Originally Posted by Lazortag
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We average about 150 players a night, and have maintained this average for months now. The server peaked at around 650 people on opening night, but most of those players were from blue, and didn't really plan on staying very long. I know that some were players from blue who DID plan on staying but just ended up disliking the server even more than blue. Also, a good number of players (both blue and non-blue) were probably cheaters who got banned early on. The fact that we started so high is what motivates people's view of the server having declined a lot, but that's silly because most of those players were just not realistically going to stay. It's not as if we lost 500 players. We maybe lost about 100-200 active players who would have considered staying on the server. Is this bad? Yes. Is this unsalvageable? No.
The reasons for the more serious players leaving are pretty varied. Some people left because they felt the exp was too slow, others left because they got griefed off the server, and some left because of the relatively low population (low population begets low population)/lack of global ooc. I don't think these are very good reasons for leaving, but those are the reasons people have given.
Some of this could have been prevented, some of it couldn't. If guard assist was in from the beginning I'm sure less people would have been killed at the docks/bank/etc. But I tend to agree with Finawin that the real problem is the players who enjoy griefing. All the dickheads who (a) killed someone next to the guards, (b) spammed root nets or other stupid rechargeable items on players, or (c) did anything that they knew shouldn't have been in the game just to get some small short-term advantage over other players - these players are partially at fault for the declining population. Unfortunately this isn't something the staff can change now - even I think most forms of griefing should be allowed (what fun is being anti-grief if there are no griefers to police?), and you can't fix people who are just assholes. The players can police this kind of behaviour themselves though. I got several Blood Money/Fish Bait members to detag back when both those guilds still existed, just by doing things like perma-mezzing them or charm-KSing their mobs and saying "I'll stop if you detag" or whatever. On some people this doesn't work though - I'm convinced that the players in Holo/FF right now have something irreparably wrong with their brains that causes them to grief no matter how much it's an inconvenience to themselves or their guilds' long-term goals.
Anyway the point I wanted to make was that getting back the players who left is really tricky, and instead we should focus on drawing in players who haven't played yet. I think one step towards this would be cleaning up these forums. For the people who play here, stop posting inane, nonconstructive criticism of the server and the staff. For the people who don't play here, shut the fuck up about how great you thought VZTZ was, or how bad this server is, when you have no idea what you're talking about. If you don't play you should be able to express your opinions on what might make you want to log in - you should NOT be able to spam the forums with "wipe it clean" type posts like Steaks, Darwoth, Purist, and other terminally stupid posters have done. Like Amelinda always says, we're all on the same side, so let's work on getting the population higher, and not posting stupid shit that will just drive away more players.
(TLDR: you can probably just read the first and last paragraphs to get an idea of what I'm saying)
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