Is this game dead?

[LunaticAsylumLA]

u didnt need to spend the AA pts if u didnt want them tho

That is not that simple. If it were, a lot of problems would disappear.

[mrcorp]

There was a strong and emotional dichotomy in whether people want that. Also, 160 points were given to both veterans and new players, effectively leaving the gap, but taking away hours of fun from the game.
Also, there were not a single thing in the game demanding AAs from a player. You could do a lot of instances (if not all) without them at all.

I assume you hadnt played that much before hand. Most vets had what they needed for AAs. 160 pts really didnt do much but offer a pvper the chance to pick up useless pvp AAs to start PVE, or reverse that statement. All in all, most had what they wanted as a vet. It didnt give vets any advantage. It gave new players the advantage to pick up some resistances and etc.

[Kurt2013]

Giving the AAs away was a good and logical decision once they decided to go that route, because it closed the gap needed to do most instances.

The bad decision was to make a certain AA level, especially hitcritprotigation and the ones needed for scripts, mandatory (for real or imagined in groupleaders minds) for these instances.

Another bad decision was the balancing and linearity of AAs. The basic idea was not so bad (offering a huge new field of advancement options without raising the level cap with silver and golden perks you have to choose from and you can change according to situation), but the balancing and execution lacks. It is obvious they had no "system" of rules for creating these AAs, but rather went for "what could be cool" or even worse, they tried to balance out class inbalances with them, making the whole mess even more complicated.

Compare the power of some feats (especially passive ones) with before existing "have to feat" ones. Also they managed to diminish the strength of the system by adding a huge amount of rather powerfull passive feats and only a low amount of active ones or ones needing choice. The whole system lacks working alternative AA choices for players (especially when it comes to class AA you can see this: some have actually a few valid and good choices, others just a golden perk). Some AAs even diminished the value of feated combos and spells by allowing to only boost a selection of the existing lvl80 array and thus reducing the standard build variety.

[slackjoint]

is this game dead ?

just look at fury , there are guilds on top 20 ranking with 5 active members . and the situation is even worse on rage

[Encourager]

lol ain't that the truth.

[mrcorp]

is this game dead ?

just look at fury , there are guilds on top 20 ranking with 5 active members . and the situation is even worse on rage

Yeah, it has been dead for years. If you were here at luanch, you know that. It died months after launch, and again a year later. It will never be what it could have been which is why people like Morphs and I are a little bitter. It could have been...

[LunaticAsylumLA]

I assume you hadnt played that much before hand. Most vets had what they needed for AAs. 160 pts really didnt do much but offer a pvper the chance to pick up useless pvp AAs to start PVE, or reverse that statement. All in all, most had what they wanted as a vet. It didnt give vets any advantage. It gave new players the advantage to pick up some resistances and etc.

I have played since 2009, with peak gaming (low-level and high-level PVP included) hours in 2010. For fun, I rerolled HoXes with no AA points for end-game PVP, and it went pretty smooth. For any groups, you could just go as DPS (DPS/healer) or an offtank.
New players have gained no noticeable advantage, but I followed the idea where a lot of people were asking to remove the imagined "AA gap" between the new players and old ones. While new players had no real disadvantage unless they wanted to jump right in into high-gear action (Jade Dugout HM instead of Iron Tower HM, for instance).

The most balanced time for the game was 2011, where the programmers and the game director found the golden middle for casual and hardcore PVP and PVE players.

And yes, the game is withering at the moment, and it could be mostly because of some risky moves from the new director. Raids appear only once or twice. Guilds have problems filling raids. The problem is that I really love the game.