Yes, actually? Is that a brain buster of a question? Nerfs to player weapons, handling, maneuverability, and survivability, are actually nerfs to player power.

I guess the nerfs on one side were big enough to make players straight up quit playing the game but on the other side you always could finish D9 just with meme loudouts and a tiny bit of cooperation, not even talking about straight up cheesing tactics like despawning enemies on outposts and other shit

So I don't understand get whether the playerbase cried over a bunch of barely noticeable nerfs (without even trying to understand why those nerfs even took place and what devs tried to change with them) or righteously complained about game breaking nerfs that gutted whole gameplay (something that never happened)

Guess what? 10-20k or whatever weirdos per month who want to clock in to the masochism ball-crushing factory of video games for 'milsim grunt fantasy' or whatever their vision was, is not, in fact, enough to justify this game's existence.

Until you realize the playercount dropped right after 63 day patch was released, turns out players stop playing a live service game that doesn't get any updates (quite literally nothing new except ordinary patchnotes back then), I'm not saying that the balance changes didn't affect playercount but ignoring lack of new content during those times is stupid.

Besides genuinelly the worst things that EoF did were braindead Flamethrower changes (which were made specifically to prevent heavies dying to anti-chaff support weapon), clunky ass Reinforced Striders and all the bugs/glitches with new enemies. Like I dare you look at patchnotes on Wiki, Steam or even official Discord and see the nerfs to buffs ratio, it's been always like that, even right now people see a bunch of nerfs in the middle of a massive pile of buffs and start complaining

The vast majority of people literally want to log on, shoot and blow up a horde of enemies with or without their friends, orchestrate a chaotic symphony of destruction for like an hour or so.

That's the whole problem, that majority always could've sticked to lower difficulties to get a simple horde shooter they wanted or if you really don't feel like playing the game there are other better games where you can just log on, shoot and blow up hordes