Both of Trion Worlds 3rd party published titles are losing players in North America (ArcheAge due to some changes made with the 3.0 Revelation update as well as from the issues during the rollout) but Devilian in the last few weeks has gone down to around the old North American Ravan server levels (meaning really bad). People aren’t even bothering to login to alts (which comprised a larger part of the AFK’s seen in Asperon) which means many finally exhausted their Patron sub.
There have always been several ways to extrapolate that number without seeing the actual server statistics. Without giving all of those details away, one small one is when I can just take all of my alts, go in and out of Abyssal Tower in challenge mode (meaning 0 points), and see what class ranking you get Monday morning.
It is pretty bad when you can get either 50 or 100 gold pouches for doing nothing on most every class except evoker (which has way more players). So the last 4 weeks, 2400 gold for doing nothing excepting entering/exiting tower challenge. On Ravan just before the merge, I had to always get to at least 120k points to receive a 100 gold pouch.
On Ravan just before the merge, availability of field co-op bosses was telling. I haven’t played much recently but the times I did do some dailies this week, I’ve managed to easily get at least 5 non-Mineval field bosses without anyone else showing up. So the situation on Bolton now is really bad and that is only going to accelerate because many of us (self included) have stopped bringing players (new or returning) into the game to at least try and continually stabilize the population on this server.
And some of those other people were folks I considered “key influencers”. Trion (across most all of their published titles) have developed such a poor reputation for themselves that they have lost a large amount of the higher income demographic that had no issues with spending a lot of money. To be more specific, some of us were careful to not go out of the way to recommend this game because of the laundry list of caveats (something I posted about before) associated with this game along with Trion’s lousy reputation which would end up reflecting badly on the recommender.
Returning players are also the most difficult to convince/retain because many left for game play related reasons that have never been addressed by both the publisher (Trion Worlds) and developer (Bluehole Ginno). And I am always upfront about telling those players nothing has really changed in those areas; that they need to just give the game another try to see for themselves if they can enjoy what little content has been added since the time they left along with the same issues that caused them to quit before.
Devilian’s level 60 update is going to be happening around the same time that the global version of MU Legend will be going into open beta (effectively a soft launch into global launch) as well as the time that Path of Exile’s massive expansion will be released. Timing has never been in this games favor and I see it happening again. And I suspect Trion Worlds will milk that update by not introducing everything that remains to be released (like the unique gear set and all the enchanting/evolving systems and raid dungeon associated with it) until later. If they do that slow rollout, the server population will drop to “circle jerk” levels because there will be an alternative MMO-ARPG for players to try.
Regardless of how I feel about MU Legends horribly stiff game play/combat (and not seeing how much paid conveniences will end up in their cash shop), I know that it is still going to have a significant negative impact on Devilian (aka Deadvilian) because of Trion Worlds continual neglect of the community and the game itself. Not saying the game will die completely (the Thai server still sees some traffic from the remaining diehards but usually not even more than 10 people online at the same time). Like I login to play occasionally but you are reduced to regular dungeons and open world bosses; there is a point where GvG, 20v20, and Stormfront Wars will be virtually unplayable unless someone is dedicated to creating a bunch of alt accounts just to get them to pop (effectively wintrading most of those systems).
Bluehole Ginno is not going to go out of their way for Trion Worlds; they are too busy working on Devilian Mobile (PC client programmer resources shifted to PLAYERUNKNOWN’s BATTLEGROUNDS game that Bluehole is working on); their last major update included parts of the guild system (the GvG and guild dungeons still need to be adapted for mobile) and they only released one archdungeon boss (Avarix) so that is where most all of their designers focus is on. The mobile game has not been as successful as Gamevil or Bluehole Ginno expected it to be BUT it still has probably generated far more MTX revenue than the PC MMO versions did (I doubt they received much from whatever marketplace revenue sharing deals they had with each publisher).
