Is the Game Population Dropping Fast?

Community General Discussion
613

I’m not quite sold on that one. If the game is doing badly and their strategy for player retention is a “free” (lol!) mount to six-month subscribers, why would they bet it on the Chinese new year mount? I mean no offense to people whose culture celebrate this, but it isn’t super relevant to most people outside of the Asia region.

People here might want it if the new year animal is cute or attractive, but it isn’t this year; it’s an ox. It’ll probably be about as unpopular as the pig mount they sold a few years ago.

Unless the subs in the West are dropping so catastrophically that they need a new store mount to sell for yesterday, I think they would make something that is more appropriate for the region.

I think the reason they give mounts with six-month subscriptions now is to buy the acceptance of the long-term players who wouldn’t buy microtransactions anyway, while they milk the more casual players.

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614

to pad out played time and make subs last longer.

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615

This happens when you play a game and get no rewards. Torgast? no reward. Mythic+? anima. Pvp? bottleneck at 200. Everyone is virtually capped at 200 unless they start to buy gear or play the gamble of drops.

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616

I don’t know. I really don’t care to argue about it.

Whether people quit or not is of absolutely no concern to me.

617

It depends on which IP, I get that not every series needs or deserves to be continued, and everyone’s opinion on which ones / why is different…

Yes Chrono Cross was (subjectively) strange… the art style, the way it handled some of it’s story, among other things wasn’t for everyone… in fact, it was very controversial of a sequel even among Chrono fans like me… I still very much enjoyed parts of it, maybe not as much as Chrono Trigger, but enough that it left me yearning for Square Enix – or someone else, if the license for that IP happens to change hands one day – to make a more modern entry for the series, or even just reboot / re-imagine it somehow; that way, nothing about Trigger or Cross would be “ruined” by such a title…

There definitely is a void in the industry, but I’m fairly optimistic about Dreamhaven and also MonolithSoft along with some others… even within the confines of Square Enix, Yoko Taro is doing amazing stuff with his NieR series, and Hideo Kojima broke away from Konami to do Death Stranding… maybe one day, if I decide to actually get into videogame design myself, I might apply to an actual independent studio… or even start my own, if I somehow find myself in a position where I have enough time and resources to… the latter scenario being much less likely, at least these days, and historically…

Part of the reason I drifted over to Star Wars: The Old Republic from WoW (again) was because I already had something of a history with that game, and the fact that I was a Star Wars fan since I was old enough to watch movies… but it’s also because the way BioWare handled their storytelling and dialogue options in that game REALLY hooked me back then, and still kind of does now…

For example, I’m playing a Scoundrel healer now on that game, and her responses after I pick an option are just so dang funny sometimes… it really helps me to actually care more about my player character, than when they’re just silent, unless there is an actual detailed background storyline reason for that… I could not actually RP as a silent protagonist, unless I make up something in their background that actually made them mute, and then I just RP as them with gestures / sign language…

618

Game making is business at the end of the day and it costs a lot to make games. If games aren’t profitable they shouldn’t be made in my opinion.

Chrono Cross just didn’t feel like a Chrono Trigger game lol. I couldn’t even get myself to care about it at all and I’ll probably never play it, but it just doesn’t sit well with me that it even exists lol and that’s all I can say about it. It is definitely possible to harm an ip’s legacy.

What would you say the void in the industry is? I don’t really find it to be lacking. There is a lot of successful indie development, lots of good mainstream games, lots of high budget games that aren’t necessarily mainstream. I think the industry is extremely competitive right now and people are only held back by their own creativity and/or greed.

I don’t want my character to crack me up or provide comic relief personally, that’s what the supporting cast is for. I just can’t relate to someone else’s writing on a personal level and to me, RPG is about pretending you are the player character and imagining the world as if it were a real one. Otherwise it’s just an action adventure game as far as I am concerned. Sure it could be funny or amusing, but it’s not of my own mind so it can’t really resonate the way I want it to.

To each their own, and maybe I am gatekeeping RPG a bit, but I think there is a clear distinction between the experiences. I personally don’t need help caring about my character because I view my character as myself. I care about myself a great deal and that is automatically reflected in how I view my character in any true RPG experience. I simply couldn’t feel that way if that character was expressing someone else’s writing. It wouldn’t be a representation of myself in an alternate reality at that point. It wouldn’t be rpg to me.

619

Pure speculation, if you look at the forums everyone has either ubsubbed or unsubbing.

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620

The worst part of this is that when the zones are actually full (IE double callings/world bosses etc) the lag makes the game nearly unplayable.

Honestly just not fun.

And this comment what even! Chrono Cross has some of the best music from any game soundtrack of all time, and my god the game was just SO much fun. For the time the graphics were absolutely gorgeous as well.

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621

What do you mean what even lol. They got rid of all the characters, they lost Akira Toriyama’s character designs. It’s playstation 1 and not snes.

It’s fine to like it, but I don’t think it should have ever been connected to the chrono trigger brand.

622

It would have been an almost perfect game to me if Chrono Cross wasn’t even called Chrono Cross, and had no connections to the Chrono series; the few connections to Chrono Trigger it did have were very much shoe-horned into the game, and basically only had their basis in the question of “what if this one character survived this one area’s destruction?” Much of Chrono Cross really felt like it’s own thing, before we were slapped in the face with characters from Chrono Trigger more than half-way through Cross’s storyline, and even then – because of Akira Toriyama’s absence especially – their designs were just ODD compared to their originals… almost everything else the game did BEAUTIFULLY for it’s time, but honestly, I would rather it had been a separate universe from Chrono Trigger… like how TF did one of them apparently age in reverse somehow?! I’m really trying not to spoil much, since you (or at least others in this thread) apparently haven’t played it… heck, Square Enix could have made a separate “Final Fantasy” style series of their own out of Chrono, but most – if not all – of their resources just had to go in one direction…

623

Idunno about that lol, I read a bit of what they did with the chrono trigger characters and it seems like they were just looking to upset the fanbase. I’m glad I never played that game and I’m never gonna acknowledge it as a real game now that I have an idea of how the writing goes. More of an experiment/coat-tail riding game.

I also read that the gameplay suffers a ton from the HUGE cast of characters, and the writing as well because it’s just the same responses with a different “characterization” based on the character design of the individual character saying the line. Modified dialogue, but all basically the same. Vast as the ocean, deep as a puddle. The exact opposite of how chrono trigger felt to me in its writing.

It also doesn’t have the same art style even remotely. They got the same composer for the music, but none of the music hits the same for me. I don’t think time travel is even a thing in the game. It’s very weird to me that it exists, and I refuse to acknowledge it, let alone as a perfect game lol.

But we shouldn’t really talk about chrono cross I don’t want to hate on something you like lol.

624

I feel that were in an abusive relationship.

It all started out great. Classic was light-years ahead of Everquest. TBC was amazing, WOTLK was legendary. We had a rough spot with cata and I cheated on blizzard with another game when they released pandas, but we always ended up getting back together.

Then Blizzard hits us with WoD and we move out to live with our sister.

Then Blizzard comes back with Legion and says “Look babe, I was wrong… I’ve done some growing and you’re really important to me.” then we come back. We get a class hall together and end up with a nursery full of followers. Things aren’t perfect, but their a lot like they used to be.

Then Blizzard starts drinking, loses it’s job at the foundry and starts smacking us around with BFA. We hide the marks under our azerite armor turtle-neck and azerite concealer and tell people it’s a good relationship and hes just going through a phase; That deep down he really loves us. Eventually it gets really bad and corruption comes out so we pack up and go. We stay in touch for a bit but decide were not coming back unless he gets some professional help this time.

FInally Blizzard tracks us down through our facebook and credit card receipts and says “Look. I really miss you. I’m making loot really important now… you’re going to find our relationship really rewarding this time. Very meaningful.” So you think “IDK, maybe he really did change this time.” And you come back again.

And here we are on the forums typing out posts instead of playing WoW.

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625

Those writers did do most of the OG cast / crew rather dirty, and two of them happened to be among my favorite characters in Chrono Trigger… then again, sometimes things happen that way in a story… I did find how they went about writing those outcomes to be more upsetting than the fact that they were trying to incorporate tragedy into some of their storylines… putting it simply, there are ways to end a character’s story, and then there are ways not to…

I like that the gameplay / systems designers tried to have more than a standard amount of playable characters, especially based on branching paths… but TOO MUCH is TOO MUCH… they could have easily achieved the same result with maybe 24 characters at most instead of 45… even though either way, almost everyone and their mom that I know who played that game (myself included at times) would have stuck with the main character and only a handful of others, ignoring almost everyone else who didn’t have the best stats / grids / techs… ironically enough, kind of like what a number of players in WoW and other MMOs do – especially nowadays – only within the context of a single-player experience…

To each their own with regards to the art style and music… I REALLY liked the scenery in certain areas, but some designs – especially those of established Chrono Trigger characters – I found funny and / or downright odd… almost literally everyone from Chrono Trigger somehow aged backwards and / or shrunk… as though the designers had a meeting where they tossed around ideas like “what if we made CHIBIS out of all the Chrono Trigger characters, then royally hosed some of them in the story?” and such… you would know at times when some of the artwork team members were high on something… had Akira Toriyama stuck around for Chrono Cross, his presence on the project could have averted this to some degree, and parts of the game might have looked much different…

The music (to me at least) was hauntingly beautiful on some tracks, and okay on others… I was hard-pressed to find one track that was even just mediocre… except maybe for the FATE battle music, which I felt really didn’t fit a major story antagonist with a certain level of unique genius, but it wasn’t awful or anything… I still consider much of the music in Chrono Cross to be some of Yasunori Mitsuda’s greatest work, even if he was just doing his best to contribute toward a game that amounted to an iffy production at worst, and an overlooked / obscure work of art at best…

Overall, I would give Chrono Trigger a 9/10 and Chrono Cross a 7/10… I’m of the opinion that most of the time, a studio / producer / et cetera puts their best foot forward, rather than saving the best for last… this isn’t always the case, but I tend to find that the smaller a series’ scope is, the more impactful the initial titles are… despite this, would I still be interested in a Chrono Trigger remake, or a Chrono Cross sequel? Absolutely!

I don’t mind constructive criticisms (key word: constructive) of something I enjoy, it gives the possibility of a thoughtful conversation… even so, there are times when I run out of energy for that, especially these days when I’m usually having to focus on lots of other things…

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626

Yes. If you look at my server, it says “Full,” but at any given time in Bastion, even during the evenings, I’ll see all of 5-10 players running around. BFA was crowded right into the 6th month I played. That’s part of what has made Shadowlands so frustrating. They’ve made huge mobs in the world, I guess assuming a lot of players would be playing, but I encountered these huge mobs and no one was around. In BFA, it seemed lively right up until the 7th month.

Mythic+ same, too. If you looked at the world rankings for mythic+ in BFA, you saw about 900,000 rankings. For Shadowlands, it’s about 190,000 ranked worldwide, total. Don’t know about raiding. But I do know that in dungeons like De Other Side and Halls of Atonement, on any given day I can look and see all of 5 people looking for groups on my full server. It’s depressing.

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627

The server population status has been a static thing for at least a year or two now. I often play on my server at 3-4am when there’s almost nobody around and yet the supposed server population never changes.

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628

Yeah, same here. Just because someone at one time signed onto that server doesn’t mean they’re playing Shadowlands. I played through BFA and even early in the mornings, there would be really lively mythic+ groups, people running around. I’m hoping Blizzard just put out a half finished product here and has a million amazing things planned for Shadowlands that we’re not seeing right now. I’m going to take a long break from it after this month.

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629

My guild is pretty much dead. My sub ends in March. It’s already cancelled. Gonna get my money’s worth and still log in but I’m done once the sub is up.

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630

Just reading through these threads–it seems players are just tired of where MMORPGs are right now. We’re basically playing a more action-based and faster EverQuest.

631

I don’t. Still see tons of people out in the world. Not really noticing any difference. My friends list actually has more active people in WoW on it too.

632

Well getting no loot in this expansion plays a big part of that. The game just seems really unsatisfactory when you dont get rewarded for hours and hours of hard work. I mean, why intentionally try to make the game less fun?

Then on top of that, creating multiple alts is also painful because you have to run them through torghast along with your main, over and over again…ya no thanks.

As soon as I grind out what I’m trying to get, ill probably play much less or not at all until the new content patch.

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