"Most are gone" from BT. I did not say most had quit the game,
"70.35% of the families who lost a noble no longer play on BT. And I suspect that most of them are gone from the game completely."(My emphasis.)
...I don't know how else to interpret that.
though I've had anectdotal evidence of people leaving because of they lost characters or (mostly) because everyone else around them died (because, mostly, I never heard of those who died again).
Quite possible. It's also possible that many people who had characters in Mesh/Heen/DoA/Hetland/etc. also quit the game because their entire realm got destroyed. I don't ht ink that means that we need to ensure that all realms survive the invasion.
As for the rest of your numbers, I don't understand them. Please tell me where you got them from and what they represent.
You listed 27 characters. Two were the same one. So that's really 26 families. 18 of those families still play BattleMaster actively. i.e. still have active, unpaused characters.
Of the remaining 8 missing families, 3 of those accounts still exist, but all their characters paused within the past few months. Therefore, I consider these accounts to have "survived the invasion". i.e. the loss of their character to the invasion did not cause them to quit the game.
That leaves only 5 of the 26 accounts you listed as being gone from the game. So, at most, you can claim that 5 of the 26 accounts you listed quit due to losing characters in the invasion. The data does not support that conclusion for the remaining 21 families. The 3 paused-but-still-existing accounts may have just stopped playing due to lack of interest in the game due to a dead BT character, but there is no data to support that conclusion.
I'm not sure what else needs explaining. If something is still not clear, can you quote the specific number you don't understand, so I can try to explain it?
I can imagine ...
I can imagine a lot of things, too. Like their computer died and they couldn't remember their password. Or they all restarted under new family names, so as to get a clean break, or the player just plain died. We can both theorize anything we want. But since neither of us have any data at all to support our conclusions...
It's also impossible to determine why these people did not return to BT. Perhaps they were just waiting for an opportunity to leave. Perhaps they had sworn to themselves "never again".
Sure. You could also say the same thing about any number of players who refuse to play on AT. Or EC. Or the Colonies... etc.
As for the goal of the invasion, why would you want to move population away from BT?
The dev team is aware of the game trends. The shrinking player base meant that the remaining players simply cannot inhabit the entirety of the game lands available. This brings the idea to shrink the available lands to increase the character density of the remaining lands. Hence: The blight. Beluaterra is the only place this can really happen. It is the invasion island. None of the other islands have the background to be able to support an invasion. As much as any player may like or dislike any individual island, we have to stick with the expectations that are the basis for each individual island. BT is the invasion island. AT/EC is not. So BT gets invaded, and AT/EC do not.
Edit ... too many distractions leads to screwed up formatting...
