I just hope they'll want to take the community with them in their vision, rather than hoping for a new one to magicaly appear when they press the 'release' button.
While some imaginative arguments have recently been made to the contrary, I find difficulty imagining a real-world scenario in which any development team would...
not at least
want every player & fan they could get, long term.
Not every good decision will be popular when you must walk a line between performance and scale while simultaneously walking lines between early and late game playability, replay value and new player accessibility. Popular /= Good. Every practical decision is a
compromise, and sometimes one of the most influential parties to that compromise is - and should be - the development team itself, both because they also have a creative stake and because they are looking at the long-game and the code itself, not merely "how much fun is this to play this very moment,
Today??" Schine has catered to massive amounts of player input. They eventually made it clear (IMO) that a power overhaul was not only needed but
long overdue, but that they had long hesitated to pull the trigger, choosing instead to rough-in a few more new features and do more performance upgrades while mapping the overhaul because they knew public response would be a shitstorm, as it
has been.
Schine tried discussing the rebuild with the public, but nothing is good enough for some individuals, and those individuals simply turned back around and stirred up more discontent. Some humans are not
capable of real compromise and no amount you give in to them will ever be enough.
Ever. They will view any concession on their part as unacceptable and outrageous. That's a crappy reality, but such is humanity.
The real solution, IMO, is Schine keeping their noses to the grindstone, finishing the overhaul - stat - and getting the game back out of drydock as quickly as bloody possible. Not making lots of words that will neither placate the disgruntled, nor fix the game. Because what
will silence the wailing and moaning that no civil discussion or reasoning can quell, is making the game reasonably combat-playable again... so people can get back to gleefully blowing each other up.
