Quote Originally Posted by AwesomeJr44 View Post
No hyperbole or exaggeration here, if that happened and there was no hope of them every coming back, then probably yes, or at least it would heavily damage the game's playerbase. People really underestimate how many people use third-party things, especially if we are going to assume that 'third-party' tools encompasses external sites like Teamcraft or Discord. If everything was wiped out in an instant, many people wouldn't have a good reason to play the game long-term anymore, and this game can't survive off of the turbo casuals (the ones who play once every 4 months just for MSQ) alone.

And if you wipe Discord... whoo boy... so many things in this game would be dead.
It's quite clear then the game itself has next to no staying power. The reason people stay is not because of what the developers created but because of the community's creations. CBU3 is quite literally coasting on the community's effort, and this dark premonition from the previous Square Enix CEO has never been more relevant:

I realize that some people who “play to have fun” and who currently form the majority of players have voiced their reservations toward these new trends, and understandably so. However, I believe that there will be a certain number of people whose motivation is to “play to contribute,” by which I mean to help make the game more exciting. Traditional gaming has offered no explicit incentive to this latter group of people, who were motivated strictly by such inconsistent personal feelings as goodwill and volunteer spirit. This fact is not unrelated to the limitations of existing UGC (user-generated content). UGC has been brought into being solely because of individuals’ desire for self-expression and not because any explicit incentive existed to reward them for their creative efforts. I see this as one reason that there haven’t been as many major game-changing content that were user generated as one would expect.
Yes, they want players who contribute, because much like Skyrim, they are exploiting the free labor of thousands of volunteers to fix the game for them and implement features that the playerbase has asked for a decade. Much like Skyrim, barely anyone would play the game in 2023 if it weren't for the mods.