Sure hope the massive drop in onliners will not be permanent...this little experiment has cost the server players I'm afraid. It was a terrible idea to let it go on this long. I say this not to point fingers but because I have been here loyally for years and I am not happy when it declines. Maybe consider being public about planned experiments and set the time frame in public before just rolling it out and strongarming it. As much as we love Reloaded we should be informed of radical experiments like this instead of rumors causing people to seek other avenues of entertainment. You should be way more public with your thoughts and especially in this case. I wonder if you decided on a whim after seeing online numbers dropping to stop the experiment or it was planned?
If we published all planed changes in advance, then we would end up making no changes at all. With *every* possible change, there would be a significant amount of crying and rageposts. Sometimes when I posted a changelog few hours before update, crying already started "noooo wtf don't do it shitty change shitty update blah blah blah" and all sorts of fonline experts who already knew what will happen (and it didn't). Simply not worth it.
Desperation is never good in fonline development and changes can't be made just because several people got pissed off because they took dusty PA from their tents and it got melted.
If somebody wants to play other game, he's free to do it and it's his choice. People come and go. We didn't advertise this game since 2013, and when we did, it had as many as ~450 people online max. Two weeks before that, there were many fonline experts who were telling us that "nobody will play this shit because xyz".
Some people will leave to try other fonline servers, some people will soon join Ashes of Phoenix, others will appear from nowhere, and others will quit to play other games or real life.