You don't need to sit in their design meetings to see where this is headed. Unless you believe game development is some mystical black box accessible only to the initiated. You can infer intent from decisions. If you leave meat on the floor, you don’t have to "conclude" dogs will show up. They just do.
It's not "jumping to conclusions" when the conclusions are the logical endpoint of the choices being made. It's forecasting based on precedent. If you repeatedly choose the ingredients for a tire fire, don't be shocked when someone notices the smoke before you strike the match. When every major system nods directly to EQ-era assumptions (forced grouping, travel friction, contested bosses, corpse retrieval, no instancing, no fast travel, no robust solo path, etc.) it's not like I have to be communicating with them telepathically to know where their heads are at.
And when people raise concerns, the answers we keep getting aren't solutions. It's responses like, "we have ideas", "trust the vision", "it worked before", and the age old classic "this game isn't for everyone." You can call that "jumping to conclusions" if it makes you feel better, but in game development (and business in general) silence isn't neutrality. If you leave a vacuum, people will fill it with what's observable.
Right now, what’s observable is: A nostalgia-heavy design ethos, a refusal to acknowledge how different the MMO market is in 2025, and zero visible systems that address known, predictable problems like poopsocking, low population fragmentation, or time-gated group bottlenecks. If the devs have something clever up their sleeve, great, show it. But until then, criticism isn't some kind of clairvoyance, it's just reacting to what's actually there.
Pretending concerns are invalid or leaping to some kind of conclusion because they weren't carved into a developer stone tablet is how every doomed niche MMO community talks before the post-mortem.
