If AE hadn't catered to hoarders/rare hunters, this game would've been doing much better.

Look at quibble, he was originally a moglin for early access to items (They're from the future and were supposed to return). Thanks to rare hunters who flipped on AE, that's no longer the case.

All I ever see now is Rare Upgrade Bonus kits, you know, buy AC or Membership and get cool items that don't help you in game play at all!

Now look at these calculations that I did and see the ratio to rare to non-rare

Rares make up to 40-50% of the games content depending on the class of items we're talking about. Why would I play a game, when I can't even access half of it's content because of a group of people wanted their "Shinies" locked away forever. This is not to mention that non member and AC items, sometimes alone, outnumber the amount of member items, which makes it harder to provide incentive to become a member. Also would like to add that most non rare items require tedious reputation farming or even resource farming that can take some time.

There's barely any content for free players to use, and so much incentive to buy AC's to skip rep farming and get better classes and better looking items, yet almost no incentive to purchase membership outside of a few minor benefits.

I've played the game since 2008, and it really hurts to see it in this state. Sad part is, before they made it a rule on the forums, so many users warned AE that if they continued to cater to rare hunters, the game wasn't going to have a long life. (This was around 2011-2012ish). 6 years later and it seems they've ignored that warning and all those users left or got banned. It's a damn shame too, because I love this game.