Before all the fanboys get themselves all tied up in a not; let me first start off by saying disregard all the non-sense talk about how it takes time to develop content. We all know it takes time to develop content; what I want to talk about is poor business decisions and planning.
The fact is they knew they had competitors releasing games late spring and early summer. I find it incredibly unlikely they thought they could ride the tails of the feature patch while those new competing games are offering fresh new content; but hey maybe they didn’t. So yes they have been releasing patches, but it hasn’t been exciting new content. Its been “filler recycled content” basically uninteresting, hence the reason for massive player decline due to other games being released. I’ve been an avid player since pre-launch and the last 3.5 to 4months there has been easily a 35-40% decline in players. Besides feature patch day which saw an influx of about 30% but then it dropped again about 24hrs later.
So we’re approaching my point. Why would they make such a poor business decision to not offer new fresh exciting content for 3.5-4months? Maybe they’re short staffed or maybe as I said above they need time; or more likely they just don’t have the resources. This brings me to my next point, that being planning. They knew for far longer than 4 months which is what they say is there developing lead time to produce content. They knew for far longer what they were working on, I’m willing to bet a lot of what we are seeing now has been worked on for over a year. Granted they told us a few weeks prior to this late sping early summer content dip; but why?
Gamers have 10sec attention spans. To leave their game with little to no new content besides a few festivals and whatnot most of us have left to new and better things. Another point I’d like to make is they think that hey, our game is free they’ll comeback. Wrong, it takes way more resources to get a gamer back once they have left. Meaning they have to produce absolutely incredible new content to get even a fraction of those players back in the game.
After almost two years I’d like to see new dungeons, new zones, new fractal levels and difficulties, new races, new classes, new weapons, and the list goes on etc… etc… I doubt this will happen. Im guessing when july 1st rolls around starting Season 2 LS were going to get pushed into one of the low-level jungle area maps; do some zerg-fest achievement fests; but hey its permanent now since they’re implementing a LS tab in the hero panel.
My predictions are maybe a new map, maybe one dungeon, a few fractal level difficulties, possibly a race, one already existing weapon for each class. I predict all this to happen near or at the end of season 2. All of this equals sad to see the game die when it could have been great