Besides fixing bugs I don't see a point in him continually making updates for the game when he obviously wants to move on and start making other stuff. Additionally, with certain people constantly making suggestions for the game, is it actually worth it for him to focus spending months of work on an update for a player base of how many? 20 active? Nice, you found the main problem!
Reasons:
1/ Bad tutorial and basic quests
I think i've mentioned about this a long time ago.
Yeah, there are many problems about this:
+ Long dialogs (I'm not talking about the jokes though), it makes players bored --> Don't bother read the basic guide --> Spam E to skip the guidelines --> Don't know anything about the game --> Quit
5% of new players have quitted even before they finished the "Pit" quest :/
Solution: Make it shorter (and more interesting if you can) but MUST have enough info for newbies such as the basic control
+Quest prizes: It's not good enough to attract players doing quests. Another 5% of them quitted because they gave up doing the quest since the prizes was not good for them to do. They said they would rather spend time on farming instead of doing those quests for 100g.
Solution: Make the prize more...attractive. Like you can give them 100 bricks and 500 gold for completing Draco's quest.
+Lacks some of the important things. (We lost 10% of the players because of this)
/tele (name of the publicpad)
/who
/home
/root
Everything about the megamap
Everything about the IRC
Everything about the shop.
And last but not least: Press F1 for help!
Solution: Add them into the tutorial!
+A system to tell newbies where to go.
Yeah, i only see this in the dialog, but as the #1 reason says, people don't bother reading it. Questions like "Where's the law office of LOL & LOL?" or "Where's the hispter dungeon?" are the proof of this.
Solution: You know how.
+Tutorial can be bypassed
This is more likely an error made by Robby himself. They can listen to the conversations that contents the /tele, then they will try to type it and accidentally bypass the tutorial. I've heard questions like: "How to use a sword?" and "How to talk to NPC?".
Solution: Somehow hide the chat window while they are doing the tutorial.
2/ Lack of events and things to do.
I know most events are also player-made (Like safe hunts, doorspleef, roll of fate and so on...) But at least you should add ONE event that is big and strong enough to keep the player stay (Except the seasonal events, of course)
Things do to? Mostly because of the tutorial didn't tell you what you can do (And show them some examples) to inspire them. I bet you wouldn't make this game if you lack some inspirations, wouldn't you? Ha!
I know that you're working hard on MOI, but placing an extra sign that contents extra info in the tutorial, or hosting a minigame doesn't take long, does it? There're lots thing you can improve without wasting your time
The possibilities are endless.... (Not really)