The amount of players is honestly not that bad considering how old the game is. And no one can reasonably expect actual content updates at this point, so the lack of that kind of thing doesn't change things much. The problem is Suba's management at the moment. There is one GM who I assume is the supervisor that reads these forums sporadically, ZenDragoon. But he has either zero knowledge about the game or absolutely no ability to influence anything going on with regards to basic support the game needs to continue, whether it is dealing with player issues with tickets or GM run mini-events. The GM that is currently responsible for answering tickets either is completely uninterested in doing his work, or has contempt for the player base. He is assumed to be responsible for the following stuff I can remember over the past 6 months or so:
- Banning an entire brig after some of them were using exploited items or hacking
- Banning a player for racism when referencing another player's name in a video, then unbanning them and permabanning the referenced player along with their main
- Announcing 3 in a row weeks of GM run events then no showing all 3 of them
- Permabanning a player for "toxic behavior"
- Banning a player for making a video that made fun of another player, and threatening to keep them banned until the video is taken down
This is just off the top of my head, but would you really want to put money into a game where your only interactions with the company running it is stuff like this? This should still be the main version of the game, and yet people have abandoned it to go to crappy private servers. I hope the players in Suba's other games are faring better than this, since it feels like a company about to go under.