In this week's Meca Ranking, we have seen a tectonic shift at the top. Dungeon & Fighter, which had maintained its spot in the Top 10 throughout the year—save for the first week of January—has finally fallen out. Sitting at 12th, a two-place drop from last week, this is the first time in nearly 10 months that the title has failed to crack the top tier. While the Season 10 'Jungcheon' update peaked early this year, the momentum has since stalled due to a lack of follow-up content.

Dungeon & Fighter previously attempted to pivot by prematurely ending the poorly received Season 9 and fast-tracking Season 10. However, the labour dispute at Neople reached a boiling point in July, and the update cadence has been sluggish since. While they managed consistent monthly content drops from January to June, the momentum vanished after July, with only the 'Inae Hwanghonjeon' and 'World Boss: Infection Site' updates appearing in August and November respectively.

Despite the 20th-anniversary event—bolstered by the return of Sword Art Online collaboration avatars—and various balance tweaks, the content drain has simply outpaced the delivery. It seems the game has reached a point where staying in the Top 10 is becoming a slog. While management and labour are entitled to their squabbles, the fact that this has dragged on long enough to alienate the end-user—the players—is a failure on both sides.

With the labour dispute finally cooling down, Neople is set to host the long-delayed offline Dungeon & Fighter 20th Anniversary Festival. Scheduled for November 22nd and 23rd at KINTEX, the event will feature a showcase on the evening of the 22nd, detailing the 'Diregie Raid' and the roadmap for the first half of next year. The question remains: can the game use this to claw back its former glory? They will need something truly substantial to quench the thirst of a disgruntled player base.

Aion 2, which launched on the 19th, climbed 8 spots to 34th. A surge in search engine queries suggests that the hype generated by its G-STAR appearance played a massive role, given the tracking period was November 12th–18th. Landing in the mid-30s before the official service even began proves that NCSoft's pre-launch positioning strategy worked a treat.

Despite the high engagement and the 'launch effect' promising further growth next week, the sentiment surrounding Aion 2 is grim. Since the servers opened at midnight on the 19th, players have been complaining about clunky animations, questionable monetization that contradicts previous promises, and an illegible UI. Even an emergency online broadcast by NCSoft failed to quell the unrest. Whether Aion 2 can weather this storm remains to be seen.

The biggest climber this week is ARC Raiders, jumping 10 spots to 22nd. The game has been on a clear upward trajectory since mid-November. During their Q3 earnings call on the 11th, Nexon revealed that the title surpassed 4 million units sold across PC and console, with concurrent players exceeding 700,000. Fears that it would be buried between the releases of Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 proved to be unfounded.

In the lower ranks, Lost Ark Mobile entered at 40th. A significant spike in search volume and streaming viewership followed its closed beta test from the 13th to the 16th. While the addition of new elements like solo play content drew some eyes, the narrative portions were largely criticised. There is clearly still some polish needed before the final build.