To be fair, games that offer the kind of experience those players want — a polished PvP sandbox with a large population, where players can fight for control of the game world and submit the losers to their wishes — is exceedingly rare. The only large one available in English I'm aware of is EVE, most other such games have a player base measured at most at a couple dozen thousand players (and in a way this goes for Rust, DayZ, Life is Feudal, etc, as each individual server is tiny for a MMO).
Thus, I've seen this phenomenon a few times. A game appears that might, with some rule tweaks, provide those players with what they desire, so they flood the forums and start asking for (or even outright demanding) those tweaks, spreading an apocalyptic scenario that will come to pass if they aren't implemented and the game remains "boring, lacking challenge or engagement" for them. Shroud of the Avatar had its fair share of those players, including many whose last game they enjoyed was pre-Trammel UO (and, more recently, private servers created to those old, PvP-based rules).
It's kinda funny, in a tragic way, because those players often shun small budget games that aim to provide what they want in the long run, if they just get enough of a player base to secure a reasonable development budget. The same way EVE was initially shunned, had a very weak launch, and only managed to stay afloat due to very lean costs and the sheer stubbornness of the devs. In their insistence on getting a game that has a reasonably large budget from the get go, those players are starving games that could grow into exactly the experience they want.
(And, of course, there's the whole question of a game with player "sheep" to prey upon. That specific ship has sailed; there's just too much choice nowadays for any player to settle for an unsatisfying experience, and the number of players that feel satisfied in playing the "sheep" in a game where others can play the "wolf" seems to not be large enough to sustain the players that want to play "wolf".)
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
