AshenDream

@eddiestrike -- I think it depends on your server. I can testify that Faeblight still has a very high population.

On logging in just now, I found out that Trion has discovered a security breach. This is from the notification page on their website at http://www.trionworlds.com/en/games/account-notification -- there's a message in the game launcher linking to it.

"We recently discovered that unauthorized intruders gained access to a Trion Worlds account database.

"The database in question contained information including user names, encrypted passwords, dates of birth, email addresses, billing addresses, and the first and last four digits and expiration dates of customer credit cards.

"There is no evidence, and we have no reason to believe, that full credit card information was accessed or compromised in any way. We have already taken further action to strengthen our systems, even as we, with external security experts, continue to research the extent of the unauthorized access. . . ."

I'm beginning to wonder if several different companies share a common vulnerability, given that something very similar also happened to Valve.

Anyone logging into the website will be required to change their password and security questions. They now require all passwords to have special characters in them, such as blank spaces or punctuation marks -- a sensible and long-overdue move, in my opinion. They're giving out a free trinket to players who do so that increases gold looted from monsters by 10 percent, plus three days of complimentary game time.

If nothing else, this points out the danger of using the same password for more than one game or website, and that using special characters in your password is also smart. (It makes getting your password out of an encrypted database effectively impossible for the hacker.)

The problem, IMHO, is more the downright deceptiveness of the ads.

If I see an ad consisting of little but an, umm . . . ample bosom, and the words "Play Discretely", I'm left unsure whether I'm being offered an MMO or a call-girl service.

@(Unverified) I had an alert popup the moment I logged in this evening.

The real question to me is: where did these lost subscribers go? Into other games? Which ones?

I have the uneasy feeling that many of these people fall into two groups: 1) people with multiple MMO subscriptions, who had to drop subscriptions to save money; 2) people who have dropped out of MMO's entirely -- not because they don't care for them any more, but because they feel they can no longer afford even one game.

I suspect that the elephant in the room no one is mentioning here is the economy, which doesn't look like it will get better any time soon. The total market of MMO players may even be shrinking.