We lost 20 plus % population in one month.

Who cares about it...

Lot of people. It was hyped up pretty hardcore and 2 week is not enough time for people to have decided to stop playing.

The belief that most of the players are school kids is the only thing that keeps my sanity. Well... that and the hope that their parents beat them severely.

Never heard of Destiny until this post, thought it could be a cool diversion. Went to site, watched trailer. Not big fan of killing trash mobs in co-op, but there's advancement and bosses, some kind of exploration and pvp apparently. Kinda OK, looks interesting overall, but would really depend on game mechanics being enjoyable to play or not. Some shooters have that magic feel to it, CounterStrike had it, Planetside has it, BattleField 1942 and 2 had it (3 and 4 didn't strangely), even Mass Effect 2/3 had it (most likely not mechanic itself, but more mechanic supported by story), some older Rainbow 6 games had it. Rest never had that feel for me.

Click on Available Now button, select your platform. PC ain't there. So there goes all interest, out the window. The special FPS feel i'm looking for never works on controller.

Reason I personally play less PS2 now is college, want to start out semester right. Once I get into routine and make sure I'm not behind on anything I can afford to play more.

Bland, maybe. But but still a cash cow, and a reason for players to try something new.

From Motley Fool: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/09/28/is-activision-blizzards-destiny-a-dud.aspx

For one, the title's $500 million launch haul was exactly half of what Activision managed with the release of Call of Duty: Ghosts last year. Count that as a win for the company, as it marks a successful launch for a new piece of intellectual property. Remember, Call of Duty took time to grow into a billion-dollar franchise. And Destiny might even get to that figure in the next year. Activision recently said that the game delivered $325 million in sales (to gamers) during its first five days of availability. With pre-order sales, holiday sales, and digital revenue still to come, the title has a clear path toward hitting that $1 billion mark.

How much did PS2 bring in during the last 1.5 years?

My interest wanes daily, down from getting 5 daily reward ribbons yesterday to 3 today and leaving the other 2.

I doubt I'll bother tomorrow or again, 15 minutes is now too much to ask and getting 5 normally takes 20-30 minutes even with support farming.

The objective was to get circa 30 per day to get to 1000 certs, I'm at around 950 and can't be asked,

Anyone normal will have given up on what this title has to offer, which is very little.

It takes a special kind of intelligence to be entertained by 'hold LMB to win' for more than a couple of minutes.

I don't think that logging in to get 12 free certs will tax me too much, IF I can be bothered to remember. Although that will add a +1 player login which is something of an ethical dilemma.

See you on the battlefield Soldiers.

I have PS4 not xbox.

You can only zerg Zurvan so many times before getting bored.

The more there is a population imbalance, the less dynamic a battle becomes. Spawn Camping, which is an immediate result of big population imbalances is a perfect example of non-dynamic gameplay that results directly from population imbalance. The issue isn't Spawn Camping in itself, it's the monotony of it, that's why I haven't been playing much.

The only reason I can think of that a big publisher like SONY would be willing to redo Planetside title, when the original Planetside 1 had pretty much the same population numbers is that there was probably a high subscriber turnover rate in PS1 and SONY thought that if they could keep players then they'd be up in TF2 numbers.

So what causes so many players to quit.

The awful performance and constant hitching caused by the PS4 code merge is why I'm hardly able to play PS2 as of late...

Same

Don't forget that this tends to include college as well... most of those people being 18-25. As much as you'd like to believe all of the people you're raging at are kids, I find most are actually late teens to mid 30's.

Yeah, I wish I had as much free time in Grad school as I did in high school.

I know the reality of it. It's just too depressing. I imagine a future president sending rage /tells to Putin's successor and making fart noises into the red phone. Mike Judge is from the future and Idiocracy was a documentary.

I'm playing a lot less for a few reasons.

Continent locking. I actually didnt mind it when the lock could only be achieved by 1 faction taking 75%. It gave you a reason to fight to keep the continent you like open. Indar was open pretty much all the time for a while there, and although people on the forums will yell how bad indar is, the fact is that most people prefer it for a number of reasons which are well known. Now the alerts just feel pointless, and i absolutely hate that box telling me to redeploy.

As a pilot A2A missiles and Coyotes are broken, and after I die to them a time or two i just log off and do something else.

Flipping vehicles. It's not fun when you get a harrasser and it flips over if you hit the smallest bump or even if you just go over a hill wrong.

Zergs all the time and nothing but zergs. I prefer a variety of fights. Sometimes you feel like a zerg, sometimes you dont. More choices leads to more playstyles which leads to more players.

We lost our persistant world with this crazy continent locking and that makes it feel kinda like a game with rotating maps rather than a persistent online world, the way it used to feel.

Too much cheese and unsatisfying deaths. There are times that you die and you are like, "ok that was my fualt," or "that guy was just better than me" and then there are the lame deaths that you cant do anything about. There are too many of those kind of deaths in the game.

And finally there seems like no reason to fight for alerts except for a little extra xp which means nothing to br 100s. There is no bonus for owning territory like there was with the old resourse system. They should add something along the lines of relics in dark age of camelot.

In DAOC they had power relics which increased spell damage by 10% and you could own all 3 for a 20% bonus (your own relic didnt give you a bonus, but you couldnt get the bonus from having the enemies relic unless you had your own). They also had strength relics that gave a bonus to melee damage the same % as the power relics.

There could be special heavily fortified bases where these objects would be held. You would have to storm the enemy base, steal their object of power and return it to the base where your empires object of power is kept. If you die before returning the object to your base and no one picks up the object it will return to the enemy base.

That would give something for people to fight over. And you could have different bonuses. Damage. Bullet velocity. Reload speed. Etc.

Also a relic type system like DAOC had would alleviate population problems to some degree. In DAOC if one realm, (there were 3 realms in daoc too) was taking all the relics, the other two realms would team up on them. You dont see that much in ps2 because there is no incentive for truces and cooperation by the low pop empires. Relics would provide that incentive.

There's a shedload of people playing Archeage at the moment. I downloaded it but couldn't get on due to the queue was over an hour to get on just one server

And this is also true.

Don't get me wrong, PS2 pop *is* slowly decreasing with time which is normal for any game. Not everyone can play the same thing for years straight. But most sudden changes in pop are usually temporary seasonal fluctuations.

The game has been around a while now , and im sure im not wrong when I say most of us here have played the game to death .

It comes to a point where it feels stale and repetitive , also some people have things to do in their lives and cant sit down all day and play games .

Players probably have enough of laggy servers. (The Server merges in early august doubled the lag.) Example thread: https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...y-since-the-update-even-with-low-ping.196492/