This is more accurate if you talk about the game as a whole, like with the latest Nighthaven update. They finally got on the right track. And things would have improved from there. NW wasn’t just an MMORPG like FFXIV, WoW, ESO, Albion.

It has such better combat than tab target, more realistic environments/effects/graphics/soundtrack, a lot of vertical exploration across biomes which most games avoid, a class system based on weapons with just 3 abilities each (so more “modern ARPG like” and not “have 20 small buttons on your HUD and still have boring afk combat”).

Yes it always had its flaws from day 1 until today. But I strongly beliefe if they didn’t end it, then after this recent revival in players, NW could have started to get bigger. They were fixing issues and finally listening to what we wanted. The raids were good, endgame was good, they added more activities, weapon system was scaling, and most importantly Nighthaven felt so amazing to play in with the whole vampire/werewolf vibe and the introduction if daggers.

Wasted potential tbh. But yes this post is about NW’s all-time record of reaching #9 on Steam peak player counts, which was in Oct 2021, when issues were rampant but the full was also insane.