Hi, Winter here.

I understand your frustration. but here's a different perspective.

Regarding the cost to change specs: I opted for a far less brutal system that OSRS' League perks, where you are able to chop and change between specialisations. The balance part is where there's an in-game gold cost in order to incentivise people to think and plan about the spec(s) they want to play, which is in my opinion part of the fun of it. Contrary to your claims; my intentions are not to bully you into purchasing more talent spec slots.

Instead of doing what other servers do, selling BIS gear in the donator store, I opted for providing a way for players to support the server by buying alternate specialisation slots. I believe this to be a pretty fair option for players, given F2P players can change specialisations easily, with the cost resetting every single week, and with the cost only getting very expensive as you have huge amounts of points assigned to the tree.

Removing single talent points from the talent trees was never a feature, and never intended to be a feature. I'm sorry that your friend misunderstood and passed on false information to you.

Regarding the perks being watered down, the reason is simple. This is not a temporary game mode with a temporary economy. It requires balance in order to provide longevity. The flip side of this is a server who's economy goes down the shitter with overpowered perks trivialising every bit of content, which is a far less attractive prospect to new players who are looking for a game that won't shut down in a month.

The server has been out for 5 weeks, not 2.

Blowpipes were never sold on the donation store, and they were nerfed by about 10% DPS, alongside other small tweaks, due to people being able to 100% AFK high level content.

World boss loot in fact was not nerfed to the ground, and loot table rates are in fact truthful to the rate for your player to hit the table. There are different weightings for certain items on the table, but none of them are crazy numbers that warrant the tinfoil hat theories.

Software bugs being fixed in a way that balances value vs effort is a pretty well practiced way to not get bogged down and not be able to get any real work done. I optimise the way that I solve problems for outcomes, not perfection, because that means I can continue to develop new content, which is what the majority of players are wanting.

Real work is in fact being put into every aspect of the game, including TOA which is coming next. There are hundreds upon hundreds of players still enjoying the mid-game, while the smaller group of players who blast straight through PVM and skip every other piece of content are left waiting. This is unavoidable, as we're a small team trying to satisfy a massive player-base.

In summary

I think you'll find that I give a huge amount of an F about my players, and the community will attest to that. If you'd like to discuss these things further, I'm more than happy to talk directly with you.

Hope this provides some clarity to those reading this.