I feel like a lot of this negative feedback could’ve been avoided if you just asked the community for their thoughts beforehand. You have to agree with me that you can’t just go out and make decisions on your own when you know those decisions would upset the same people that the server depends on to maintain itself. At that point you’re just wasting time and money coding features that you’re eventually gonna have to scratch off when you realize no one asked for them…
I don’t believe you had bad intentions with these changes. I doubt you and cheater were sitting there like “haha we’re gonna steal some children’s money”. However, you can’t blame the community for thinking this when this is what these uncoordinated changes infer. You said yourself that these decisions were made based off community feedback, and I’m assuming that it’s mostly from posts like this one. However, I’m looking back at that post and the only involvement from you was cheater commenting on cosmetics and finally closing the thread when things went ruckus (keep in mind, without ever mentioning anything the community said). A great way to make everyone happy would be to post something as simple as:
Hey guys! We hear you and we want to do our best to keep survival balanced and fair. Here’s some ideas we had:
- make this cool spooky chest at spawn that lets you buy back your stuff after death (elite and legend get a discount)
- …
- …
What do you think? Do you have any other ideas that would achieve the same goal?
You just can’t go full parent mode on all of your players and say “this is what I decided so that’s how it’s gonna go and you have no saying in that!”. You also can’t say that and not expect a messy, uncivilized discussion which achieves nothing at the end of the day when you weren’t there to organize it yourself.
As a fellow programmer I would expect you to know by now that no changes are ever rolled out without the customer’s approval. You skipped that stage and these are the consequences.