I think one possibly vital clarification is what exactly makes an “active” or “dead” server. Unless I’m reading this situation wrong, players consider a server to be “dead” if there are less endgame people (human beings playing the game) who play regularly. VR is likely looking at the overall server activity...a server might have an average of, say, 25 characters 220+ that log per day....but might have 200 characters under that level that log per day. Whereas another server might have 45 characters 220+ and only 100 characters under that per day. To endgame players (which constitutes pretty much this entire thread), the second server is more “active” whereas in reality, the first is. This also leads to my second point (which Corrupt touched briefly on) which is multilogging. VR doesn’t know who multilogs, if 5 characters are logged at once, that looks like 5 different people logging accounts. You can’t blame them for not knowing that you are multilogging. Anytime people multilog (which is fairly often) it throws off the numbers of players, which is unfortunate but can’t really be worked around.Rosmerta can't even kill dino? Nice arguementI’m not saying it’s down to the people what I am saying is I’ve seen the likes of Rosemerta and Epona amongst others recruit both new and transferring players by making pro active efforts to do so with good effect at various points.
I think there are a lot of great points here, from what I’m seeing, a bunch of servers do tend to struggle with endgame content.
However, I just want to clarify, that doesn’t mean the server is “dead” in the normal sense of the word (lack of overall players). This then circles back to what I think Schwing may have been getting at - focusing on making the server a more inviting place in some way would help encourage new players to stick around. Will that fix the core problems of drop rates/grinding/lack of content? No, but it would help bring new people in, which is more important imo. I would rather see new people come in regularly, stick around a year or so, then leave, rather than see players stick around for 3-4 years, but without many new players coming in.