Maybe we should just ban all players that aren't willing to donate 5 euro/dollar ASAP. That will give us that tightly packed community again.
I think that move would make many
veterans leave the mod.
It's been roughly a year now and I can feel how cRPG is becoming much like Native when I stopped playing it. Repetitive, boring, rage-inducing. More importantly, the mindset and the behavior of players changed. Before, the game had that lighthearted feeling. I never realised how important that was until we lost it with the january patch. People weren't hating each other. Most of the time, it was just petty rivalry. Now everybody is forced to win. The mindset evolved into what I can now call crap. What was meant to reduce the grind only did one thing : make it invasive, make it the backbone of the whole mod, governing everything the player does. Instead of three peasants hiding behind a house, now you have roofcamping, FOTM builds, balance lobbyism, delaying, glitching, hacking... Now people do everything they can to win, even playing chars they don't like. Because winning = earning gold and xp. And you need gold because otherwise you can't upkeep your equipment. If there was no
need to win, the game would be much more enjoyable
for everyone. If winning is the only way to have fun, most people will only have fun during half their playtime.
You can't really force people into not grinding if you allow char progress. Giving oneself goals is a natural way of enjoying something. Linking the grind to a behavior will lead to an increase in that behavior. In this case this is winning. At start everybody thought it was good because people would play in teams etc. But we didn't expected how it would completly change the way individuals play. Now I can say that it created many problems for only a slight increase in teamwork.
Things are finally going back to normal for me as I start looping between various games again, instead of playing cRPG nearly exclusively.
PS : I remember like 95% of your list. And I'm forced to note that many, many vets don't play anymore.