Ironic - in the original non-Morissette sense - that it should come to this the same week that Ghostcrawler left Blizzard.
This is why gamers can't have nice things... When someone from the company reaches out with explanations we crucify them as symbolic representatives of the flaws we perceive in the game (which might not even be real).
The fact that Diablo 3 PC version is still Online DRM only game while spewing stuffs like "The game is designed for online only" where putting offline mode for console version makes me not feeling any sympathy.
It was inevitable that after 10 years of all of DRMs, lies, ignorance and arrogance, the relationship between the gamer and publisher/developer is, in short, destroyed and only doubts and blames left which are pretty deserved and expected result.
That said, one of the reasons recent RSI hiccups was that quite a lot of people put their money on the company due to a sole promise that the Star Citizen will be a 'PC game only'. Reactions to recent interviews and dev post's responses show there is really no more faith left from PC gamers in general toward pretty much any publishers/developers. And regardless of the spins, this is 100% publisher/developer's fault from the start.
I don't say 'gamers can't have nice things' because the gamers really have not gotten any nice things since 2000s aside from Valve.
Not to mention a lot of problems were caused by the fact that we do not have (and will not have ) modding tools for this game. Say Diplomacy is broken (seriously I disagree diplomacy is broken, and I think this is actually the best well-finished feature for Elemental compared to a lot of half-finished features we have), then someone could had fixed it.... except we do not have any necessary tools to do so.
Notice, modding tools were also the promise when Elemental was introduced. It did not happen, Stardock decided to not put effort in it. As obvious, expected result, this game really has limited future and the potential has been killed the moment Brad said there will be no further modding support.
Only companies that understand the power of user created content are Valve, Bethesda, and Mojang. Both Valve and Mojang are monetizing user contents well, making massive profits. But it will take a really long time for other companies' to catch the profit because the trust is completely destroyed long since.
That said, Brad and Stardock indeed tried very hard to revive the franchise. Except, there were a lot of bad decisions made after Elemental bombed, pretty much nailed the coffin other than selling some small DLCs, and that hammering nailing into the coffin happened rather a long time ago.
