Curse

healthsoldier0570 · May 19, 2006, 10:40 PM // 22:40

Don't worry, I have read that Factions sucks @$$. After a while, people will realize it does and come back to Prophecies. It won't be long until that happens.

Phades · May 19, 2006, 11:20 PM // 23:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by Age

II sure hope if the A$$ or the Rit doesn't get the Xp or if they can fight the doppleganger just to get to the Tomps.I saw a Canthan Monk in the RoF mission I don't get it why to cap shield of deflection?

They get full rewards for everything they can participate in. In other words, full rewards from kryta forward. Going into the desert and ascending is easy exp and free profession secondary options opposed to paying 500 per via the factions route. Also going through kryta and denravi provides bonus skills for the secondaries through the skill quests. This helps to round out the characters without spending money. I also find capping skills a bit more methodical than in factions, where it can be a crapshoot at times between old and new skills.

Numa Pompilius · May 19, 2006, 11:23 PM // 23:23

I'd say there's more people playing now. Tyria is possibly slightly less populated since Factions was released, at least it seems a bit more mellow, but Cantha is brimming with people. Combined I'd say the total number of players is up quite a lot (as can also be witnessed by the horrible lag in Cantha).

Hunter Sharparrow · May 20, 2006, 01:34 AM // 01:34

I'd say no one reason is the one for the population shift.

Prophecies was the first of it's kind. A top of the line Online RPG that didn't require a monthly fee. Upon release you get a rush of people. Some rush through the game while others took their time. This, over time, spread the population more evenly over tyria. As the game went on you will have more people in the higher level areas, some in the lower level areas with their second or third (or more) character but out of those some will skip the wilds simply because the option is there. Throughout all this you will have some people stop playing for whatever reason but at the same time you will get late new comers. One balances out the other. Maybe not exactly but close enough.

Towards the end of the year the population of GW settled for the most part. Most in high level areas like UW, FoW and Tombs or just outside the high level areas farming. You still had a few new comers combined with a few who started another character. Droks, Ascalon and LA became the hot spots for selling loot so that kept the population up in those cities.

Then the release of factions. Some hated it, some liked it and some didn't care either way and play for the sake of playing for whatever reason. However when it was first release you had a mass fload of people spill over to the new land of Cantha from Tyria. So you had less people in Tyria. Some places even became ghost towns particularly the ones in the wild that were easily skipped (not to mention long and somewhat boring) and would only realy be sought out by those that wish to follow the story line. So with factions just released you have most of the prophecies players playing the newly purchased factions combined with the new promos that brought in a bunch of new comers as well. Yes for the first few days the districs of the first couple towns were many because every one had just started playing the game. The districts are still high but not what they were from when the game was first released. I'm sure that maintenance that Gaile mentioned had something to do with that but I'm sure that people progressing through the game to the higher levels have something to do with that.

For as long as factions has been out the gushing river of new comers hasn't completely slowed down. Some people have quit and some have went back to tyria. Other have beaten the game and got to the high levels and have settled their doing whatever (doing the high end repeatable areas or farming) and/or started different characters. I'm sure some have taken their canthan characters over to tyria as well.

So it's hard to say if the population has actually gone down or has just spead out thinner. Maybe both is the situation but all the reasons found through out the posts are all contributing factors to any population shift.