Some news here:
Kill Ten Rats
This is a shame, but I guess if Asheron's Call 2 was actually any good, I'd still be playing it, and so would thousands of others. AC2 seems to have entered that stage in the MMORPG Main Sequence which corresponds to the white dwarf; it is now but a fraction of it's inital size, but will dimly burn for millions and millions of years, slowly losing mass all the while.
It's hard to say exactly what went wrong with it. It's was pretty, presentable, had a fairly solid skill system, interesting world, novel backstory - all the things that, on paper, make a succesful MMORPG. But after a month or two, I'd gotten bored of it, and I've only ever resubscribed once, and lasted a total of one day before unsubscribing again in disgust. I think, for me at least, it seemed far too empty...not just of players, although it was never 'crowded', but of anything at all. Superficially, it looked nice, but look any deeper and it really gave an impression of lackluster lifelessness. This made the enevitable grind, present in all games of this type, seem particularly souless.
Also, at the time it was the first of the 'sequel' games, and this presented a new challenge; the predecessor as a direct competitor. I think many Asheron's Call 1 players took a took at 2 and decided they were happy where they were. Even today, AC1 still has far more players than AC2. Competition from other games didn't help, and by the time AC2 was released, the pattern of Migratory Gamers had firmly been established - players who will take a look at the first month of anything new, maybe stay for month two, then definitely jump ship as soon as The Next Big Thing goes into open beta.
Bad Timing for AC2
Note the release of The Sims Online, Planetside, Earth and Beyond (Now dead), Shadowbane and EVE Online in the same few months, and also the line for Asheron's Call 1 at the same time. In summary, AC2 wasn't really needed, got jumped when it was released.
But this isn't necessarily the end. Recently, Sony Online Entertainment signed some sort of deal to redistribute the Microsoft title. Given that they also sell Everquest 2, a direct, and far more successful, rival, could this mean that SOE intend to tart up the faded world of Dereth? It certainly won't be worth their while trying to sell it in the incarnation I last remember. Maybe they'll even include it into their Access Pass? If so, I might be back to take a look - afterall, it was very pretty...