My Thoughts. Would like input.

[X-Ray_Dog]

I'm sort of inbetween your yes options. I do very much care for AC, at least I would hope so, and I love being able to jump into little underground caverns with the community (Teamspeak?, IRC?). The problem is yes, something should be done but what? What can be done? This is a free game so unless we get swamped with donations or whatever, we can't do targeted ads of any kind. Word of mouth has sort of died down. Sourceforge still shows AC being downloaded a few thousand times a week though which is odd so there is still some interest.

So why do the new people leave? New players when they want to register on our forum a lot of the time are impatient for an admin to approve accounts so many don't come back after the first day they register (From what I can tell). Registration was made to be approved by an admin because of spam and other hate activity by some fork of AC gone wrong, etc. I've also heard things such as devs being close minded (I'm sure Undead can chime in here plenty) or mods being over-reactive on the forum or too much censorship and the like. I'm not calling Undead out btw, well maybe now, but he's been right on some key points and devs have been very closed minded in some aspects. I don't code so there's not much it seems like I even contribute game wise but it's happened to even myself with just basic forum administration stuff. Focusing more of the in game stuff, blacklists. Ranges are huge and a newbie isn't going to probably put much effort into a game with so little info as to why multiplayer isn't working. There are so many tutorials for newbies but unfortunately AC can be downloaded from more than just our website so not everyone may find that especially if they only browse sourceforge directly (Or even github now).

Steam? Aren't there fees or some crap you have to pay for that?

There are issues to work out but I think even as of recently, we've been pushing for people to contribute and help for a new release.