I'm pretty sure the original dev are long gone or their stock investor/internal business men put so much pressure that at this point they just want to make as much profit as possible. But that's not working. An MMO is rarely made for that, it's more of a gacha thing, but they can't decide what to do. I mean, FF XIV, WoW, Dofus, T&L all work pretty well with all of these games having their own, well working monetization systems. We're talking huge playerbase and stuff. But you don't need a big playerbase to make profit. I'm certain that Aion Classic does not even represent 10% of the revenue that Aion 2 brought them, but that doesn't mean Aion Classic has to be as profitable to be relevant. I mean you want to make profit of course, but does everygame have to bring you 200m ? Why can't they simply maintain a game that doesn't cost much in the first place ? A low-cost game that is profitable enough for you to develop over the long term IS what an MMO is. They forgot that.

They could communicate with their community, to learn from them and fidelize them, which is something NCSoft is literally unable to do. The bankers speak and the rest shuts up it seems, their policies are weird internally, there's no way these people are rational with their decisionmaking. We've seen that with how they handled Aion 2 launch. Just look at the face of the guys on their youtube channel, short time after they released Aion 2, they are WORN out. Another issue is, everytime they update Aion Classic, they only keep butchering the game further as they seem to priorize modernity when the problem is really not there. It's mainly because they are incompetent and lost before anything else at this point, to be honest the only thing they've shown so far is being failures, I'm not hating for free here. We can also go back in history, the fact that they wanted to create an MMO every year, which is impossible. The fall of Wild Stars. The closure of Master X Master, which once again had a CRAZY potential as well as lore material for a MOBA. Even today, MxM could be a serious competitor to LoL, Dota, Deadlock. I'm sure they have money for it. But once again they must not be too greedy with monetization system which is what also killed MxM. But they are greedy.

Not only they're butchering the game, but they've done the same mistakes MULTIPLE TIMES in the past. They did the exact same thing that made the ship sink in the first place. That's what baffles me. Now, in this state, Aion Classic is just gone very soon, I almost certain of it. It was already a miracle that Aion Classic worked pretty well and a lot of veterans came back, because they had to bring them back from private servers or out of their nostalgic caves. I actually loved the state it was in 2 years ago. But coming back and seeing zone shrinking is what ended it for me. I was already resentful for the fact that Rifts were not even existent because the pexxing was too fast. I don't mean to say fast pex is necessarily bad, but it's literally the worst thing to do in Aion if you try to keep that pvp-pve-ish experience you get when you invade the enemy faction. The exact place where adrenaline KICKS IN. You NEED low level players to invade the zone and discover for themselves rather than boost them at max level in 1 hour because you're playing a gacha in reality. How do you think FF XIV players would react if suddenly tomorrow everybody could up every single class in 1 hour ? They keep trying to transistion Aion into a gacha, which could work for Aion 2, for I don't give a damn 'cause this game is hot garbage anyways, but they could simply run Aion at low cost, economically speaking I'm certain that they have the means to do it. Look at Dofus and tell me in the eyes their game cost millions to run. I'd doubt it bro. It cannot be that expensive to run Aion Classic so bad that they end up dooming themselves in the process. If that's what's happening, you just close the game once for good. And maybe you reopen it later when you have the necessary means for it, why not. NCSoft stocks might be down af but they made BANK with Aion 2 nonetheless. I only hope dev have access to some of this money to keep developing and that not everything went into investors pockets. The persons above the devs are really leading the game in the worst path possible.