Ladderslasher was redesigned to be a team game. Not competitive. Yet it has a competitive drop system that simply randomly assigns loot. It's nearly impossible to self-find a "good" set. Soloing is retarded, so you're at the mercy of "who's online right when I want to play?!!" MQs need to be done in bulk if you ever wish to experience higher classes, which indicates the speed of a group climb is required, but if you have neither the time nor desire to dedicate anywhere from an hour and a half to 4 hours for a solid climb, don't bother, you'll just get shunned.
Effectively, by orienting the game so solidly towards group play, yet making it nearly impossible to gear up based off that work, then turning crafting into the task of years, the game became more of a curiosity than anything else. Clean coding, playable on computers decades old, excellent forum communty/support, with hints of nostalgia style games remaining even now. Yet with a broken economy, game mechanics that seem geared more to nerf than to assist, and a reliance on group play whether that's convenient or not, the game became less "fun" and more "work".
Why is the population dwindling? It's too much work to maintain this game in the playlist, and not that much fun. What could be done to bring it back to a level it was in the past? I quite frankly don't know, because at this point, it'd have to be pretty massive to make me wish to return.
I'mma quote this. While the troll session was interesting, it didn't add much. Is this a "who can win the troll-war" contest or a "cause of the decline of the LS population and what can be done to minimize it topic?" Try not to get it locked based on your petty squabbles. Input real material that either informs on why you aren't playing when you used to play too much, or what is preventing others you associate with from playing even though they once did/would.
Good grief people. When did I become the reasonable one?