Yeah, funny to re-read this thread years later. Those were the days.
Playing WoW puts an interesting perspective on it. As some may know, that game is patched regularly, and not just with bug fixes or new content, but with
major gameplay changes. And by major gameplay changes, I don't mean (if WoW were Myth) a dwarf's bottle, when thrown down hill at a certain precise angle and with your camera angle set a certain way
seems to go +/- 1% the range you think you remember it used to go back when you were still a noob, but intentional gameplay changes more like... oh, now your dwarf doesn't throw bottles at all and instead attacks with a broad sword.
Imagine Project Magma trying that one five years ago and you have a typical day on the WoW forums. People, resistant to change as they are, gnash their teeth and threaten mass subscription cancellations. Yet somehow, the WoW community continues to grow by the thousands - every week. How?
Personally, I also find myself really hating a lot of the changes at first, but once I start settling into a new patch, I find I have to admit most of the new stuff is pretty cool. Never changing anything would surely make the vocal "purists" happy - at least till they got bored and moved on along with everyone else who also got bored because the game got stagnant. Change, however, promotes growth.
Project Magma understood this, but instead of making it their mantra, they spent way, way too much of their limited time and resources also trying to keep
everyone happy. This was so impossible that even when Project Magma succeeded, people made up shit to be unhappy about.
If Project Magma somehow had the manpower to make quality patches like 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, etc... every couple of months instead of every couple of years - while also having the resolve to not worry about minor gameplay changes, I'm sure the Myth community would have eventually grown instead of declined. Sure, most of the same old people would still be bitching, but they'd be bitching on these forums instead of the WoW ones, where many of them have gone.