Understanding WHY players left.

[Phillip]

you guys must have played WoW and chose the server named Rejected d00dtards.

i've played for the while now and just don't have such experience. perhaps i'm justnot sensitive enough.

the community here is great. everyone is a surviver of some guild that dwindle to a handful, and barely hanging on.

[Tryagain]

umm Goriax its too late to wipe the slate clean.

They could have done that pre release by delaying the release and extending the beta instead of handing out cooked over exagerated claims. Anyway threads like this by the true blue loyals will spring up all the time. All in hopes they can understand why a game they love is always hanging on by its last thread. Thing is its all moot. Everything in this thread has been mentioned a million times over already. Tulga knows what the issues are.

But they are stuck in their vision now. Right or wrong it will EITHER 1) lead them to chapter 7 final death or 2) leave them as a small niche game always scraping together resources needed for development. The twilight for a true Horizons success story has long since past. Now its time to figure out how to survive in an industry that is just getting bigger and more competitive by the month.

[RexxLaww]

Against my better judgement, I went ahead and installed the horizons Client this weekend. I finally got logged in and set out with my new elf.

I lasted 10 minutes, not counting load times.

90 Minutes if you count that.

It didnt take me long to remember all the reasons I quit the game.

The last time I played Horizons was on a 1.2 Athlon processor, 640mb RAM and a Geforce 2 video card.

This time it was on a Pentium4 3.02, 2.5GB Ram, and an AMD x700 Pro.

It was as laggy now as it was then.

I am honestly disappointed. I had high hopes, especially when I heard that haunting load up music that used to fill my house. Good luck to you all, I highly doubt Ill be back.

[Finduilas]

I started playing in Jan 2004 and quit in Dec 2004.

Whilst the merge helped to change the world, and added much higher level content, it also broke a lot of things.

The following is why I finally quit (warning long):

In Sept '04I decided to take a break from adventuring to let things settle down, and all the problems with my old quests would have time to be fixed.

I decided to make myself a set of cobalt chainmail for my ranger, dyed and double teched, and a full set of plat double teched jewellery. I was level 74, so I would go and level up later to be able to wear them.

However...

In order to go from making ring to chain involved one long grind. Mine ore, smelt it, make item, destroy item, remake, and so on. I would typically login, start grinding, whilst watching TV, or reading a book. That is NOT how it should be. Repeatedly performing the same action over and over to reach a goal. I don't mind if it takes a long time to level up, but it should be interesting.

But there was no other way to get XP. In WoW AV battleground you have a repeatable quest to collect ore, which you give to your quarter master for XP and improved reputation. But you also make ALL your side's NPC guards stronger.

HZ should have had this. Allow me to craft armor or weapons and hand them in to a quarter master in a border city that is contantly under attack from WA. As I hand them in I get XP and reputation, which after a while leads to me getting a medal, or title, or lowers the cost of buying a plot, or something. It also helps to upgrade the guards, their armor, weapons, spawns MORE guards, and so on. Give me a REAL alternative to destroying my creations, and REAL purpose to grinding, in between the USEFUL levels.

I eventually made ALL the cobalt, teched to my liking, and ALL the jewellery. I was still too low to wear them but now I decided to go and hunt for XP, level up to 75-79.

This was when the END for me came.

Much had changed. The WA mobs were now far more difficult to solo, since they got boosted to cater to the multiclassers. My favourite hunting ground WD, was too hard to solo now, too time consuming for the amount of XP gained.

So I went to hunt regular mobs. But now I discovered the "new spawn system". Areas that just after merge were teeming with life, treants, golems, were now non existant. I tried to do the maple quests, but in half an hour saw ONE treant. I went to the trophy hunters, wrote down the items they wanted and went to find the mobs that dropped them. Only a couple of them spawned a lot, such as the golems outside Kirasanct, and they were over camped by desperate adventurers.
Everywhere else was deserted. The Aug mines, just after the merge patch, were jammed with golems, now they were devoid.

I searched all over the world but it seemed empty now.

My guild had dwindled too, now we had fewer people to go out hunt with. And hunting consisted of more grind. Find a decent spawn spot, with WA, and start killing, over and over and over. Level 75 was the same as level 55,35,25,15.

I quit playing though my sub was still active, and played EQ2 beta. I was stunned. So much life, so much content, so many players, such lovely graphics... This was what I had been yearning for in HZ. However, EQ2 was geared more to group play, not solo, (and though that has now changed) I did not bother to buy the game when it released. Many people on the server did though, I read the goodbye posts.

Being in the EU I waited til WoW was released and started playing it. Now I could solo, and have fun all they way... until 60 that is.

Grouping in WoW is flawed. You have "must have" classes. Tank, healer, crowd control. No group gets going without these 3. So it takes time to set up a group, even with your guild. In the meantime, while you wait, there is little to do solo, that is interesting. At 60 the game becomes hardcore, raiding and instance runs.

But... If wow had multiclassing then this problem would not occur. I could switch classes to one that was needed. Or simply bring enough healing and utility to be useful.

If HZ had quests, like WoW, I would have done them right through to level 100 with my ranger, then swtiched to healer to do the quests I had missed.

If HZ had instance zones, or even just dungeonlike areas, lots of them, I wouldstill behunting with my guild most nights, with ALL my classes.

If boss mobs dropped loot, decent armor upgrades, or quest rewards, my guild would have had a purpose each night, somewhere to hunt, something WORTH killing, or dying for, to LEARN how to take down.

As a prestige class, I LOST all my quests, the WD ones were broken, and the trophy hunters were a poor replacement. There was no point trying to reach level 100, nothing awaited me, no content worth reaching.

Finally.

Crafting. Plots. I had desired from the beginning to buy and work on a plot. At first, when I was most eager, I could not buy one. When they did eventually start releasing them, it was during the day, when I was at work, so I missed out. This saga lsted until July, when they announced the server merge, and change to plots.

So now, having, or getting a plot was pointless. I decided to wait. But they screwed uptime and again.EU got the merge patch, but did not merge. So plots were not available to buy. Then we DID merge, so whilst US players were building their cities again, we had to wait. It was october now, and I was just losing interest.

Then I played the EQ2 beta. Their solution to housing was not a patch on HZ, except for one thing. Decoration. You could buy all kinds of things for your room, paintings, tables, beds, lamps. You could even sell good from your house, linked to a merchant that people bought from, so if gave a reason to stay home. They had planned to allow you to put craft machines in your room too, and storege,so you could run a home business.

I realised now how pointless buying a plot would be in HZ. Because when built it would be soulless, not a place I'd have reason to stay around. And, the final nail in the coffin, as an elf I could not build an elven structure, such as those I'd seen in Feladan.

My account ran out on dec 3rd '04.

I had hoped, then, that after dragons got their much needed love, that adventure content would be added, and racial structures, elven.

Being able to build an elven palace on my large plot, being able to decorate it in a variety of ways (including getting rare wall paper or paintings), and having decent content for when I decide to go out hunting; quests, dungeon type areas, boss mobs, usable loot, events; would lure me back.

Until then, I watch silently.

[Seikojin]

:o
I left because:
The game hasnt met the origional features advertised when DA was at the helm.
With other people at the helm the game has stagnated. No significant proigress has been put forth. Not an issue to the devs; they do the work handed to them from higher ups. Those people seem to be calling the wrong shots.
Lack of biped content. Why is it bipeds can level grind all their abilities (Or most) and dragons have to quest for theirs? I think they all should; it makes the earning more valuable and worthwhile.

[Venge]

""Dont state there vision""...The game is still being built, i think there vision is to build the game and finish it, and fix the problems created by not finishing it.Other then that, what else is there to do, untill they finish it. I think there vision is to refinish the game, which you see now with lessar adrdoth, and the two new citys tht are going to be reamped. This will add quests that we all wanted at lower levels, I feel the lessar adraoth change was a good step forword."

You cannot finish anything without a vision. Without knowing how the finished product will look like, operate... (a vision), how would you know when you've reached.

So while they may still be building the game, they must have a Vision for where it will end up. We are simply asking for what that vision is because frankly right now there does not seem to be any IMO

[Syiara]

Hey Aamar!!

I left honestly beacuse of client performance.

The game itself was great, being one of those players that raced to 100 in the first few months. One of the first to multiclass to 100 and then staid and played every night with fervor, i found that eventially, i couldnt stand the performance.

I went to try other games CoH, WOW and found smooth flowing greased engines (in CoH at least) that performed beautifully.

Its great to have events, and wonderful the things that i was able to participate in while playing horizons, but always was the ever present CTD and lagouts, and running over a mountain to wait while the creatures loade din around me.

How many times cna one look at the shiney paragon city with its instantaneous load times and fast action battles then go back to trudging to the mud of istaria steped in lag and constantly getting to view your desktop...Combat in other games made horizons pale. When you can log into on egame and have a 8 man team take on literally HUNDREDS of bad guys using epic screen rattling graphic intensive powers while flying around, and running around freely and smoothly...or you can go wait for load times, sit and do boring pulls that usually end in demise because the creture couldnt be clicked on or it came, killed, then loaded..well thats what made my choice.

As more new things got added to horizons, and the client continued its decline and/or lack of improvement i decided it was time to take that final log off and devot my gaming time to playing more instead of waiting for that next screen to load, or twitching across a broken landscape of empty textures.

I know the default response is that my system caused these problems are that my network connection wasnt up to par, but i know from experience in this and other games that my performance was not lacking. I love the game, and i love the people, but the performance of the client itself and technical issues interfered with my gaming experience enough to turn me elsewhere....where i can play a game and not fight memory leaks and CTD's.

I hear that these things are improving, and i have once again looked to renewing my sub...at least for a month to see how things are going (the fact that when i login i caqn still see my toon names helps!) but am still half-hearted, for fear of seeing that great game again, hidden behind the veil of poor client performance.