Okay, let's strip apart the trolls I'm usually doing over here on the forums. It shouldn't be tedious to understand what is actually happening. From the executives views, the situation is the following :
YNK/PlW did, since around 2 years, a chain of bad moves/decisions. They underestimated the hacking issue Leo and me reported to the GMs in late 2012. Not only they underestimated it, but they proved they were unable to stop it neither understand what was happening. From that point, instead of patching the client itself or the serverside (either with a complete rewrite of the client, either by rewriting the forge system) they chose the less expensive : patching gameguard, and proved again how they were a complete failure in managing that game.
What did the indos do ? They went on the repository of CheatEngine, took the sourcecode of CheatEngine, and modified it so CE would be undetected. Gameguard was just a pure pile of **** in terms of security. That's exactly what Lee and Awall did, and when it comes to a game where you have to throw hundred and hundred of dollars monthly, it's probably the best move. So for around 8 months, you saw two trends : people leaving that game because it was expensive, or people hacking. YellowLightz, Famous, Vindicated, Eclipse, e2n, StarGazers, and some other guilds did hack almost everything that was possible to hack. PlW income dropped suddenly to near zero.
Because due to the stupidity beyond levels of YNK/PlW and their irresponsible faith in GameGuard (or the greed, whatever you call it), almost every player was hacking. The few one that did not left. Then Nico came to uncover what was happening, and then zzerachiel came (a dev from a pserver, yeah) and explained them what was happening in the serverfiles and where to locate the hacked items. There has been a massive banwave, decimating the playerbase.
Playerbase was once decimated with the release of epics, and then was decimated one more time with the hacking issues. More than 4k hacked weapons got removed, and we don't even talk about the armors.
Not only that, but YNK released rohanopoly in such a way that it was possible to exploit it. Rohanopoly and the free coin system was very popular. Sadly, people exploited it. So YNK did a third banwave and closed Rohanopoly, leading a ton of players either to be banned again, either to leave.
After that, YNK decided to release those mfkin +200 chimera armor stones. Then released those +50 armor stones. Released again 50% scrolls. Released walter's medals, released talismans, released absolute patchs, and released upg bossdrops. By january of 2013, people had all left that game, when everyone was hitting more than 50k regulars against characters that had 60 to 80k hp.
What did YNK do ? They made Isen 6 months later, noticing no one was playing anymore. It lasted 1 month - one month and half, due to the stupidity of the CEOs. They made a server that was even more costly than Jin and Ran. One month of it, then people left again.
Aswell, due to the extremely low population, YNK even released a lot of accounts that had been banned one year before due to hacking, in the hope they would come back to play again.
So, as of everyone had left, they saw the pinoys as a way to re-populate the servers. They planned to merge Jin and Ran, and add the philippinos. From their point of view, it'd make the people play again, and would increase their income.
Bad move. Pinoys won't spend on iRohan. $1 = 45 philippine peso (PHP). 1k rps = $10 = 450php. Minimum Philippine salary is 1.200 PHP. Median salary is 28.000 PHP, which is roughly $600. Average salary is about $1000.
For any comparisons : $1 = 0.70 €... And I'm paid monthly 4.5k €
If myself, with that monthly salary, find that game expensive as hell, then Pinoys won't spend even one peso in this game. They simply can't.
Since they though they could take the pinoys as an income source, they merged all the equipments they had on Jin and Ran (supposedly as mistake). Bad news, they had weapons that were even stronger than epics and upgrades. Not only that, but by doing so they outright lied and screwed all the jin players. They all left, and there won't be even more than 10 people from Jin that are going to play. YNK doesn't watch the closed groups from facebook, but everyone is selling their stuff for real money. They are leaving.
Merging Jin and Ran suppose you release new upgrades to par the PH weapons. So, in order to get some incomes (and to force everyone spending), they did a slight (but useless) boost on weapons to quiet everyone. And they released weapons stronger than the actual epics/upgrades to force Ran players to buy them.
Bad news, people are quitting because they feel lied, cheated. And won't spend any cent in the new weapons because they obviously know not only that it's going to be unplayable but also that it's their opportunity to quit for good. Everyone's weapons and gears are useless, they all lost what they spent. They have no reason to stay over here, neither have a reason to spend in upg 2.0.
Conclusion : the executive's point of view is totally wrong, and they failed in almost everything they had to understand. Privates servers are going to have a lot of people, and no one is going to come back to play under that management.
PlW lost 95% of their playerbase this month, and cheap upg 2.0 won't make people come back. Good game, and great greedy milking management.