Throne and Liberty is struggling with declining player numbers. For part of the community, it is crystal clear why the MMORPG from Amazon Games and NCSoft cannot fully realize its great potential.
How is Throne and Liberty doing currently? Despite regular updates and meaningful improvements, player numbers for Throne and Liberty are gradually decreasing. The strong focus on guild content and massive battles is proving to be a growing disadvantage. At peak times, only about 50,000 players are active on Steam instead of 336,000 (via steamdb.info).
Players are increasingly demanding server merges, as the few remaining top guilds have formed alliances and are farming world bosses unchallenged and winning castle sieges.
Even at the launch of Throne and Liberty, it was clear: Find an active guild! Here are the reasons:
Players see 2 core problems
What could be the current main problem of the MMORPG? That is exactly what part of the community is discussing in this thread on Reddit. Two insights that are supported by many players:
- That top guilds can form into huge alliances to dominate all PvP content in the open world is a huge problem. It’s just not fun when 280 organized characters beat down 100 opponents. Such all-dominating alliances are said to exist on almost all servers.
- If castle siege is the big core feature, there shouldn’t only be one castle around which everything revolves. This way it is much too easy for dominant alliances to maintain the status quo. The quasi-predecessor of Throne and Liberty – Lineage 2 – had already done this much better, with a variety of castles to fight over.
Players are divided in the discussion about whether alliances should be completely abolished or whether it would be sufficient to limit the number of guilds per alliance to two. In both cases, however, the developers would need to hide the names of opposing guilds in PvP content to avoid shadow alliances that secretly coordinate and organize.
Do all players support the problem analysis? No. There are also people for whom the alliance system is one of the important features of Throne and Liberty. Communities that have not been able to assert themselves since launch need to get better – as far as coordination, organization, guild activity, and so on is concerned (“Git gud” – via Reddit).
In other words: For them, the game is not the problem, but the part of the community that isn’t stepping up. The desire for more castles or zones that can be claimed by player communities, however, also resonates strongly with many alliance defenders. By the way, the developers plan to tackle another construction site soon: Throne and Liberty is struggling with the same problem as Lost Ark – this should change, even if players are surprised
