POLL: dyno has 2 questions he wants all of you to (in General)

While everyone is fired up about it (unfortunately I have to go) I'm asking for people to chatmail me the answer for 2 questions.

1) At the current state of the game, how long do you think the game will last?

0-1 years
1-2 years
2-3 years
3-4 years
4+ years

2) What do you think is the main issue with why we can't retain new players?

Lack of visual stimulation (icons/3d/etc)
Lack of parity
Gameplay (10 ba vs 6 ba, character balance, etc).
Other (please limit to 1-2 sentences.

If everyone chatmails me I will put together statistics. PLEASE do not start a flame-war on here - let's get everyone's unbiased personal opinion and see what people are thinking currently.

3 more for the 2nd question

Game is repetitive/boring
Too many items too few players

4+

more dev involvement(cant be helped on certain levels i suppose)

4+

tutorial issues

i know the second one wasn't one of your options but it should be! ; )

1) 1-2 years.

2.) Poor interface.

0-1 years

boring. Strategy isn't flexible. Cannot change strats on the fly. People are sometimes forced to stick to their 'main' strat (char). Even if they want to try a different strat, they are 'discouraged' to do so because of a number of reasons (cost of hiring minions, BA restrictions, loss of experience, etc).

*Wows at the negativity from the person who's been here for a month.*

1.) 3-4 years is my opinion in its current state, but I would like to say 4+

2.) Because many new players cant wrap their heads around the game without lots of help from the community and actually reading the wiki (Which it seems most completely ignore till someone says something about it.)

This is a strategy game, not a blind click-fest, some new players don't seem to understand that until its explained to them.

1. 4+

2. GUI

1. Im a noob so I dunno I hope it lasts a long time cuz I like the game and I like yous peoples
2. Interface and the tutorial is horrid. If i didn't have someone to explain strategies to me and if I hadn't read endless amounts of wiki pages I would've been completely lost.

1-2 years, would prefer to be proven wrong with it lasting longer.

Competition, CB isn't the most aesthetically pleasing or well known game and there is a lot of other games that are easier, more interesting to those who do not understand CB and require less time commitment.

1) Depends what you mean by "the game will last" : actively being played by many people, or the server still being up and running.

If the latter, quite likely 4+ years easily.
If the former, well, it's been pretty sickly for years now, and activity hasn't exactly ever picked up no matter what kind of publicity stunt members of the general population have tried.

2) There is no single one issue why the game can't retain new players. The game was DESIGNED to be a niche game, so it's quite normal to lose the vast majority of newcomers. What it is NOT normal however is to lose more older players than have newcomers stick around. And THAT is the real problem. We just have a way too high churn rate.
In other words, screw the shiny brand new players (a.k.a. bloody n00bs), most of those just come and go and are a lost cause ever since before they come to the site, no amount of prettyfication will help make them stick for the long haul, it will just make them stick around a few days or at most months longer, then they'll go away anyway.

What we need is to focus on the issues that make OLDER players want to quit. In no particular order, those would be...

* no real fair second chances :
a NCB is obviously far inferior to a NUB unless you already had a more-than-stellar first run, in which case you would not want a NCB, so the conclusion is that you only get one chance and then you're shafted ; good luck motivating most people to want to do better and be even more active after they realize that

* play while you sleep and work or face subpar performance, destroy your sleep cycle or maybe your life for the sake of not losing BA :
this is so obviously bad that it would need absolutely no explanation, one would think, but no, we can't possibly accept the fact somebody could ever be competitive with just two or maybe even a single login per day, screw people with lives, CB doesn't give a damn about them

* vacation mode, what is vacation mode, you don't get any vacations from CB and you'll like it, and forget about rolling bonuses and other such pinko commie laziness enhancers, komrade :
no, sorry, I won't like it, and some people really DO quit just because "they won't be able to keep up" in the immediate future in spite of being somewhere near the top of the game ; combine with "no real second chances" above, and even for those that later on attempt it, apply the enhance version of "CB asks for your life" when in the lower BA regeneration rates, and you have a situation where older people don't have much of a choice or a future if they decide to take more than a token break away from an internet-capable machine (and don't act as if this is uncommon)

* CB$, who cares about how hard they are to get, I can just buy them... or sell them and pay for my RL bills... or something or other or whatever :
allowing CB$ for RL$ trades by players to/from players was a bit of a mistake (especially considering some of the other issues), and while some people don't really mind (I actually don't mind much), a lot of people feel quite strongly against it ; in fact, MOST people feel very strongly against "NUB sellouts" (people that make a new account for the main purpose of making RL$), which compounds this problem with the other problems... but very few feel strongly about people that get massive NWs (so if you really want to allow CB$-for-RL$ sales, restrict it to indirect sales via supporter items, or maybe even creation-from-nothing purchases from the game itself)

1) 4+

2) looks

lol'd

my critique was based on the "current state" of the game. Negative criticism means that there's room for improvement. Yes, people may still keep playing the game for years to come. But the game will still be dead if the attrition rate is greater than the rate of people coming in.

I think people either mis-understood what I wanted to get out of this, or simply didn't care and wanted to take the earlier chat discussion here. So one more time: Everyone that hasn't, please CHATMAIL me the answers to the 2 questions and do your best to limit to 1-2 sentences (if there are multiple reasons please state the ones you think stand out over the others).

See oddbird, that's why we post instead of chatmail - you just can't limit yourself to a couple of sentences, and most people don't mind to express their opinion publicly (and we haven't exactly had a flamewar so far, not even comments to what the above people answered to the original questions).

Ok, one, actually, but very brief and not extremely hostile :p

2ish for me, 4+ for die-hards;
What SickOne said about "No Second Chance" - And Nats was wanting to bring $ rewards *down* for NCB!!??!*!
Chatted and copied to Thread

If that was aimed at my comment it wasn't meant to be hostile at all, I was just really surprised to see someone who hasn't been around for a long time and doesn't know the game very well to think that it doesn't even have a year left in it. Genuinely surprised me.