You and the GM team needs to promote a stronger community to get people to stay. Most players I see stop playing after certain levels in the game: 101 and 150.
People leave once they reach 101 because it takes either forever to level (without VIP) or the community after leaving low TI sucks since there really isn't one for Mid TI. I say for VIP benefits, don't include +50% bonus exp as an incentive along with the ability to single TI into all base or job. Just leave the server at 150% VIP bonus and give VIP incentive for the usual bonus drop rate and access to the whole vip buffer/summoner/malangdo thing.
For 150, you really need to expand leveling for some of these players. I hang out in lighthalzen all the time and see players waiting hours upon hours for parties. I've seen people rage quit because they can't find core classes and it's unfortunate to see players quitting because they can't play the game. So I think it's time to really push out better leveling updates for these players.
Lastly, look at your forums and look at the guilds that are still around. Seems like constant problems and fighting and instead of banning some of these repeated offenders, the CMs decides to keep moderating them and "hoping" the problem will go away.
There are positives though, I do like a lot of the new hats coming in. But if you and Oda wants to talk to an old player like me and figure out what works and doesn't, I'm more than happy to work with you guys.
PS: Please change the high TI map, it -_-ing sucks and you shouldn't be taking suggestions anymore from the person who suggested it.
I totally agree with the diagnosis, but not with the proposed solutions... but as I don't have any alternative ones... upvote to you. I think that it's an extremely complex thing, and attracting the interest of new players, or keeping the interest of returning players, and players that come from other servers, like I did, require a lot of stuff that many times directly contrast with what old and stablished players want here. You can see this in how the server's opinions were divided by the tentative release of the Penetration Shadow Set, and every time that people insist on asking for more frequent hammer events. It's always something ugly to see, as people act like children, calling other either spoonfed or elitists, and those offenses are quite moderate, considering things that I saw in other forums.
I came to iRO with 10 or so friends from my former guild. Only 5 went past level 100 (my wife being one of them, but then she lost interest in game for the reason you said... poor her... playing as a wanderer with no knowledge on the balance state of the game...), 3 of which quit exactly because of what you said. There's a big difference in the leveling hurdle, and Mid TI "community" sucks hard. You either get a terrible party and gets irritated and frustrated, or you get a great party and it's heaven, but most times you get no party AT ALL, and keeps getting killed by mobs at entrance. High TI is a little bit better, but people still play like they are soloing, completely ignoring those who get behind, and it's terrible how A LOT of people just quit after finishing their counts. After all, only 3 remained (including me), and as one of them had trouble with his PC, he decided to spend his time playing Destiny and other PS4 games instead. What also made him lose interest is that he was not being able to make his warlock effective, and every other class seemed more powerful. It was just on that time that I decided to frequent the forums and started to discover about how to make a warlock minimally effective, though it's still a bit frustrating to play on my second warlock on High TI and see rangers with instacast dealing higher damage... I didn't see their gears, though...
After 150, you either belong in one of the "meta" classes and go to bio 4 (and wait hours and hours to get a party, just to do a single round of boards, and sometimes not even one, because some stupide people leave before completing by either raging at someone or simply quiting. If you're not one of the Bio 4 meta classes, nor a GX (which can level pretty quickly at NCT), you're damned. You have to do quite some research on leveling (remember: not everyone like to read/post on the forums, and a lot are not good even basically proficient in english). There's too little in-game information, and sometimes the community doesn't help. The BBs could serve as a good guide, but they're open for a very wide level amplitude (e.g.: New World Camp BB is 100 to 150, why not add centipede/centipede larva and break it into a couple BBs? Also, add Bradium Golem for El Dicastes, in the Centipedes' stead), and there could be leveling guide NPCs that showed players options available for their classes.
About VIP bonus EXP, I think it's not that bad. What is worse is that non VIP LOSE A LOT OF EXP on dieing. The 1% should be normalized by either VIP or non-VIP, and as far as I remember, at least pre-renewal 1% was the standard. Why make it worse for F2P players? It makes dieing a great frustration, specially if you are not yet sure about where or how to level. What is also worse is the mobility restriction that non-VIPs have, and I'm not even questioning the availability of Aperture, but the regular Kafras teleport have their standard only for VIPs, and non-VIPs can f themselves. There are too many unnecessary hurdles that take away new players interest.
And last, but not even by far least, there's a HUGE unbalance in classes power right now, and it's not something that newer players will understand until they spend - what in their point of view is - a huge investment of time and energy, and if they were unlucky and did a poor choice of class (like me or my wife), it adds A LOT to the players frustration. Because, hell! I want to play a [Mechanic/Warlock/Performer/etc.], why should I NEED to make a [Ranger/GX/RK] to be able to get decent gears for my class of choice? For people like me, who cannot play a lot of hours a day, this idea is terrible. No wonder I have a 144 RK frozen in time for more than a month (after being frozen on level 122 for 3 months or so) and my Hunter didn't even become a Sniper. But then again, the path that kRO chose to rebalance a lot of classes conflicts with the interest of lots of older and stablished players here, so we cannot expect this reality to change.
Well... after detailing what I feel, I sudenly became VERY pessimistic about the future of the server...
Edited by Kusanagisama, 24 August 2016 - 10:25 AM.