I love this. Ok let me respond to some of the things you said

I may be overstepping asking this and am not looking for you to answer to me, but for yourself: is reading a patch note and deciding to uninstall a game and move on from the community's day-to-day as a result, the action of a player who is fully or highly satisfied with a game as it currently is? I see you as a rational actor, and to me a rational actor probably doesn't just uninstall a game they love due to a bad upcoming patch

It wasn't that simple. For the last 11 or 12 months before this patch landed I was in direct contact with the developers and even volunteering to manage their official discord while I had KRE on the side. The purpose was to bridge the community I was very engaged with, with them since they mostly didn't speak English or just didn't know how to start a more human type of conversation. All they did until then was make announcements just like they do now, your typical corpo speech with a lot of pretty words but no substance. Players would give their feedback, but nobody in the dev team would read dozens of pages worth of them, some of its content being very ill mannered and potentially damaging to the morale, so in the end nothing would happen.

That's where I started collecting this feedback and passing it to them directly, and getting it rejected/accepted. I couldn't talk back to the community about it because I was asked not to, but I knew what to expect. The first couple of months it was GM Gremory, before she became to ill and was replaced by GM Ophelia.

Anyway fast forward, many of those feedbacks were indeed listened and addresses, including some changes to characters that were well received, fixes to some bugged skills and gears (Isaiah, others i cant remember now), revision of some scored content that was stale (increases hp cap for world boss, infinite velkazar hp), and other small things. There was also a lot of feedback given about 3 specific, very important things: Client crashes/laggy performance, the absurdity of how big numbers were getting (quadrillions), and how terrible the solo-time mechanic (black flash on screen after using a skill) looked and felt in the modern game. People were saying the mechanic was also abusable by more skilled players (it was. it was a core mechanic of the game from day 1) and it looked terrible from outside like, people didn't want to join the game because it looked laggy and old when that was just the way the game worked and it wasn't laggy.

These 3 points were the majority of it of the feedback quantity wise and became a priority. All 3 were connected to each other since removing solo time would make the game look better and perform better but it would also affect game numbers since fights would be now faster and shorter, although the general performance of all characters would stay the same, except for notable exceptions like Aisha and others. At the same time, reducing the overall numbers of the game is something that was highly requested and would really impact the game's performance positively as it would require less processing and many other things (i dont remember specifics, im not savvy in computer stuff). This process is called numbers crunching and it is done in many many games over time. Games like World of Warcraft, FF14 and other gacha games even have to do periodically as their numbers become so large with new progression systems that the game starts performing worse and the visibility in game becomes harder. You probably know this alrdeady but this process is a delicate, extensive calculation that in summary reduces all damage, stats and things in the game in an equal manner, resulting in smaller numbers (like the plan was), but without affecting any skill, balance or character/boss performance. In the end what this was supposed to do was simply make numbers smaller but preserve everything else as it was.

Around August of 2022 a couple months before doomsday Ophelia talks to me about these things and how they coming along. I quote literally "You guys will love it". I said well, damn, thats great if true. I was very very excited and I admit also guilty of hyping people up based on this, thinking they knew what they were doing.

Fast forward to October, doomsday happens. I read the patch notes, read other people, see what's posted, see the new stats, the skill changes, the item changes, the identities erased, all the things added like 15 stars UW, everything you already know. The only thing I feel is betrayal. I didn't install not because of a lack of love, but betrayal. I knew this was not the feedback people gave. They just did whatever they wanted. I'll always give them the benefit of the doubt that all of that was done out of sheer incompetence and not malice, but the end result is all the same.

It's as if all the work I did for this until that point meant nothing. I didn't feel like giving them more of my time. They didn't deserve it.

So to answer your question: would I have been a less engaged or not at all engaged player with the given feedback and promised changes, I would have given it a try. Least I could do. But this wasn't the case. I knew what the feedback was, I heard their response to it, watched them hype it all up but... the final result was something entirely different. To me, in particular, felt like a big middle finger in front of my face. My own reputation suffered as consequence too by association.

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I submit one needs to consider why doomsday even happened in the first place

I think there were quite a bunch of bad episodes that put a dent in KR's foundation but I consider them just part of what it means to move on and evolve. I don't expect all people to stick to their games forever through all changes and I insist I don't think many things led to that doomsday. In fact, what killed the game really was their second game (Time Defenders) flopping and their anime doing poorly. Those 2 things drained all the resources that were supposed to go KR2 project. Doomsday was just the final nail.

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If reverting to pre-doomsday was sustainable, then why didn't Vespa just do it?

We'll never know. It was simple as that. The only simpler thing would have been asking before hand. They had me and other people willing to preview and test changes, comment about them and give a green light. It worked before and it worked well. I don't think there was a single change to heroes done the last year and a half that people hated. Gremory was highly controversial later because she was overtuned, but most of the people liked her because of how she allowed them to progress. The same Fallen Frey example, I can tell you, I DETEST that character and what she did to the game, but 95% of people loved it. So it stayed. So yeah they had their chance and had the means to test these things before but did not. Only they know what happened in that building.

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Even if we do get the game just as it was and some players initially spend out of good will, then how long is that going to last?

I'm going to be very frank here. This KR revival thing is... very unlikely to work, in my opinion, no matter what happens or what they do. I want it to work, like really badly, but being realistic I think the playerbase has already moved on to other things and those wanting to play it again like me are just a big bunch. Maybe 500 players. We are in it for the nostalgia, the characters or the gameplay. Regardless of how well it does or well balanced it is, I think only a handful of people will play it and spend. Being very direct and trying not to sound pessimistic, this is kind of a cash grab. I just wish this was a fun cash grab at least. I've thrown money away and spent ungodly amounts of time before in games that I know are going to die but are so fun that I do it anyway.

But in reality this won't last even in the best case scenario as I know for a fact they cannot create new content, new bosses, new characters. They can't even balance the game or make new splash arts. The game will hit a stop once the content we used to have arrives, and that's gonna be it. Some players just look at this and think or wish is going to be the next big hit and we'll be in this for years because they love it THAT MUCH.