I came across this in another thread and it perfectly sums up why myself and alot of others ive spoken to eventually stopped playing crpg.
Why did I fall in love with CRPG? In hindsight it was due to one thing: the euphoria of feeling like a goddamn knight slaughtering the peasants. When I started out right before the level and gear revamp, when levels were uncapped and people rode around in plated chargers and full plate, my main game mode was Siege. Back then people ridiculed siege as noob mode, and all the serious players played on battle. But I loved Siege, I didn't have to wait minutes to respawn and play again, i felt amazing standing on the walls or a bridge just decking people left and right. I was hooked. Occasionally i would go to battle and play a few rounds just to see where i was at, but when i wanted to have fun, I played siege. This changed when the introduction of the multiplier and upkeep mechanics. Although in theory this was suppose to help out new players level faster and encourage teamplay, in hindsight this killed CRPG Siege and the fun for me because:
1. The goal now was to get multipliers as fast as possible and not really kills, battle became much better for grinding out exp and gold than siege due to the latter's long and fixed round times
2. For some reason, Upkeep was much worse on siege than battle, so players paid more money playing on siege than battle
3. Battle was often dominated by clans or teams that would just stack multipliers because they would just steamroll the noobs/average players.
Siege began to die slowly, as the well geared players moved to battle to avoid the upkeep cost and the noobs left for battle for better grinding and possibly get teamed up with the dominant clan of the day. But ultimately, the death of siege also meant the decline of new players entering CRPG. Noobs playing in battle will never feel that awesome feeling of being unstoppable, because battle is too unforgiving and too unpopulated compared to siege. Without that feeling, why would anyone keep playing CRPG? This is what happened to me, i left around the time WSE2 was introduced and really never looked back until recently.
If your after player numbers a revamp of siege would see many return.
