Any ideas to bring back players?

[malark]

I think the ultimate point here, to why people are leaving. Is that the devs make the game the way they want it. Not how the majority of the community want it. And to a certain extent it's within their right to do so as it's a closed source project. But that leads to an incredible amount of frustration in the player base. Especially when things are developed (like ranked) which the majority of the population frankly don't give a damn about. That frustration combined with controversial changes leads to small groups of people to quit. And over time that issue compounds until you get an ever dwindling player base as we currently see occurring. At best RoR is stagnant. And that's never good for an MMO, even a free private one. At worst we've got a net loss of players.

What do I think would be the best way to get players back? Developers shifting their focus to make the community more involved in the future development of RoR in a more transparent way (And maybe increasing the team size, yes I know people tried to steal code in the past but because of that paranoia the project is suffering terribly.. you've just gotta accept that it's a risk and push forward, locking everything down to a select few is imo doing more harm than good). Do quarterly or yearly polls (depending on how long it takes to develop a feature) that decide the focus of what the devs should do based on community polls. And then every sprint period or quarter of that development cycle, give the community some information on what's going on behind the scenes to achieve what they voted for.

A system I would like to see is one similar to that of classic runescape. Players get to vote on what is developed or added to the game. If there's controversy about a feature or decision that was done, a poll is put up and people are allowed to decide if it should be removed, kept or modified.

Also i'd say that it kinda seems like the game is going backwards in a way. Like take the PVE, rather than it getting tweaked or made better, (other than the lightning boss in BS) things seem to be going oddly backwards. Like the left wing gunbad boss, I mean sure the puddles were annoying because the effected radius was bigger than what was on the screen, but then they were made invisible and instead of the boss acting in a predictable way like before where you could move him with him punting you, they just had him drop agro if you got too far away and gave no punt at all, and then after that they just took away puddles alltogether. It's the same in BE with barakus, I mean he was supposed to punt you and then drop agro, but now it's just all random. It kinda actually seems like devs are getting less skillful it's weird. Also to spend like an hour of your time to do a dungeon only to get no credit at the very end, you'd figure would normally be a top priority to fix, or at least if there was a way around it to let the player base know what it is. Like if it was anti-cheat code or something I get it, but if it's caused by other people in your pug group leaving or quitting and you've just gone to the effort of tanking it which can take a lot of energy, to get no credit right at the end just leaving you feeling like some kind of stockholm syndrome guy to keep saying the game's awesome you know what I mean ?

[illutian]

Might also want to do something about the Faction Imbalance.

It's starting to look like most of the WoW Classic realms (source: IronforgePRO site).

[Stahn123]

Leaving the game in a broken state to push an agenda that is not even close to helping anything, instead cripples the gameplay and player interest. For a player with many alts, the currency exchange gimped most of my toons under 60 and left them with nothing. If they gave a month of 2x rr and let us run around as champs. I might reinstall. Something tells me they don't want us back!

This. So much this.