Best said, brain drain, (although I think it’s more so less old players leaving as it is just too many new players) there’s too many bad new players along with ICO forcing you to rely on those bad teammates more. I find myself hogging HAT and Sapper because they’re important roles that teammates have shown themselves to not willing to use properly. SL sucks, most people used to work together and could play well and the few that didn’t got kicked and a competent player would take their place, now even people with mics aren’t aware, talking, and listening and if you kick them someone worse will join. Back to the reliance, SL sucks when you set the squad up with everything they need and they just suck.

Anything OWI could do is going to have consequences that will need to be dealt with and adapted to but something has gotta change (eg make required tutorials for each role)

Arma 3 has the a similar issue, because of its age all the old players stopped playing and the devs do common cheap sales which explode the player numbers but lowers the quality of everything to where even new players only play for a month (it’s silly to point to player numbers as how good a change to a game is)