So what was the point of the class change?

Holy shit, you're astonishingly stupid.

i disagree.

it's extremely confusing to have 15 different classes, and a myriad of subguilds to then pick, for new players and players that are not veterans of the system. let's say you want to roll a thief/rogue type character. you go look at the classes page and you're left with four options that will stand out: fence, infiltrator, pilferer, and miscreant. you then need to sit there and parse through the skills to figure out which one is slightly better for whatever idea you have.

without referring to the class pages, can you describe the distinctions between those classes? imagine being a new player and going to the class pages for each, and look at the skills lists and try to figure it out. it's confusing and a huge turn-off.

Eh. I mean, PvP is probably the one thing that the new classes facilitate as the combat classes got better at killing. Enforcer is the nuts, infiltrator has better combat skills than assassin did, and you can even take someone out with a miscreant if you work on it. Raider is warrior with master archery and charge. Combat skills start considerably higher than they used to. If your goal is to PK softies, it's never been better. I don't see where that would be the reason to quit playing. It's probably more about waiting two years and not getting something more innovative than this.

No worries, Amigo. Most of us are here because this board is more fun than playing the actual game. You're supplying us with free content. Express yourself!



Maybe. But I also think that the fact that the mechanics of the new classes are so well documented has contributed to the letdown. Don't get me wrong, I think that open sourcing this was the correct way to go as far as entertaining the average player. But for elites such as yourself, you've been deprived of the fun of reverse-engineering the new class capabilities, and when you were learning the capabilities of the previous classes (years ago?) you probably had to do it blind.

Anyways, I also disagreed with your point about the class changes driving a multitude of people away. I mean probably it drove some away (I guess?), but I blame Tuluk's closure and the decline of the Gaj.

I think Tuluk's closure is the largest driver here, but I think it induced second-order and tertiary effects, even fourth-order effects that took years for us to feel. So Tuluk closed, right? First group to go were the cats that played exclusively in Tuluk. Tuluk closed, and so they left.

Next up was a demographic that I happen to fall in, a group that never completely left but is gone for all intents and purposes. When I lose a character, I want a clean break as many here do. So for me in the past I'd play, one character in Allanak, then one in Tuluk, then back to Allanak. And so on. But without Tuluk as an alternative, I started taking longer and longer breaks. Rolling up a character seems like work when I know I'll be interacting with the same people, facing the same problems.

This is the demographic that I alluded to with the higher order effects, we're slowly drifting away.

Next we lost the people who didn't want to play in Allanak because it was too crowded. After they left, we started to lose people that didn't want to play in Allanak because it felt too empty...which brings us pretty much to where we are now. Most reports drifting back to us from the game complain about how empty it is, how no one interacts.

Which brings me to my next point, because I think that I mentioned the Gaj somewhere in there. I think that older (Gen-X?) era players used the internet to socialize. Think America Online chatrooms and dial-up bulletin boards. With time as millenials came to represent an increasing proportion of the playerbase, these were people who had extensive socializing options in the form of social media software, and so I'll conjecture that they had less interest in sitting in a giant chatroom like the Gaj.

While these guys are very social, I believe that they tend to fraction off into smaller groups. You can find groups of these sorts of players in clan compounds, in apartments, and in campsites outside of the cities. The Gaj isn't as popular as it once was, and so I think even more players might have left because the game is no longer ever effectively a chat room.

Anyway the game is empty.



Yeah, but if I had to pick a demographic to purge from the playerbase, it would have been the guys that vacillated between nothing but muls and sponsored rolls. Nothing against your friends, of course.



I mean I think that this was a manageable problem, it's just that the staff mismanaged this. The way that you approach something like this, in the introductory material is that you create a cross-walk for people who are arriving from other games. Say like "Are you looking to play a Fighter/Warrior? Try an Enforcer!" or something like that. Should be a very solvable problem.
Bafflingly, I don't think Arm has ever really had a problem *recruiting* new players. Maybe it has, but it seems to really suffer from a retention problem. IMHO the problem is caused because the staff are dicks. It would cost them nothing to be nicer to people. You run an online utility, and usually manage to abstain from deliberately trying to ruin people's day, even though I can tell you're somewhat hard-boiled.



Full disclosure? Nope.

That was so long ago, though. Logins didn't truly start to nosedive until last year. They shut Tuluk down in early 2015, and I recall that there was actually a temporary surge in numbers afterwards because people thought it would lead to a heightened emphasis on Allanak plots. Of course, this never really materialized, but the numbers just normalized and remained stable for at least a couple of years. It seems unlikely that the effects would set in now. It's probably more about the karma changes and the fact that there hasn't been a noteworthy world event in years.

Makes me wonder what they actually had in mind when they closed Tuluk. Did they really mean to just shut it off and do nothing else in the aftermath or were there plans that got abandoned?

Jkarr you're such a damn ignorant idiot. The guy types an essay of good feedback and it completely flies over your head. Go back to your ESL class you dweeb

>hurrdurr truth hurts

Yeah so does reading comprehension apparently, you mental potato.