Scapegoating to please some angry mob? Disgusting. If you proposed this seriously, then you are a disgusting person, I'm sorry but there is no lighter way to put this. Even suggesting that anyone in the team would spend a second considering your proposal is an insult to those people. I would never want to work with anyone who thinks this way, and I must say I consider myself lucky that there are people in the team with more common sense than me. Otherwise maybe there would be such person around.
Blizzard did it, worked like a charm for Diablo 3. I think you've mistaken stopping to work with a person for a while with a putting a bullet in said person's head... but given how emotional you guys are I probably shouldn't have expected more understanding than from a bunch of 14yo girls.
On another note, I'm sorry but for the most part you don't know shit how the game is developed, who proposes what, who implemented what. Makes you angry? Well, even as GM I had very limited knowledge about it. I think it's bad, at least GMs should know more, but it's the reality. The difference is I didn't flap my mouth spewing some nonsense shit about other people, when I didn't know shit. And I don't do it now either, because it does no good and nobody is perfect, neither am I (especially not me). Only players are perfect, right? This goes to Roachor and a couple other people too.
I've said it once, I'll say it again. I don't care. Actually, nobody cares. People associate most of the bad stuff with you and Wipe, because it fits how you and Wipe are perceived by the community. If you're mad about that, you should do something about it... but I don't think throwing tantrums is going to work, sorry.
About player content. All content is appreciated, and there really was some content that required real effort and creativity from players, kudos to people who did that. It also gets some support from GMs if requested, if only it can be done in a fair way. Even SoT did some things, never heard about BBS, but hey - maybe you did. I don't know. But let's make something clear - just pwning other people to boost your ego and get items from box is not any "player content". Neither is making "alliance" because you are unable to pwn a bigger swarm of other players. All it is - it's just playing the friggin' game in the environment that we provided you, nothing more. Null. Don't make yourself a hero, because you play a friggin' game. You are the most effective, good for you. If not you, it will be someone else, as long as there are players around. And I'm not going to kiss anyones feet because they play a free MMO, ever, especially if they talk shit about me. Don't even try to compare it with hundreds (in case of many developers, thousands) of hours of actual *work*. If you don't see a difference between playing and working, even as a hobby - for example writing dialogs is working - in your case I think you should get the difference already.
That's just laughable because in your case working is playing ("get lost, it's free, we do what we want because we like it"... and suddenly you're as serious about this game as a Japanese salary man?) and in the case of many players playing was working because fuck me if farming superstimpacks on BoS was any fun. The thing is that "pwning people" and engaging in faction politics
is content. It's like a quest for other players and it proved to be more engaging than all of the predetermined stuff you've managed to implement since 2010 or even earlier.
I've never seen it from that perspective either, but it's one of the things that I've learned when I started playing EVE Online. It's a similar game when it comes to basic principles: full loot, hardcore gameplay, sandbox with little-to-none dev intervention, but it's flourishing because the devs and the players are
actively supporting community-related ways of playing the game. It's the nessies who get bashed by the devs and the community for their failure to provide other players with some form of interaction and for using up server resources, not players who actually engage in a social network and create situations that force other players to respond with their actions. If you still have to ask yourself which approach is right, check out last week's Wasteland News. Oh wait, it's been out of business for months and somebody actually made a thread about being bombed in the NCR, because that's what counts as big deal around here right now.
The kind of attitude that's apparent in your post destroyed the social network people have been building (against all odds, I might add) for
years. No more serious gangs, no more politics, no more content, no more recruitment, ded gaem. And no, people aren't going to replace us because there's no incentive to start playing like that anymore - it's just a casual Mad Max fantasy that gets boring once you can farm your own items with some degree of efficiency.
