And then there were two (A story of member loss)

EQOAnostalgia

700k+ subs... and you are bound to see people leave and new ones coming in. I see this same exact topic on just about every mmo ever made including WoW. People come and they go, that's life.

Tandor

Bear in mind that a lot of players tried this game at launch with the stated intention of moving very quickly to Wildstar, and did so. Then they moved on to ArcheAge. Those games are now pretty much discredited and lots of players are leaving them, some of whom are doubtless coming back to TESO.

It's the nature of the beast these days, there are very many MMOs out there, the market is over-crowded, three competing AAA titles were released this year within a few months of each other, and players are very volatile in their switching between games, compounded in the case of TESO by the lack of traditional loyalty to a single guild because of the encouragement to join as many as 5 guilds.

In these circumstances it is scarcely surprising if the game's population hasn't fully stabilised yet, players are still coming and going. I can't say whether Craglorn and Cyrodil are empty as I don't plan on playing in those areas, but the areas I have been playing in are no quieter now than when I started in April.

AngryNord

For the couple of weeks I've been questing in Craglorn, it's been far from dead... But yeah, a lot of the people who were in from the start has quit, that's pretty obvious... Of the two guilds I join at start, one is completely dead (apart from me, none of the members have been online for at least a couple of months), and one is "semi-dead" (it has a fair number of members, but only 4-5 that are really active). Of the people I friended in-game at the early stage, only two still remain, and one of them logs on only very rarely.

abigfishy

Artisan's Guild has 499 members and only 8 have been inactive for more than 14 days.

Sindala

The only reason a lot of players still log in daily is because of the Hirelings email collection, they then log back out.
This game truly is inventing a halflife for itself and I fear it may be to little to late when they finally add the Champ system.
Once people leave it's very hard to get them back.........especially without Housing

Tandor

Sindala wrote: »

The only reason a lot of players still log in daily is because of the Hirelings email collection, they then log back out.

So? If they're doing that then it's because they plan on using those items and consider the subscription worth paying on that basis. They're not quitting the game, they're still committing to it.

The challenge was initially to find people who were still logging in, now that's been done is the challenge to meet an arbitrary amount of time they must be logged in for? What then?

pmn100b16_ESO

One of the biggest guilds I joined in the beginning was called Dungeon Veterans (EU). There were up to 100 members in this guild online at the same time around launch, mixture of PvPers and PvEers, there was constant recruiting for dungeon runs, etc. This guild currently has 377 members, 7 members have logged on in the last week and only 3 in the last 24 hours. Its a shame to see such active guilds become ghost towns.

And yes PvP pop is way down. We only get one pop capped campaign on EU now, and even then barely. I used to queue for 70+ in prime time, the most I've had in prime time recently is 3. This is a continual decline, not an early exodus after initial launch. I think the end of the original 6 month subs saw a lot of people go.

GreyBrow

nerevarine1138 wrote: »

Of course, your story is kind of belied by the fact that I'm in three active trading guilds, each of which kicks people after more than a week of inactivity, each of which is currently sitting at 500 players.

So while your friends from the beginning of the game may have left, they were replaced. Overall, the population seems to be fairly healthy, and people have been making the "My guild is losing people, therefore the game is losing people" argument since a week or two after release. It was just as bad an argument then as it is now.

What, you mean the 3-4 big trading guilds per zone?

So, not counting the people that are in more than 1 guild, each zone has about 2000 active players?

Seems about right to me. In AD, you always see the same 50-100 names in reapers march.

Tamriel is a very, very, very small world

AssaultLemming

Logged in tonight, tried to find a group for any vet dungeon. Nothing. Tried to find a trial. Nothing. An hour I looked, then I went to pay another game.

AngryNord

AssaultLemming wrote: »

Logged in tonight, tried to find a group for any vet dungeon. Nothing. Tried to find a trial. Nothing. An hour I looked, then I went to pay another game.

I logged on this morning, after about 10 minutes got invited to a dungeon run. Did four Craglorn dungeons before the group leader suddenly quit...

driosketch

Did we have a ton more people at launch than we do now? Yes, but many of them were only ever here to play the game for the first free month and then move on to other games. The population that remained after that first month has been a lot more steady. You will still see people leave from time to time, but also new ones come in and even a few have returned. When established players leave, they do so for many reasons we may never know. There are those that let you know they are leaving because they are fed up, but there are also those I know have left for real life issues, because an MMO takes time and money not everyone has indefinitely. And it takes a while for a new player to establish themselves to fill the void.

Guilds that formed in April were an entirely different beast from how they are now. You had a flood of new players without guilds looking to fill up their five slots. You also had trade guilds that were a necessity back then. The introduction of trading kiosks has meant you no longer need to belong to four or five guilds to sell or buy stuff. As long as your guild has a kiosk, you can make due with one, two tops. This means a lot of trade guilds failed because they weren't able to compete and recruit members in a potnetial pool that was now 40-80% smaller, without the the player population actually declining by that amount. And every guild anecdote in this thread is one that formed up in April. I'm still waiting to hear about one that formed in June for example.

Now PvP is a different story, and in a much sorrier state than the rest of the game. I can see why PvP players are much more pessimistic. (PvE group content too, but grouping with a largely single palyer fan base has been an issue from day one, not something necessarily worse now than back in May.) But part of the blame, if we get to the intent of making this thread, is on the PvP players, not just ZOS. Collectively we chose to exploit in mass every hole in the system. There are players now who gather to spam particle effects in order to use lag as a tactic. Could ZOS do more to curve this behavior? Sure, but that's asking them to be our nanny, and many of the changes that are made end up punishing players who aren't exploiting. Players in PvP sometimes take things very personally and passionately, as evident by the Alliance War forum, and when they had enough they leave that part of the game, the game itself, or keep their sub but merely log-in to collect their mail each day for a while.

Grunim

Ifthir_ESO wrote: »

driosketch wrote: »

Anyways if you stay or not, see you around.

I am a Psijic order player just like you. How many of us are even left? Ten? Twenty? Tops.

I can assure you that there are far more Psijic Order players around than twenty. Many PO folks avoided the forums and though many have left ESO, quite a few of us remain.

Jahosefat

It is indisputable that the PVP population had steadily decreased since beta. At no point has the PVP population began growing again. ESO needs a growth phase.