No Lusche, you didn't, and I didn't mean to imply that was your thinking. Sorry.
It's ok, I'm just a bit touchy on these subjects as occasionally some kind of rumors / myths start to spread from my "work" , like "Lusche has proven that the number of subscriptions ...." where in reality I just showed data on kills, played hours or number of pilot ID's.
But, it does seem to indicate (at least to me) that the arena split - and the increased difficulty in finding a fight that it brought about - could be considered a cause for the decline if, as you say, numbers did start to drop shortly after the split. Sure they would climb for a little bit, as old customers gave the new system a chance and new customers continued to come on.
They didn't even drop "shortly" after the split. According to HTC the split was very successful in terms of business (=subscriptions), and according to my own data it was not hurting player numbers at all. The downward trend started at least 2 years later. If the split had anything to do with that in a direct way, it should had happened way earlier. I had always disliked the split, but I have never found any data or fact to prove that the split itself has been bad for the game (at that time, that is
)
And to expand on the difficulty to find a fight: That had not been any problem back then, despite the split, because we had much higher player numbers, which had really been high enough to support gameplay in two arenas (I'm talking about LW exclusively, other arenas are a different topic). In fact, the high player numbers had been the reason to split the arenas in the first place.
However (and here comes my
personal opinion again) the parameters have changed. While two LW arenas worked fine (keeping a few personal grudges of mine aside) with the numbers back then, things start to get non satisfying when the numbers declined. One thing is the absolute number of players in a given arena: While there may be a maximum limit for "healthy" gameplay, there is also a negative impact when the numbers / the player density is getting too low.
The other thing is the dynamic process of filling up an arena after caps kicked in (old system until tour 130), respectively offpeak to peak arena format changeover. With the old system, it once took about 1 hour for both arenas getting steam again. Annoying, but acceptable in my book. But When numbers started to get lower, this process was taking longer and longer, as the rigid cap system did not adapt. At the end, it could have taken up to four hours instead of one.
The new offpeak / peak hours system was a (necessary) step to adjust for that and a big improvement over the old system.
But now we seem to witness the same effect we Euros had to endure under the old system again, just at peak time: With total numbers having sunk again, it's getting longer and longer for the second LW arena to fill up. And thats' why I am now for getting back to a single peak arena for the time being. The old split system was introduced to enable growth and healthy play. But we have now roughly 50% of the players online we used to be. It's not longer about splitting 500 players into a 300 and a 200 players arena... we see 250 players splitting into one 190 and one 60 player arena.
And at least in my book, 60 players on a large map offers much less opportunities and variable gameplay than putting all those 250 in a single large map arena. Not only because of the lesser player density (= hunting single cons, battles dying quickly when facing resitance because it'S easier to strike elsewhere), but also because it's much more difficult to organize the big stuff like "epic" strat bomber missions.
