It’s the early levelling that’s the problem, IMO. You’re right that it slows down a lot more at higher levels past 200, and if you don’t use tomes and the like to speed up your levelling it’s a little more relaxed. But they give out 8x tomes and other exp boosters (goddess statues, miracle seeds, fortune cookies, those new savior’s tomes…) in such a high frequency you can’t just ignore them. It has to be considered as a part of the game’s overall exp rate. Not to mention these rewards are often given to new players specifically. It would make more sense to give these rewards to returning/experienced players, but newbies shouldn’t be shooting up in levels that fast.
I think it should be possible to reach a healthy balance. Levelling should be a normal, slow speed on your first character, but you should have more options to go faster and faster with each new alt. Like how team level exp bonus works, except lower the overall exp gain speed and buff team exp by a lot to compensate. Hell, that’d even give players more motivation to make more alts if their overall levelling speed increases that much more each time.
As for the population, though, it really is dangerously low. Only a year ago I’d always see at least 30+ people in mission queues and it was possible to just enter queue on any level 100+ and get a full party, even if you might have to wait awhile for it to fill up. You’d be waiting maybe 15 minutes at worst, and you could always megaphone to get more people to fill the queue up if it was close. Dungeons were a little more slow since there’s a lot of them and they’re scattered around, but it was normal to go into a dungeon queue and find maybe 1~2 other people already waiting, then mega to get more to come in. All the queues were a bit of a pain since that was before the match 2 to 4 option was added, but it was never a situation where you’d see yourself alone in queue and immediately have to give up or start begging just for a 2-person run.
In its current state, I’ve yet to see the missions queue go over 10 people. Sometimes I go in and it’s literally just me, the only person queuing in both Klai and Orsha servers from lv100~330. That’s a huge difference and not in a good way. Dungeons are almost always completely empty unless someone uses a mega to try and get more, and even then there’s no guarantee anyone will come.
We also have the economy, which I feel has taken a huge hit from the boosted exp rates as well. See, there are a lot of very useful items and gear, or rare and desirable cosmetics, that can only be farmed or found in these low level maps that everyone skips through now. So all these items that were previously fairly easy to find for purchase are just… nowhere. You can’t even buy some things because no one has bothered to get them to sell. And, of course, the fact that the population has declined massively also means that everything is more scarce because fewer people are playing and farming items to sell. Even if you wanted to try and take advantage of that to profit by farming these uncommon items for sale, how do you know someone is even going to want to buy it? It’s a waste of time when there are more consistent ways to get silver in the game.
Is the game closing down, though? Despite what I’m sure a bunch of people are going to say, no, it’s not closing down yet. It’s absolutely in trouble though, and if it stays on this decline it’s not going to be pretty. It takes a lot to truly kill an MMO, as you’ve seen yourself in other games, and since IMC is the publisher for the international servers themselves I don’t think it’s at as huge a risk as it would be if a different company were publishing it. The game isn’t at risk of closing down right now, but that doesn’t mean we can just ignore the problems and expect them to go away. The game will die if the population continues to bleed like this.
I think it’s still possible for them to find a way to pull the game back out of this if they truly put in the effort to fix the game’s issues and bring in new players who fit the game’s target audience, but it’s going to be a very difficult uphill battle. It’s not going to work if they keep applying these bandaid fixes that end up causing more problems.
wow i wrote a lot sry for words
