It is a nice written post, but as everyone has the right for his own opinion, here is mine:
- Overpriced items in shops and consignment do not necessarily belong to gold buyers. People often sell items overpriced than what you could find it from a vendor in hope that people lacking knowledge will buy them. You seriously cannot believe that someone has 2 billion florin or that the whole server combined even has that kind of wealth.
The game is in no way dying. The number of concurent and total players is still rising. We just had our all-time peek 5 days ago and as I am writing this, there are 600 online players on Steam alone, excluding the Masangsoft Launcher.
You may now claim "But 100 of those 600 people are bots!!1!!1!!!". No, they are not. If I had to guess, there are no more than 10 gold farmer bots online at any time. You can find bots in Twilight Forest and Twilight Basin, but those areas are very limited. I also noticed 2 bots in Hobgoblin Forest, but have yet to see any in a higher level area. Therefore, my assumption is that we don't have more than 10 of them.
Without Chinese and Korean players, we would soon be able to see a noticable difference in the number of players that we see and interact with daily. It is against the ToS for them to play, MasangSoft did what they could according to their policy, which is put region restrictions and remove chinese/korean letters, as well as remove all players that had chinese/korean characters in their names.
Unfortunately, MasangSoft cannot control VPNs, which chinese and korean players use to access the game even with region restictions. The state of the game is not just asians fault. It is mainly due to the racist players that plague public chats all day long and yet do the same action they complain to koreans about: automation.
It is not just asian gold farmers doing it, "we" do it too, so maybe we should start with ourselves and remove the bad apples before we attack whole other nations?
A coin has 2 sides and we should be looking at both of them.
My 2 cents.