I’ve heard some murmurs and disappointed sounds from players who stayed with Albion, but I don’t want to publish random opinions as proof. But now someone was smart enough to measure the player count. The game has an official toplist of weekly “fame” (kind-of-XP in Albion) gains. He scrolled to the bottom and the position of the last contestant means the total number of characters who play this game:
He published his results on Reddit, finishing it 3 weeks ago. But since I have an account as I was tricked into buying this game by the crooks making it, I could log in at Sunday and Monday and check it myself for the last week and the week before. Here are the results:
Not only the numbers are low (EVE has more concurrent logins than Albion has weekly logins), but it’s dropping fast. A 0.988 R2 fitted 1/x curve says they’ll be at 20K players by the end of the year. We’ll see. After all, it’s not much to ask from me to log in once a week and add lines to the current data set:
2017.08.06 134
2017.08.13 115
2017.08.20 109
2017.08.27 88
2017.09.03 77
2017.09.10 66
2017.09.17 56
2017.09.24 50
2017.10.01 47
2017.10.08 42,6
2017.10.22 35,1
2017.10.29 31,9
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2017.11.05 29,1
2017.11.12 26,5
2017-11-19 25,2
2017-11-26 24,5
2017-12-03 24,1
2017-12-10
We’ll see where it goes, but it sure doesn’t look rosy. Hey SBI owners and bosses! It was a great idea not to spend on internal security or a third party audit, right?
Don’t you think the main reason for the drop of players is that most remember that they hate grinding and underestimated the grind this game needs to accomplish something, especially if you try to free to play it
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??? What grinding? Albion is one of the least grindy MMOs out there.
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@Gevlon: Well, if you want to do any kind of meaningful PVP you need to grind mobs … a lot of mobs. The reason being simply that the fame requirements for wearing T8 + a reasonable specialization level is ridiculously high. And if you don’t those you just get demolished in GvG’s.
Other major problems:
– DDoS + mitigation lag made the game unplayable for weeks
– Cities are still impossible to conquere, because of the overpowered defender boni.
– No real wars since everyone is in big alliances that don’t want to fight
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Also, though they nerfed it now, for the most part the fastest way to get fame was … by speed running expeditions. Yeah, who would’ve thought.
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@Hanura: people got to T8 in a week. I understand that those are no lifers, but it’s still a reachable thing.
– DDoS came from some debate with RMT-er criminals. Hint: if the game wasn’t designed to be RMT-ed, maybe RMT-ers wouldn’t show up at the first place.
– Guess who got the cities at the start? Large incumbent bonus is usually a sign of rigging: the powers that be are meant to be in power forever.
– No kidding! RMT alliances don’t fight but make OTEC/PUBLORD. Who could have thought?!
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