The peak game population is lately down to ~20 players. Its becomming unplayable.
This is simply untrue. The game regularly passes 20 players between afternoon to night EU Time. I think you're referring to the minimum population.
Make it ~36 player then:
http://steamcharts.com/app/209080. Even MappleStory has more ingame players than this.
During my typical play time, I will see anything between 4 and 60+. I'd say ~30 is the average.
This is well inside "dead game" territory for anyone looking for the first time. New players that pipe up in chat typically express remorse for buying a game that they can't even reliably play.
Indeed. And the sad thing is that GOIO is awesome: it offers a completely new cooperative gamestyle incomparable to any other game. In any case, what can we do to resurrect it? THe only thing I could play for the past days was PVE, which is fun until you realize most matches against AI just feel the same. PVP is what makes the game really great: human behavior is unpredictable, which in long term translates into more fun. Still, PVE is great for new-commers to the game: its less competitive and the difficulty can be adjusted to "train" with your friends for the real thing (which for me remains PVP).
I want to reiterate that
Narayans idea might not be bad, but requires the game to better retain players in the long term to be effective.