Any genuine concerns about the game dying?

i think its clear from the devs that the game will not be shutting down, they are supposedly working on new stuff and investing in server upgrades etc.

from the player side, i think most would agree the game is dying. simply, many people think there is not enough to keep them playing, and we see this with the amount of players leaving the game, and new players do not show up enough and do not stay enough. i have access to some player xml from a few years ago, and have been collecting myself for the past year, and the number of accounts in the game is decreasing, the flow of new players is not enough to offset the people abandoning, and this doesn't even count the permasats etc.

i think first and foremost this is a player-driven game so the main focus to "revive" is to create stuff that draws in new players. right now the game looks abandoned from the lack of updates on the "news" page, and there is no advertisements.

something i would suggest is de-listing and then releasing the game again on steam, this time as f2p from the start, as this will draw many eyes. maybe wait for the completion of the new ui and release it as "remastered" or something.

the game also feels abandoned because of the lack of action from devs, many bugs and petitions are active for years with no action, no news, no moderation of chat, no action against multiaccounters. this isn't something that a new player would notice, but for old players the sense of stagnation and feeling that problems will never get better are a big reason for quitting. 

i think even small updates that can be posted to the news section will show some life and inspire some more confidence in the devs. save up a few bug fixes and make "patch notes" a regular feature every couple of months. stuff like this can do no harm and should be trivial to do. that is what i think

Crowdfunded ad campaign anyone?

Depends on what you view as the game. My game (pvp) died off enough for me to leave. The building and trading game will have no such issue. You can be the only person on the server and still happily build along. 

Smopecakes wrote: My rough estimate is that the player count goes down by 2-3% a year. If I recall 2200 when I started and 1900 now five years later. I find it easy to imagine a UI release and advertising reversing the trend and perhaps setting up another 10 years I plan to initiate an external recruiting effort for our alliance if the UI comes out or maybe if faction play comes out and get that critical mass where there's quite a high chance that two people or more are on who have time to chat