interested in covering them with shard bombz yes

I played some of the new maps and i can say they are fun but i dont think it changes much..No old players will come back but more importantly no new players will want to play LD.You see the same people play ld over and over..I dont wanna sound ungratefull for the new stages but i think they need to do some new things to give motive so the LD will be renew.We know that the population dropped from the golden days but we are enough to LD be more alive than what we experiencing now.I would suggest new krogmo awards.Maybe an extra prize for the top 10 players of the week too.This will rise the competion more.Maybe a special emblem or a recolouring in the name for a week of the 10 best names will be a nice addition too.Most players not even checking the ladder so why not make them recognizible when they put so much effort in pvp?

The players that left in the good ole days provided great experience and actually played the mini game well, unlike today where pure damage is the goto motive to obtain "glory" and "fame". The problem with today's current LD state is that as mentioned above there's hardly anyone that play anymore because you have current players that basically just spawn camp the other team and force them to take defensive measures which really doesn't help them at all because those spawn campers will be awaiting three feet away from the opposing team's spawn area. What makes it worse is that some back up these spawn campers by spamming pulsar shots and locking them in with haze bombs. There's not many of them but when they do play they ruin the opposing team's chances to actually play the mini game therefore causing new players to quit after two to three games. They'll be back however but it's by chance that they don't encounter these players in the future.

Another aspect is gear balance. Back then when we had 300+ playing LD and BN starting dying off slowly we had different gears roaming around with everyone finding their preferred play style. At this point this was where the mini game flourished and everyone had fun. Soon the meta came in and you know what happened so won't talk about that. The actual issue to what came in is the introduction of full BK armor, buffing of Acheron and implementation of specific damage blaster lines. By this point around a quarter or maybe almost half the LD player base have the full BK set and by adding UV's to get rid of some of the negative resistances they'll be a force to be reckon with (I'm assuming that they have average to above average skill). What would have made this preventable was if they didn't even introduce the raiments because one, they're behind a giant paywall where literally only the 1% can get their hands on it or if one is extremely lucky with book hunting and two, they're more glass cannon than chaos yet chaos itself is available to everyone so that's why I'm not adding that. But if they made BKR as well as the other raiments available to everyone such as an extra possible drop when defeating Margrel where you're guaranteed a BKC to the book holder with a possible chance of getting a 3-5* kat armor that will give more of the player base a chance at getting the armors. What would have made this preventable was like how I mentioned, either not introduce the raiments or rework them so they can maybe be a less powerful version of the helms or something because just with the kat helms it was somewhat balanced because you farm for the book and the luck is random to everyone therefore everyone has equal chance.

Acheron was buffed when Obsidian Edge was introduced because if they didn't do anything to it then everyone would have gone with Obsidian Edge because of it's poison application when one uses the charge, therefore making Acheron obsolete because it would be considered a less powerful version (take a look at Sentenza and Obsidian Carbine; there wasn't a damage buff to Sentenza which made Obsidian Carbine the more superior weapon because of it's poison application). To counter this problem the devs buffed up Acheron and with max damage UV's or armor bonuses it acted as a faster version of Gran Faust. What also makes it powerful is the split normal/shadow damage so even if you have full shadow protection armor one wouldn't stand much of a chance against it. What I would recommend to counter this is basically make Acheron inflict pure shadow damage and get rid of the normal damage. I mean we already have the rocket hammer which inflicts pure elemental so why not make a pure shadow weapon. This would have been better because then it would be more balanced and shadow protection armor would be more useful against it. It would also give Obsidian Edge a chance because due to it inflicting poison in the charge, it won't get buffed in raw damage but it'll have it's use in inflicting poison. Also Obsidian Edge would retain normal damage therefore Acheron would only have pure shadow.

When Valiance was the only blaster line available it had its use in LD as being one of the only efficient and balanced weapons. What countered this is Ancient Plate which would reduce the damage but gives penalties to the user in ASI and MSI; his at the time was balanced. However when the Gunner Update came in and new blasters were put in it made Valiance less useable because now one had something to counter against Ancient Plate, which is why one doesn't see much of it anymore. I wouldn't say this provided too much imbalance because the recipes are easily accessible by farming Basil and hoping to get it or buying it from merchants or AH. What makes them powerful is when you pair them with gun damage bonuses and this is where BK or shadowsun comes in. With shadowsun it's still balanced but with BK it makes it more lethal because of it's higher universal damage bonus. If BK was assumed to be in the game why not slightly reduce the damage from the specialized blaster lines or as I mentioned above, remove or rework the raiments so they're more feasible to use and obtain.

The other big problem and possibly the main problem is internet connection, more specifically ping. Almost all the good LD players have less than 30 ping therefore they won't experience as much lag as the rest who probably have more than 30 ping. I'm not too sure what the threshold is until you starting lagging but the higher the ping, the more lag one gets which affects their performance. There have been players that played godlike with one bar or high ping but that's because they had months or possibly years of practice in predicting movements. This is great and all but if you put in a new player in this place they wouldn't stand a chance. In order to get good they'll have to keep playing until they get it right but for most people they'll get frustrated for dying too much and possibly losing on their side. Ping is a main attribute that affects a player's performance and with high ping they won't be too sure if they'll be hitting an opponent.

There's so many other reasons why old players aren't coming back besides the ones I listed but other possibilities can be due to boredom or finding a better game or so. In LD it has been mentioned above that you play with the same players over and over again, which doesn't really increase your skill level that much because you'll be analyzing the same person's movements and attack pattern. Some do change their tactics which is great but overall you're just playing with the same people everyday.

In LD right now there's like 15-20 people queued and/or playing everyday which is the average, around 20-25 on the weekends. One will see some new faces but the majority of them are the same people and in recent times the spawn campers and spammers. Hardcore LD weekend made it possible for new players to have an even match with better ones by removing AT and adding obstacles to the capture points. it also introduces a few new maps with a mix of PvE and extra hazards. While all this makes it more fun it really doesn't improve much of the mini game. During this event there's only a small increase of players and the max I seen was 30 or so during these events. Also there are players that don't play on the weekends and do things outside the game because you know it's the weekend. Also those that played without AT for years will still destroy new players because they have been accustomed to playing with natural aim. There's a lot of debate on AT and while there has been a bunch of complaints and colorful vocabulary against new players to "git gut turn AT off nub", they still need to get the hang of no AT in LD because unlike PvE, PvP in the game is faster paced and they'll have to hone their reaction times faster but due to experienced ones killing them off and spawn campers they won't be able to learn.

Already I made a bunch of paragraphs so I won't add more at this point. What I can say is that old players don't normally come back because of these conditions and already some have found better games out there. I mean in SK in LD you're playing with the same people over and over again with a tiny player base of 30 at its highest. Other games have hundreds to thousands queued in their PvP modes which gives more variety and more strategy making because one won't be playing the same people over and over again. The old players probably flocked to these games because of it and possibly it's more balanced and/or interesting.

Tl;dr - old players won't come back because LD is way more unbalanced and toxic than it was before and a couple of introductions and modifying of current weapons made it even more unbalanced. There have been suggestions of player created lobbies (not GvG ones) to separate the experienced from inexperienced and adding a game mode where all the pure damage dealers can kill each other off while not capturing anything (Team Deathmatch lawl). Welp that's it and I have some suggestions to counter spawn camping but already this is too long lol. Later!