MystMan

It's the crafting and unlocking all the recipes that got you the experience needed to level up to 55. The toon I tried this on was my 5th, I already had 2 main crafter toons with all recipes learned, I used them to mail crafted stuff to my other toons. If you invest little to no time in crafting on a toon, you will get stuck being under-leveled. It has happened to other players in the past; I remember some threads about it from other players when the forums was more active. It happens when new player joins large clans that support them, so they won't need to invest much into crafting which is understandable. FE being a standard MMORPG game, questing by its own merit should have been enough to award us with plenty of experience (and rewards), since questing is the backbone of all MMORPGs. FE has interesting lore behind its quests (not counting the terribly rushed Outpost), but G1 neglected all the terrible payoff despite promising three times over the years in their dev blog "we'll look into it" I once helped a new player go through the Flagstaff University quest, the hardest area of sector 2. He died a lot. When we got the pathetic end reward, he RAGED hard, his anger was palpable through my monitor Obviously I never saw him log in again after that.

Month/Day. That's the US format of writing the date. 2 October is the shutdown day.

Not true after the random node spawn change. Plenty of mid-high tier crafting recipes required rare materials that are practically impossible to find outside pvp zones due to their randomized & very low spawn chance. You can go in pvp zones and get them in half an hour at fixed locations since the node change didn't affect the pvp zones (or use those boring time-consuming non-reusable harvesters) or spend a month looking for the same amount outside pvp zones relying on random luck to run into these rare material nodes. The massive overworld is littered with way too many basic nodes, making hunting down semi-rare and rare mats a nightmare. This game's enormous land area (which attracts many new players) is wasted, no reason to travel and explore it since you know you're going to find basic copper, iron, vegetable and wood everywhere. No variation. What I had to resort to as an explorer/crafter/quest player was waking up during ungodly odd hours, like 4am, and enter pvp zones to get the mats I needed since I knew these zones would be practically empty on a global scale, since people are either asleep or about to go to bed. If there was a different fun efficient way for me to get these mats myself, I would have. But there wasn't. I had 4 different toons, each in different PVE clans. Combined, all these clans were ~200 players. Considering the small niche size of FE's playerbase, that is a significant amount of people. All those PVE players left permanently in the month that GORE came out, The gap they left behind was VERY noticeable by all. So much that some pvp tryhards who would regularly ridicule them that "pve ain't worth it" suddenly changed their tune that PVE needed to be fixed to get these players back. G1 made it clear they didn't give a damn about them since PVE was left to rot with its terrible reward system and no proper update and bugs and issues that have been around waaaay too long have never been addressed. Also, I made a 5th toon to prove that never going in pvp zones will result in that toon being underleveled at the end of Kaibab forest. If you do EVERY quest per zone (including the oddly placed PVE quests in pvp zones, go figure) before moving to the next zones, you will finish Kaibab forest with well over the required level to do quests in Deadfall. If you skip all pvp zones, you will be underlevelled and can't do quests in Deadfall, so you're forced to waste away at Defense towns for hours to level up instead. Fuuuuun /s. tl;dr FE got empty because it didn't feel rewarding for the time the player was expected to invest in it after all the unwanted nerfs and neglect. People simply tolerated all this hoping it was going to be fixed one day..... until their patience finally ran out after the GORE debacle. Cripes, I remember there was a time it was "positive" on Steam years ago. Today it is now "mostly negative". FALLEN Earth... what an understatement.

Fallen Earth under G1 has been like a classic muscle car that was left in the sun to rust away with no maintenance for years. They kept breaking the game and making changes nobody asked for, making everything less enjoyable and less rewarding, which drove away the core player base. Trying to fix FE as it is now is like trying to fix such a car to look presentable. It realistically isn't financially feasible unless you're already filthy rich and like fixing wrecks as a hobby. Cannibalizing the game and getting all the non-proprietary source data out and using that to create a Fallen Earth 2 is a better option. For the game to thrive again, soooo much would need to be done and this game is completely unknown by now and I haven't seen ads for it since.... ever (even APB has had banner ads). Word of mouth won't be enough and where would you get the money for ads besides the massive amount of money already needed to fix the game? It doesn't help that the game has been passed around publishers more than once, creating this proprietary obstacle, people working on somebody else's code and whatnot. NoMan's Sky had a disastrous launch but at least it was still their code and they managed to fix it to a proper game in 2 years before the game could become forgotten. FE is almost 10 years old, that's way past any salvageable due date. The game is too dated, too unknown, to problematic. The hardcore fans it has now are not enough to save it. The playerbase hasn't peaked in the triple digits for years (I check the social menu each 2 weeks, average player count is always 40-80). An MMORPG needs triple digits to remain relevant. I'm not being pessimistic for the sake of negativity. I always wanted FE to succeed and I was lucky to have started playing years ago when there player count was actually above 1000 and it felt like I was actually playing an MMO and not a literal abandoned wasteland; even single player Fallout games feel more alive than this. But any new player who started playing FE after the G.O.R.E. update (the beginning of the end) will never experience the better quality game that the older players enjoyed before that.

What the game needs, in order of importance: 1. Better server + net coding. A laggy MMO is a dead MMO. *coughDefiancecough* The server needs to be reliable with proper coding. I have no problem with new server and everything, it's 2018. Can't keep using outdated hardware/software if one wants to remain relevant. 2. The game needs to be rewarding to be fun. The reason the game always struggled to retain new players pre-Gore is that most leave the game in sector 2-3. They never make it beyond that to reach lvl55 (unless they skip 90% of the content and power-level to lvl55, which I personally find a guaranteed quick way to get bored of any game). People leave that early because in those sectors it becomes very clear how awful the effort : reward ratio is. Why bother doing anything if you get peanuts in return for an arduous 30min Master boss fight? G1 mentioned at least 3 times they would fix the reward table, welp that never happened. I've personally seen people ragequit the game after getting terrible rewards from quests for the umpteenth time. Multiplying the quests' chip reward by 10 would've go a loooong way in making quests worthwhile. Also, that nonsense of item rewards 10 levels lower than the quest level itself... seriously what is wrong with the person who thought that was a good thing? 3. The character stat building system is..... not good. It never really was. The game claims to champion freedom of choice, you can define yourself. (one of the game's main selling point that attracts new people). But the character system is so inflexible and convoluted you pretty much always had to build specific meta builds. It should've just chosen the generic class system with fixed skill tree like any generic MMO instead. People coming in here with an idea in mind how to build their character end up realizing later they can't do it due to the extreme limitations and don't want to make a gimp build, So follow the meta or go away. Unsurprisingly, many choose the latter. 4. Capitalize on the fact that this game is huge. 1000+ square kilometers....yet more than half of it goes to waste. There is so much enormous empty spaces everywhere. They're filled with generic enemies and common nodes. There is no reason to ever enter these vast wastelands. Would've helped if at random some rare resources (or enemies that drop these resources) would spawn in these places, this would promote exploring. But noooooooo, let's put all the rare stuff inside pvp zones. That oughta show those pve players how much we appreciate them! G1 did an amazing job driving the PVE player base away with terrible decisions after terrible decisions. GORE, broken Outpost and Dome instantly killed off 4 pve clans I was in. They made exploration and crafting on such a huge area a zero-purpose goal. Veteran players were actively telling new players to just go to power-level locations to reach lvl55 as quickly as possible and then grind their sanity away in Citadel/Dome for tokens. Tokens!!! 5. Make AI combat worthwhile. Combat against npc is just a matter of outlasting them while standing still. There is no strategy involved at all. Would be nice if their accuracy would lower when you move around a lot. Cause right now everything just aimbots you, why bother moving? Because of this, combat can be done with one hand. And this lacking combat system gets mentioned a lot in reviews as a biiiiig negative. 6. All recipes need to be relevant. The amount of recipes in this game is amazing. Too bad that for its majority it's all a giant waste of time and space. We have no reason to craft most of this stuff when it's pretty obvious what the best thing of each category is. 7. Crafting queue needs to be increased. This whole 1 queue for f2p and 3 queues for freemium is brutal. Other f2p games offer more for less. New players need to feel invited to spend money, not driven away right from the beginning as a punishment for not spending cash. The target audience of 2018 is not the same as 10 years ago. Still using the rules from way back then will never make you competitive. . . . . . . 100. Re-skin everything to make them look more shiny and modern. Yeah, that won't help whatsoever until the above is addressed first. Realistically speaking, can all the above be done cheaper than just making a new game from scratch? As it stands, FE is so broken and neglected with rushed/unfinished poorly planned content..... how do/can you fix that without throwing the baby away with the bathwater? That is THE point of playing PVE. One does not power-level and THEN go do those things. You do all those things and you automatically level up in the meantime. The road to lvl 55 needs to be fun and engaging, reaching endlevel is not the one and only reason people play MMOs. To many, the journey matters more than the goal. If the journey is awful, who will care about the goal? They just leave for other games instead. "A lot". I'm not buying that at all. When somebody says "I am a PVE player", that means they do not and never will be interested in fighting other players. They will go out of their way to avoid PVP. a pve player will never be a pvp player. A pvp player can like both pvp and pve however. When the game clearly became anti-pve after GORE, the pve player base left in a massive exodus. There was nothing left for them to do and the little they had became irrelevant due to power creep and depressingly boring token-grinding content.

The 61 player count through Steam chart is not far off. You can count how many people are online in-game at any time using the Social window. (press O ) For the past two years, I log in once each 1-2 weeks to count them (and to prevent my clans from dissolving, being the only players left in all of them). Filter the player levels from lvl 1-40 and lvl 41-55 with location checked to "all" and I could easily count how many players are online at the time. It was always between 55-90 players. Even on weekends. The game hasn't broken in the triple digits player count for years. For a F2P MMO, these are terrible numbers. And half of those numbers are always new players in Plateau, unaware they won't be playing this game anymore about a month later. Plateau is a revolving door of new F2P players. The rest of the player base are idling in the usual spots, Defense towns and capitol cities. Everywhere else is completely abandoned. Such a waste of a huge map. EDIT: just checked on Sunday August 26th 2018 13:00 GMT. Only 30 people online. Wow.