I had an inkling of this in 2008.
It became obvious by the end of 2009.
By the beginning of 2010 I quit playing.
Each time I visit the boards something new reminds me of why I still don't play.
It feels kinda good to kick the habit.
So you're only realizing it just now, huh?
Just let it die. Hopefully it will remain a somewhat pleasant memory, but probably not with the events of the past six years. It's just gotten to the point you don't even get a rise out of kicking the community while it's down in an effort to fix the flaws, however ambiguous and subjective they might be, they are still all dead horses by this point. Most folks have been saying for years that fixing what needs to be fixed (info dissemination, area explores that require as much time/effort as a 40 man WoW raid, scaling issues related to those items, the wholly uncomfortable evil slant in alignment and the equally uncomfortable square-peg-round-hole approaches to rectifying that slant for good align, skill spam, A/B/S and it's balance headaches, to day nothing that we have had the same subset of 20~ players leading ALL the cabals the last three or four years with little variation) would be a double edged sword that would butcher what is left of the game as one currently knows it, so what are you going to do? At that point it's like finding out you were apart of or founded a sports team that is now corrupt and bereft of integrity so no one wants to play with you anymore. There's no real solution when you get to that point short of a complete revamp of policy, theme and atmosphere. Well, guess what? 'throw the bums out' ceases to work when you can't, and on the other hand it doesn't work when you replace them every 6 months or they give up in disgust.
EDIT: Don't worry, the relatively young MOBA genre and to a certain extent the MMO genres are exhibiting similar symptoms in different respects, it's just the tenets that CF holds dear making the vast majority of the game secretive and subjectively rewarded have accelerated this process, in recent years only, to where we are now. It's not a lack of graphics, there are other things driving off otherwise viable players. That at least eases *some* of the blame, it's impressive to have gone on as long as they(We, players too?) have with the systemic problems they've been unsuccessfully and anemically attempting to solve on volunteer time.
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 01/20/2011 10:03AM by Scrimbul.