State of the Game

It depends on how long you've been away.

1. We have the new input of the Morai area, so we can get plenty more dailies from that starting at 95, which can significantly contribute to the leveling process; however, before that, it's still mostly Frost.

FCC has reduced in price though, so you may have some luck there.

2. The population is, at least from what I can see, more or less "dying" if you're an old player. Everyone you know is leaving. However, there are plenty of new people joining; the population's still pretty good to sustain a nice network of friends and faction mates.

3. It depends on what level of endgame you want to get.

Full G16+10 for a seeker is going to be a great deal of farming, possibly several months worth (to get everything). And then sharding with more HP, Saphs, Vits, etc, gah.

Full Rank 9 is another option, of course; it's a lot more expensive than R9, and as a seeker I doubt you have the ability to farm it unless you have extensive merchanting abilities or an aps TT sin alt.
Not only that, but you have to buy Summerwind tokens to recast it; farming tokens from NW alone is impossible, and you will need money to buy at least some of them.
And then you have the Full Warsong runs again to recast to the final third.

I'd recommend that you start off by getting R8 and TT99; if you like what you see, jump to the next level. Until then, hold off on anything major.

1) No, they changed quest revards and added new quests, so now lvling even with quests , espetially in the lower lvls is faster. Once you hit 90 you can join FC.
Or if you wana buy FC: as seeker you are wanted, at least on my server seeker often pay less or are for free...

2)Population is changing only slowly... Who once got adicted stays, but new ppl are rar. Anyway there are enought to party with, so nothing to worry about.

3) Pure farming is slow, as always. If you are one of the lucky persons to life in a good timezone for NW - do NW. Thats propably THE farming event atm. On Archo you wont have much fun selling TT, hardly someone buys that. Things you can sell are mostly connected with endgame content... For monney making I suggest you start merchanting, farming alone wont bring you far. But with a bit of merchanting you can easily get a good equipment.

TempleSlave - Lost City wrote: »

New population is sparse. Peak of poulation on all servers was around the time of the first anniversary where a lot of people rage-quit. Six months after, everything had mostly recovered as there were more new players coming in than old players leaving. By 2011 that trend was reversed and more people were quitting than new people arriving. Most of what appeared to be "new people" were just veteran players making another new set of alts. The amount of factions hasn't really changed, but now even the most powerful are filled with alts or people playing abandoned characters and getting more than 80-90 people online for war is pretty difficult when there used to be 140-160 people online for multiple defense wars.

This, pretty much.

From my experience of playing PWI since beta, I've noticed a trend of people leaving and then coming back for new content/expansions. Unfortunately, most of the people that come back, stay for a very brief period. During 2008-2009, the game experienced a large player base. Everything was new to players, the game well fairly balanced, and everything was new and challenging for players.

That was until things like packs came out. A large thread on the forums about packs was started, and PWE promised that they would be taken out. Weeks later, they were back by popular demand. A lot of shady business moves (constant sales), pushed gold from 90k per to about 250-300k per. A thread was created about this, and Xarfox (A GM who was active during this time on the forums), made a post about it. He said they were monitoring gold prices and that Jolly Jones would fix it by putting a coin sink into the game. He lied. Not only did it not fix the gold prices, but PWE wasn't monitoring gold. It rised more and more over the following year.

Then the TB expansion was released. Sins, hypers, BHs, Nirvana gear, etc. More packs came out by "popular demand", and PWE pretended everything was great. Eatwithspoons left as a Community Manager, and posted in his blog about corruption of PWE and how poorly they treated players. Frankieraye was pushed into the community manger position. Things were pretty solid for a while, while players learned the new classes. It became apparent how OP stealth and aps was during this time, and most BMs swapped into claw build and went 5aps. 5aps became possible thanks to the cheap gear from packs, and was wanted for just about everything.

More sales, more packs, more lies. Glitching to 105, censoring names, banning innocent players, ignoring the forums, etc. It was around this time Frankie's favorite words were "soon". We still haven't got most of what that guy promised the community, and it's been years. DQ was nerfed originally in 2010, then nerfed again in late 2012. R8 and R9 fairly easy to obtain, more unbalanced gear, lies about why 11 and 12* orbs were taken out of the boutique, etc.

The state of the game nowadays isn't what one would expect. Despite everything PWE has done, a fair amount of players still play. Most players nowadays aren't new, though. The game's quest-areas (most of the map) are abandoned. Very little new players seem to be playing the game. Multi-clienting is possible, so a lot of what we see in west arch and around the map is inflated populations. The real number of active level 60+ players can be seen during events like TW, NW, and tiger events. How many still play? Probably around 1000-1500 per server, with some of the newer servers having much less. Totals of players don't really mean anything, because if those players are paying good money (which some do), the game's servers will continue.

The unfortunate thing is so many things in the game revolve around group-oriented activities. While this is fun and great, the lack of players willing to do things are minimal. Not many people do full RBs for fun, culties, etc. No one does Nirvana now. OHT maps are dead as ever. FB89 or lower is rarely done, and generally just for BHs or culti. Heaven/hell are pretty damn empty, with most players just farming herbs here and there. The starter cities are pretty bare compared to 2008-2010.

Also, we must take into account how easy leveling is nowadays, and how hard coin-making is for new/low level players. I recently created a Cleric for the lulz. Within' a few hours I had gotten to level 25. I didn't hyper, use exp orbs, use another toon, or FF. I simply just quested. The quests nowadays give more exp for lower levels, and free stuff is everywhere for exp in start cities. If I had continued, I could have made to it almost level 50 without using exp boosters. This wasn't the case during 2008-2011.

Coin is hard to make nowadays. The only ways to obtain coin without cash shopping is merchanting, BHs, Cube, farming herbs in hell/heaven, and doing events like NW/Tiger event, etc. DQ drops aren't worth anything, along with Nirvana, or farming mats. So, how does a new player actually obtain coins? It's near impossible. This should make players rely more on either quitting or spending coins. Also, TT90 stuff like TT3-1/3-2/3-3 has been amped up to make it harder for players around that level to farm it.

This is the state of the game.