New World

nary a soul said "you know what, I love this game and everything about it, its design, gameplay, ui, combat, story, lore, just fucking love this game. But you know what, the azoth being 150 instead of 50 to travel is just a bridge too far, i'm going to quit because of that"

People quit because the core combat loop and all gameplay elements was designed for private server survival game sized encounters, 4-8 people and then they fired the team that designed it and told the new team to make it support up to 50 players in a persistent state, then they got fired and the newnew team was told to make it 50vs50, then they fired that team and told the newnewnew team to make it an MMO.

PVP was a slide show and unplayable. And then because of that slide show people figured out the game was client side authority so you could disable your wifi or simply move your screen around in windowed mode and run around invincible. And then when they tried to fix that by telling the server to stop listening to the client so the client stopped telling the server how many mobs the player was facing so you ended up with musket/bow guys with 200% run speed and hatchet wielders running around with 300% dmg buff all the time because all the skills were designed around that initial client side authority. 100% headshot criticals 100% of the time with client side aimbots, healers running around invincible so they turned off client side hit detection and then melee became unplayable even in PVE due to rubber banding.

Not to mention the trillions of gold and items duped into the world week after week, every single week from a revolving series of dupes and exploits all enabled by client side authority spaghetti code which invalidated any and all benefits of pvp or town ownership or crafting or anything. That shit got so bad they had to disable ALL PLAYER TRANSACTIONS including rent/guild payments multiple times for weeks at a time.

PVPers quit because PVP was unplayable mess of frozen screen and exploits, and besides there were no benefits to PVPing when the duped gold/items far surpassed anything they could achieve by owning towns and collecting taxes. Same for crafters plus for half the time they were playing they couldn't buy or sell anything off the AH. Casuals quit because the combat went from ok to bad to worse every single patch. core players played through the leveling process and then quit when they realized there was no end game because the game only decided to be an MMO 6 months before it launched and there was no content just cockblocks.

This game that launched was a failure that would have failed even if there was never an option to flag for PVP. PVP has nothing to do with it being a shitshow.

Everything I mentioned affected the casual player. Azoth costs being slightly different depending on faction control had zero impact on casuals.

The vast majority of casual players joined green because it was cool, and to a lesser extent purple, probably 65/35 split. zero casuals joined orange. They never felt the "sting" of slightly increased azoth costs.

I played orange on a green controlled server (which became stuck green when the companies who owned the territories left the server), the azoth cost never mattered, never even knew I was paying more than a green, because azoth was plentiful and the cap was too low. You sat capped at 1k azoth the entire time you were leveling up doing the quest chain.

Speaking of which, another reason why your point is invalid, the game didn't "keep sending you to far off spots". It sent you to a city (first time you had to walk there), had you vacuum up some quests there and complete them, repeat a few times, and then it sent you along to the next city to repeat. The vast majority of travel was from quest area back to the city that gave you the quest, repeat, over and over and over. You could only port home once per hour, and if you wanted to port otherwise you had to go find a shrine which weren't always close to the quest areas. Only time you had to walk far was when you finished an area and had to travel to the next one on foot, and azoth wouldn't matter you couldn't teleport to a city you'd never been to.

The only complaint casuals (and everyone else) had about travel is "where the fuck is my horse? this shits gay."

The game started its decline the moment the devs tried to fix something and broke way more shit and we learned the engine was held together with duct tape and the devs were clueless. that decline continued but more than any other reason was the player base lost confidence in the game itself. They lost half their population the moment they had to turn off the auction house and player trades. The other half left a week later when they had to do it again.

dude for the first month when this game actually had players, none of the invasion portals beyond the newbie ones worked, and OPR wasn't even in. You got all of your azoth from running quests, and that's exactly what the casual experience was, running quests.

Yes general travel was hugely PITA, storage was stupid, encumberance, etc and contributed to why players quit, but that was because no mounts, it had nothing to do with the PVP faction control impact on azoth costs. All that shit was part and parcel of the trade/life skill system remnants from it being a survival game where you would build a town, relics of the earlier design before it became an MMO.

Trying to teleport with a full inventory cost most of your azoth whether your company owned a city or not.

Yeah I gotta say the no mount thing was dumb as hell too. Running simulator was fucking spot on and prob attributed to more people quitting than anything else in the first week(s).

replaced "forced PVP game" with "private server survival game" and you'd be right

This is the result of all those wonderful decisions made by the devs.

One of the dumbest things this game had is servers with 2K peeps max with 3 factions. You can see how this shit works out in the long run. Just not enough people and not enough turn over in a territory control game.