The game has simply become too large for what it has. STS has progressed the game from one point forward when instead they should have continuously worked through the entire game. Each cap expanded upon the Endgame aspect of the game without paying much attention to the mid-game content needed to bring late players forward in the game in a productive manner.
Imagine the world is in a famine and most of the food left on Earth is in a multi-story building. The first people walk up the stairs up to the second floor, and inhabit it for a while living off of the food needed to stay alive. After a while, a new staircase is built leading up to the third floor, and everyone still alive moves up to the third floor to live there. Then comes the fourth floor, then the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth. After natural selection runs its course, many of the original people have died because of disease, injury, age, etc. leaving only 20% of the original people left.
While the building was growing, new people were discovering it, so they entered and managed to feed off of what was left on their way to catch up to the people who kept up with the development of the building. They walked up the stairs and most of them survived the journey. But as the building grew, it took more time and effort to reach the top. Climbing stairs from the first to the 5th floor wasnt as arduous of a task as climbing from first to the eighth. And as time grew and more people passed by, the amount of food in each of the floors started to dwindle away.
The building is now developed at the tenth floor, Those who are left are either living up top, or crawling around on the lower floors trying to find the energy to climb up. Most do not make it.
This is an example of how i see the game currently. Each floor represents a new cap or new expansion. The food represents farming or general interest that drives players to play or grow with the game. If you don't have enough food or motivation to get players to go through a phase of the game, they likely won't do it. The quest system revamp helped it quite a bit, replacing the stairs with escalators on the lower half of the building, but much of that fluidity died off afterwards after the stairs grew more and more steep with the new system of "increasing xp needed per level after each level, with a sharp increase after lv41". STS should have created or added more food to each floor everytime a new floor was added.
Synopsis: Endgame shouldn't be the only thing expanding in the game. Players seek wealth from the very beginning, so that should be taken advantage of. Twink progression should be taken seriously as it is (or was) not only a huge demographic for the game, but it contains most of the beginning opportunities for new players to gain a quick buck. Occasionally releasing new low-midgame tombs or rotating new gear into the older maps would have helped tremendously with driving players to reach the end of the game. So this could be much to blame for why endgame PvP/PvE isnt as active as it used to be. Those who actively took upon themselves to run end-game have already retired, while most of the other players are struggling to reach cap. If the game was shorter, if the level cap was 31 or so, it wouldnt be a problem because the player base is more dense and is distributed between each level. But now that AL is a big game, It's harder for new players to find anyone to run with mid-game because each segmented level of the game doesnt have a dedicated demographic of players to support it.
Sorry for the long-winded post, thank you to those who read the whole thing. I tried to bold the basic idea behind the post.
Bookmarks