Quote Originally Posted by Sindele View Post
Leaving aside any technical discussion about whether they can put the lid on the box even if they want to:

The hit would be massive, but survivable. Anyone saying it would be insignificant literally just hasn't been paying attention; anyone saying it would be fatal is drawing wrong conclusions from bad data.

Some fairly conservative estimates of how many people are using tools and what percentage would quit quickly sum up to wiping out two entire NA servers worth of endgame population - a number pushing up against 8 digits of annual revenue. This is the kind of number that draws immediate and overwhelming attention from the C-suite, and absolutely the kind of number that ends careers. However, it's also not that big of a number weighed against the totality of the playerbase and revenue generated. Even more generous estimates don't come close to the existentially-dangerous level for the entire game, though they would most certainly come with an increasing amount of heads rolling.

One of the most fundamental problems here is that if you tacitly allow a greater deal of personal expression in how people see their characters, you have a very large problem on your hands if you want to take that back. People get attached to their characters and their perception of those characters, and they are nearly never willing to 'hand it back'. This is one thing that I think the more conservative estimates miss - sure, for gameplay tool users, you probably won't see that high of an attrition rate. But visual modders? You'd lose so, so many of them, and you'll never get them back.

If it needed to be solved, the time to solve it was 4 years ago. It's far, far too late now.
The simplest experiment to run on this is just pay attention on the release of a new expansion or raid patch.

Most of the casual raiders won't even raid until all their mods are up to date, and most of the role players don't even log in for the first few days since they cant play IMVU with all their mods broken by the patch.
It's hilarious seeing people rely so heavily on mods, and them crumble without them. If mods were removed, these people would 100% just dip from the game for good.