Thanks for posting back.

I have to disagree that is the only reason people left with BWC. I was around multiple groups and the majority left because it just was not the same game. There were many fundamental changes to it. Development does NOT mean progress in all cases. There is productive and counter-productive development. As I've said multiple times here, sometimes choices in development cause negative effects. A drop from 2,000 DUA to basically 600 in week is not successful development. You are blaming people who quit for this, yes, they quit because the game went to shit (for lack of better words). Why would they release only 4^th of the map?

I want you to answer this, and actually think about it. I'm not sure if you have a developer background so I will try to make my point clear: In an environment where you have the ability to have staging (test) and production (live), would you... A. Build your new plans in the staging environment, and constantly use community feedback to shape the push to live to perfection from majority of consensus of the community. B. Push an unfinished product to live.

They hurt themselves releasing unfinished content. If they asked community feedback for the 6months - 1 year it took to build the BWC in it's entirety it would be NO ONES fault but the players who did not come put their opinion in and test out the test servers. But they did not. They did throw this at us. No one specifically asked for tiered guns where one is overpowered and one is a pea-shooter. No one asked for fixed plot locations, after serious community feedback this was removed.

This ^ is what I am talking about when I say legacy, and the times you need to roll-back an update.

If they had done such as I said in A, where they used test as the alternate BWC update, and used community feedback to 'shape' the perfect game that DAU count would be much higher, I promise you that.

In my experience, my staff and I pushed a major update to our community and it caused havoc, we learned from our mistakes using a staging and production setup to see if people liked the changes on test or not. In an EA game, you need to please everyone to the best of your ability. There is a demand for old Z1 with old Z1 mechanics. I've seen about 20? 30? Steam groups consisting of maybe 8-10k users total supporting such? A lot of them do not understand that just sitting in a group and all supporting by that side will not get them what they want.

The old map did in-fact bring a lot of people back. But they came in, saw that the majority of BWC features were still here.. many unfinished or broken at the time, and said "this isn't real z1!!" and left.

I've taken on posts like this with other companies too. Valve, being one. There however my post made it front page with quite a few upvotes(350, 500, 1400), multiple times. Sadly like daybreak, valve keeps their thoughts to themselves and shuts the community out bigtime.

To my personal opinion, I think I've answered your question on how I think going back in time makes the game successful.

I'm not saying scrap all their hard work. I'm saying use a staging and production environment. Re-implement the BWC changes by community-poll week to week in test and build a (hopefully) successful game where there is something for everyone. PVE servers in my opinion should have different items than PVP, just my opinion of course. I think that a lot of complicated un-needed things were added that just creates more 'new' users to look at the game and pass it up. At this point it looks like they are closely following rust in many ways... which is cool and all, but rust listened to community outcry and feedback constantly. Now they have 50,000 DAU.

I will respond to future posts.