What happened?

[Konoha]

It's been a while since I've played AE but I've come back to a wasteland. Where the heck is everyone? What happened?


I think this gif sums up my experience after returning

[Baylor]

Jude 1:3 Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.

[Tycho X]

The launch of version 2 (v2) of the game (which means high fleet taxes, high base costs, fewer bases, smaller mobiles, basically you playing the same game except everything costs more time and more in-game credits), combined with rapid-fire release of new servers every 3 months, together these 2 factors have caused absolute devastation on the population and playerbase of AE. The servers have been getting smaller and smaller, by player count. F2 is now the smallest and least popular server ever released. The v2 era started around 1.5 years ago.

^This. I played a couple years ago too, and yeah, things have changed... in a bad way.

[Gowron]

I think this all stems from the bellows of those disgruntled players who sought a way to avoid being derb farmed by vastly larger fleets and high level players. (this is MY opinion) Of course it didn't work, the FM alone was suppose to control the fleet size, and the vastly expensive cost to built bases totally stupid. Instead AE has done these launches on new servers to what? Not sure, many players will go to the new server only to see the same repeat as in all other past servers. What AE should do is simply fix up the old servers, get rid of the oldest ones, touch up and improve the latest ones, and Leave it at that. We don't need all these version 2 servers, I came to the 2 servers to see how they are. I was in the old ones for a while then left, came back this past year after a 6 year absence only to find disappointment. AE really needs to focus on simply just fixing what they have running now, and shutting down old servers and say... make a new 1.5 server complete with improvements and perhaps better play, get rid of the high cost of bases and the so called Fleet Maintenance and I am sure that many would return if only if the servers were improved. Stop bringing out new servers AE, it's not what we need, You are Losing players this way

[Wlerin]

I think this all stems from the bellows of those disgruntled players who sought a way to avoid being derb farmed by vastly larger fleets and high level players. (this is MY opinion) Of course it didn't work, the FM alone was suppose to control the fleet size, and the vastly expensive cost to built bases totally stupid. Instead AE has done these launches on new servers to what? Not sure, many players will go to the new server only to see the same repeat as in all other past servers. What AE should do is simply fix up the old servers, get rid of the oldest ones, touch up and improve the latest ones, and Leave it at that. We don't need all these version 2 servers, I came to the 2 servers to see how they are. I was in the old ones for a while then left, came back this past year after a 6 year absence only to find disappointment. AE really needs to focus on simply just fixing what they have running now, and shutting down old servers and say... make a new 1.5 server complete with improvements and perhaps better play, get rid of the high cost of bases and the so called Fleet Maintenance and I am sure that many would return if only if the servers were improved. Stop bringing out new servers AE, it's not what we need, You are Losing players this way

To be fair to those "disgruntled players" (disclaimer: I was one),
a) FM as implemented is nothing like what they were asking for, and in no way helps new or weak players compete with old players (except those old players who get farmed into the ground without any hope of ever recovering thanks to FM),
b) the game was already dying for multiple reasons, one being how extremely difficult it was for new or damaged accounts to ever catch up to the oldest and most successful ones. FM was proposed as a solution to this, and if it had been done even close to right, it might have worked...


All that said ... honestly the way AE was going before FM I think it'd have still ended up here without it. Especially if they still did the increased servers thing.

[NexusTruthTroll]

Jude 1:3 Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.

LMAO Baylor going back and editing all his forum posts, too much time on his hands. Trying to cover up his real words.