harharharhar wrote on Dec 19
th, 2013 at 8:02pm:
No, in the last 4 months they've probably lost 60% of their VIPs (based on people not playing anymore on Khyber who I know are VIPs, so this number is subject to wild variation, but it's definitely a big number).
Yeah, in my circle of gaming friends 2013 was definitely the year to move on too. I've got about 20 friends who used to play, and I don't think any still do. Some might occasionally, but they never post or talk about it anymore.
It's hard to guess at overall numbers because they broke the API server so the DDO Oracle can't provide recent data, but ShadowFail barely registered as an uptick.
And as bad as everybody says summer is in DDO, the September weekday logins per day were actually below early July weekday logins per day!
The mid July dropoff seems to correlate well with the widespread announcement that ShadowFail would not include a raid to balance the level cap increase and that it would wipe everybody's enhancements (bad news for both power gamers and casual players alike!), and they followed it up with lootgen problems and and that stellar decision on the Hearts of Wood. Oh, and Exreeeeme prejudice, which I think got a lot of people looking at other games while they or their friends had a "vacation".
So my guess is numbers are way down, and at this point they are afraid to turn the API server back on and let people see just how bad it is. But they know, and are starting to worry that maybe they pushed us too far this time.
But on the bright side, DDO was on the ropes before, and it drove them to innovate. They abandoned the conventional wisdom of subscription only. We got F2P and the game was greatly revitalized. Maybe they'll abandon the conventional wisdom of constantly changing rules to keep players interested, or the conventional wisdom that quality doesn't really matter.