I don't know what to say here. The players aren't exactly unified in what they want. But even if they were, I couldn't see it having any effect on what the devs are working on. The devs are a pretty closed bunch. A thread with a huge amount of player activity won't see devs do much more than correcting facts. It'd be interesting to actually hear what their attitude or vision about things like PvP. But we don't. You don't need a community manager to say, "I think PvP should be dominated by high levels, not everyone is meant to have a chance" or "We're not interested in adding PvE, we'd like most combat to involve players".
I'd argue that the game is stagnating. We've got players, we've got features, but there hasn't been anything to get excited about in a long while. The game isn't going anywhere new, nor has anything different been tried in a long while. Most of the changes are bug-fixes or brahmin based, and the changes that aren't don't have any real impact on the average game experience. And I don't think anything as significant or game-changing as the 'Create your own faction' feature was, is in the works.
The game isn't going to die, no. There's plenty of die-hard fans that'll keep FOnline populated. The same people that just were grinding cash and xp over and over in closed even though they knew it was going to be wiped over and over. They'll play the game no matter what.
You need fresh blood, a new vision, a new team leader, or something. Because at the moment, what I can see is a group of skilled and capable people, who are clearly committed to their project, just tinkering because they've got nothing else to do and no clear direction.
Just take combat, or PvP, or quests, or PvE and run with it. Find one particular aspect of gameplay that's important but neglected, and focus on it as a team. Work out how you can make PvP accessible and fun for more players, and start experimenting. Start messing with melee and unarmed, see what works. There's a whole bunch of stuff that has barely been touched. We're still pretty close to vanilla F2 combat in a multiplayer game.
I don't know.
Take this guy. He was a capable coder, with both interesting and relevant ideas. He had vision, and obviously cared about the game enough to write a damn novel about how it could be worked on. But the dev response was to just go through each point he made and tell him why he's wrong. Nothing was of interest or taken onboard. The poor guy may as well have been arguing with a dining room table. The devs have already decided they know what's best, because they're the devs. If that guy knew what he was talking about, he'd be a dev. Obviously.
It's nothing personal. Like he said, it's your game and it's your rules. You've built a game you like and that's about all you're going to do. I can't fault you, but I'm just sad you've put so much effort into something and aren't taking it as far as you can go with it.
