Oh yea, I am very much interested in this one!
For anybody clueless about the game, I guess the best quick intro is IGN's Crowfall Wiki - http://www.ign.com/wikis/crowfall (In general, I prefer Wikis to official sites, since they don't ask for money while being much more to the point).
Meiam said:
That's the one where they'll generate a new random world every few week/month right? That sounds really cool if they can make it work, but that's a gigantic "if". More likely it'll make a very lifeless world like most rogue lite.
Second problem is that they rely on player to make the world interesting, meaning if player population drop and it'll start a real ugly downward spiral. Hopefully they'll be smart and gate the game release, only let the most ardent fan in at first so they can start building up the world and make it interesting fro everyone else. That also mean you won't have the initial day rush and they'll be able to have less server so higher pop on all of them.
The real rat in the sack is that there ambitious on a small kickstarter budget, and there were a lot of "Don't worry they'll totally make it work" from the fan which always makes me worry. Bottom line is there playing with fire and it'll either blow up in there face (most likely outcome) or it'll work and make something amazing (extremely unlikely, but I wish them the best). I'm kinda burned on mmo atm but I know I'll get in the mood again in a few month years so it could release at the right time.
I kinda agree with your first paragraph, the quality will be lower "on average", but I'm not that pessimistic and there are quite nice gains on the other side of that tradeoff.
Second paragraph is typical problem of PvP MMOs, retention rate, but it doesn't depend that much on the initial rush (you probably have Archeage or something like that in mind), especially in the "hardcore" rulesets.
Also, the very game design is pointed against that problem - basically, you will have any kind of rules from 100% PvE / chat lobby / housing (think: Farmville) to free for all / full loot PvP and players will have much more choice than in typical PvP MMO (that is, more than just stay or quit).
Talking about small Kickstarter budgets, they are already sitting on $6.4M, and with this dynamics it will land anywhere between $8M (quite pessimistic IMO) and $10M+ which actually (having in mind that they don't have to do PvE) brings the game in the lower range of AAA titles in terms of production quality.
If you are interested about budget details, you can find it here - https://backers.crowfall.com/#/news/the-crowfall-budget-question?lang=en
Here's TLDR of that link: no PvE (which would take roughly 70% of the budget!), procedural terrain generation, classes "locked" under archetypes (and sometimes genders) thus no need to design numerous class/race/gender combos, using commercial engine (Unity 5) together with PhysX and Voxel Farm instead of making their own (there is couple more inside the link).
Or, here is that TLDR in Gordon's own words:
"Typically even a small MMO is going to take over $10 million to build (and probably closer to $20 million). If the fully-loaded cost of an employee (once you add in the cost of office space, insurance, taxes, etc.) averages about $100k/year, which means a $10m project will buy you 100 man-years of work!
We're doing a much smaller than normal MMO by choosing to be PvP-focused, doing algorithmic world generation, tight (but effective!) constraints on character customization and heavily reliance on off-the-shelf technologies. Our cost for the core game will be in the $6 million range."
Note that he assessed pre-launch budget quite pessimistically (this was written while they had roughly $4M).