Haha i knew you existed dw, i have seen your name in many locations and thank you, it makes it all feel well worth it
Liewise, old friend, I sincerely appreciate your words!
I think there are several reasons the game died. 1 it's old and people got bored of it, 2 devs weren't interested in designing new, unique features to keep players attention, 3 most servers have no business opening up, 4 the game has bad graphics which isn't easily remedied (as you'd have to move to a deferred renderer, and that could take a man months of programming to do), and 5 there's no real reward for playing the game. You beat a quest, kill some players, that's it. there's no real storyline (gunz has one, but it wasn't implemented, i assume it was written mostly back when the game was being developed as an mmorpg). I've tried adding a few things like a mail system and achievements, but i doubt either will do much to help.
I've tried boosting the endgame rewards when I stole the rebirth concept from MU Online into Gunz; the same with PvE... I don't think I've told you, but back in 2009/2010 when DR was being a pioneer in several aspects, and when I was on my development peak alongside Sulfin, TJ, Thief, Fox, and a few other developers, we had a project of actually implementing a story driven Quest mode: with the Astra Gods raging misery throughout the lands, some factions with their own inner conflicts further uniting for a greater good, etc..; everything properly built, with ingame dialogue and some custom cut-scenes between quests, etc... But as you can imagine, all of that, along with our development team, took a 'kolie to the knee'...LOL! Maybe we can actually rethink this concept nowadays. Time will tell, I guess, maybe the Skeleton King will have his first and final debut eh eh :]
We've recently spoke about this regarding the Final Fantasy VII remake and how Final Fantasy XV can either be extremely good, or have a terrible sales chart. IMO graphics mean nothing compared to quality gaming, which very sadly, isn't the case nowadays with all the top-notch consoles and 3 day polished rocks like in Final Fantasy XIII. That's why, when you see those TOP 100 games of all time, like in IGN and others, you will always have 'good old games' like Ultima VII, FFVII, and UFO/XCOM in the main tiers.
The same applies to Gunz, it's not about the graphics, but mostly about gameplay - K-Style surely made the game highly competitive and popular, along with the game itself being fairly easy to mod and have implemented new functions and game modes. Hence why Gunz 2 was a complete fiasco, because what made Gunz 1 shine just wasn't there on Gunz 2 anymore... I loved Quest on Gunz 2 though, but the lack of players and overall disappointment quickly drove me away from the second installment of this game.