Whilst it takes more practice to get 'good' with the Australian latency, It's entirely possible to become good at lockdown. Several of my Australian guildmates (Smashgear, Decostop to name a few) and I have become good enough at lockdown to not only have fun but to often be one of the best players on the team. Practice is all it takes. Katastrophe wasn't the most well-thought-out event in terms of the drops. You must be playing lockdown in a completely different place to me, because I've never been 'abused' for lagging.

I suppose it's their loss if people listen to this person's advice; they miss out on a great game!

Im from asia and i lag, well but tough f&^%k.
In pvm u have learn to raise your shield to defend before attacks reach u.
In pvp, which im not good at....you have to slash places where u think your opponents will move towards lol its really weird but i can live with it.

But replying the topic, one of the main reason why people r leaving is because lack of update events and news.

Its true that we get festival events like xmas , summer and etc. But most games out there have weekly weekend events, not main patches but just stuff to keep the community amused. The last event we had is valentines and it did not even have any new additions to the game, just a perma love puppy mask that looks exactly the same as the 30 day one.

Fine it m9ght be a lot of work and needs to go through many layers of approval and tests, but at this day and age not only is it important to live up to the customers expectation, and sometimes exceed it.

I'm not leaving but if I would I would do it because I can only do 10 floors every day.

Left the game, not the forums, don't fret people.

Here are some reasons why I left.

#1 The lag
Though true it takes practice to get well even on 300ms ping, but I still feel that sting when a monster whacks me to death without me knowing because I don't have the time to react. Human reaction time is approximately 200ms, that said, 300ms ping is deathly. Of all the monsters, fiends are the worst, because they tend to hit me with their toasters before I block it with my shield.

#2 The lack of diversity
Not to say how lacking the game is in the number of weapons or gears, but I think that the game balance is so one-sided (I mean who wouldn't use Wolver set?) it isn't fun experimenting on any of the equipment, not to mention the price of 1 single 5 star gear, and also considering that I am purely free to play. That said again, I also noticed how there isn't much difference in between knights. A knight can basically be a swordsman, gunner or bomber, or all of them. That's right, ALL OF THEM. I think a skill tree system would work perfect on this game, and hopefully more weapon/gear balance, not sure how to implement it.

#3 Repetitive gameplay
King of Ashes, says it all. Done 1 shadow lair before, not much to expect out of it either, just the swarm making some difference, however, it's still pretty much the same maps. All prestige missions done, all danger missions done. Yeah, it's boring.

Define people "leaving". Do people delete their characters and refuse to remake a new one? Or do people take a break for a few months and return for new contents?

I managed three guilds over the last two years. From what I'm seeing, SK population are content driven: most of them stay for new contents while said contents are still fresh. Otherwise they would just head for another game and take a look at SK only when there are something interesting.

I believe the "core" population of SK is roughly 3.2k, of which around 800-1.2k is from Steam. (Core means they login almost every day, including alts.) So it could be that the people who are "leaving" that you described are just the stray population outside of the core.

I haven't "left" but I am in "stasis" so to say. And my group of friends. For us, it is due to not having new "meaty" free content since well... a year ago? We crafted everything we wanted in the meantime, missions were a way to replay everything with a story - which in the end didn't add anything new... and sort of lurked and helped a bit in the guild we were. But as time went on, we had nothing left to do... so we are waiting.

On the meantime, we are playing (and waiting for) other games - it is surprising what some small staffs can do on (even if mostly instanced) mmo games, this one (as well as others we are playing) being a good example. Even if it has had some bad decisions as the game progressed, it has been a good ride at least the first six months. I wish I could pick up this game again with the same joy I had back then, but well, we had all existing Cradle to explore back then... maybe the novelty wore off?

Maybe if all that content behind paywalls or "once in a moon through grinding" was free, we could have 5 more endgame dungeons to tackle... I love IMF, and tried the SL version invited by some guildmates. Wish I could run it much more often.

laziness, boredom, bad teammates.

Every time I play a few floors, one of the following happens:

1. Nobody joins. At all. Even in the arcade, where you can join at ANY floor. Or else I click "join" and there are ZERO parties available. By the way, party finder is useless and broken.
2. Everyone is deaf, either because of refusal to get steam, disabling voice chat entirely due to one or two people, or because they have music or crap blasting in the background and don't want to pay attention to the game
3. Someone decides to be a jerk and completely sabotage the party (ESPECIALLY in Blackstone Bridge. It makes King of Ashes almost unplayable because there will always be one or two dastards who ruin everything)
   

It all boils down to the lack of contents. This causes all sort of other problems like lack of flow of people (a big problem to small guilds, the problem is less to bigger guilds) and so Guild Hall expansion, while having some interesting aspect, do not fully realize its potential.

And if you end up playing with the same group of people over and over and over again, or the alternative is, join a PUG and hope the noob in your group don't cause a stroke in you, the interest in the game would naturally die down. Then when promotion comes, we found out it's a grindfest. That I believe is completely missing the point of SK. You want new, interesting content, to retain and attract people. The flow of people would help you grow that gamer base.

It's like a river. More fishes tend to dwell in a flowing river. Your river is not flowing, fishes swim to somewhere else.

Lack of new bosses. The lifeblood of the game, still baffled that they havent worked on a T3 boss. Vanaduke is so old he makes betty white look like young teenager.

Promised updates that never came to fruition im looking at you magnus line and tortodrone.

All my friends who had called it quits.

000 abuses promos and doesnt even try anymore recolors items or rehash the same items I find that greedy and lazy.

Shard bombs i loved the old share bombs now they are simply no more than a fancy firecracker.

The market for all items crashing like stones. The only way make money is to merch when that died I pretty much had no reason left to play.

Regarding big REAL bosses. I think OOO does have all but one monster type covered: Vanaduke (Fiend, even though in game he has his own type), Roarmulus Twins (Mecha), Jelly King (Jellies), Snarbolax (Beast), Seerus (Gremlin) and Margurel (Undead).

What we are missing is a Swarm boss. (Unlockable by Echo Stones, hopefully?)

... or just make FSC harder. e.g. Zombies shouldn't die to one volley of Blitz charge?

But wait, that would become UFSC. So how about just fold SL altogether and make the SL content into the official stream?

Week six without any new content. OOO continues to be cryptic as usual. Supplies running low.

Because after you do many shadow runs, T3 runs, have almost all the weapons you could need, have a ton of accessories and have crowns and CE but no reason to spend it nor any reason to get more; well the game gets boring.

The end game content doesn't last that much.

Not really, if you see the discussion topic about the new UI there is a whole lot of mixed reactions going on - I don't care that much about it actually, a new UI isn't going to make me play more the game (like, almost nothing)

In fact, I may most likely log in to check the new enemies on a status strata in Arcade, say "oh that is nice" and leave again.

I wish though I would have had that minimap improvement a while ago, so many deaths from surprise devilite debris...

the game gets wayyy too repetive. I did FSC 10 for FoV, a sword I killed myself with more than once. I occasionally come back to check out a few updates, but those get boring soon too. This game is so farming based, and I ATE HATE HATE farming in every game.
Another reason is that, to be honest, I wasnt content with the energy. CE prices jump up every year, really, and I spent all my CE on crafting, and suddenly, poof, back to farming crowns. I'm also getting into other games, and I kinda failed to like it anymore. I still drestroy the forums, but I hardly play the game anymore.

Same here ^

Also, people would quit for the following reason:

-Forums
-Criticism
-Insulted
-Banned
-Under-aged noobs
-Boring
-Energy price
-Lockdown
-Finished the game easily
-Have nothing to do
-Attention-seeker
-Endless crown farming
-Mist tank
-Crafting
-More

you will quit every game that you play sooner or later. The only way to actually keep players in is to release constant updates, and that hasnt been happening.

theres not really anything i feel compelled to do in sk atm
soooo i ended up leaving but i check the forums a lot to look for major updates
there is just not much else to do when you have all the uvs you want, and all
the 5-star equips you could care about at least thats what i feel like
maybe when an important content update comes i will play again but probably not to be honest
i dont feel like going through the trouble of finding a guild and having to maintain presence in this game

edit: for a while after not playing SK i played path of exile
it was pretty nice since it felt like it was in the same vein as spiral knights

Gota agree with Zader.. started playing other awesome indi games in the mean time. Pretty addicted to Faster Then Light right now.

I've quited a few times already (well, more like extended breaks), mostly over the same thing: lack of content after getting to tier 3 and some really dumb changes the dev team makes.

After you've done Vana so much and tried the Shadow Lairs, there's almost nothing else to do other then getting accessories and rolling UV; which a care very little for. If you have a good guild, I can totally see that extending your attention but not much and I cant say much for LD since I hate that mode with all my hate...

Which is a shame, since I absolutely fell in love with this game the first time I saw it, from the gameplay to the art and the look. Hell, I picked up 3D modeling thanks to this game! I've tried to force myself to play more but the only thing that works for me anymore is trying new play styles or weapons :gunning held my attention for a good 2 months and just recently I've decided to try bombing and found it a blast (no pun intended); getting all the mist bombs felt rewarding (except Stagger Storm...).

But even then, that will get boring again, just as before, because it feels like there's nothing to use it on except the tired same levels (that includes clockwork runs) and I'll end up taking another extended break... thou the new ugly as sin UI might just make me finally jump ship unless an uber big patches with like new bosses,weapon balances or more levels/monsters start occurring soon.

I prefer the bombs that teleport to the enemy ship and cause fires, so good. My panic option is when boarded - everyone runs to the med room and open the rest of the ship to space... and wow. The enemy keeps on truckin for a good 5 minutes, they dont give a F about oxygen!