Nexon's decline in traffic

I have to wonder if part of the reason they're doing more classes not more areas is hardware.

New classes take little to no additional overhead because a character is a character is a character...
But every new area is more space the server has to keep track of, more mobs to float in memory whether they're used or not, more props to keep track of.

Removing areas and simplifying things could be an effort to buy themselves growth room without having to worry about increasing minimum hardware requirements.

Strictly technically speaking, if Nexon really was concerned about hardware requirements and/or unnecessary resource usage, there is a ton more they can do without even taking ANYTHING that's "released" out of the game. Heck, I'd venture to say that the GMS client has at least ~500mb of useless data that could be removed without affecting anything in-game. Tons of copy+paste, etc. (that content can obviously be taken off the servers as well).

Not to mention that they should really consider redesigning their .WZ files. They could cut themselves a lot of problems just by condensing the info. For example, there are often times like 10 copies of the same monster with just some stats changed. Rather than having each version of that monster store its own identical animations, they really should just link to a main monster and only change the stats on it.