I love DS2 and it may be my favorite Dark Souls. That being said, I beat it several times before Scholar came out, and I acknowledge that Scholar made the game wildly inaccessible to new players.
Some of the changes were definitely for the worse. Iron keep especially has way too many enemies with crazy far aggro distances.
Wiggity wam wam wozzle!
I'm gonna go lay down...
This is me with the lotr wiki. Still haven't managed to make it through all of the books.
I think the logical response is to burn down everything you created and alienate the people that built it up to be successful.
That'll lure in the investors.
In a roundabout way, it kinda does.
If a bunch of losers take their rule holiday as "post whatever I want without consequence" it will make the IP less valuable to potential investors. Killing the value of Reddit may actually be more effective than protesting the changes, it's just more of a "burn everything down on the way out" strategy.
I'm okay with the existence of the corporate run server in your example so long as alternatives remain available and that corporate server can't start requesting removal of "competition."
Some amount of centralization isn't bad, so long as people can still choose to be elsewhere.
The story of Dark Souls concluded. I feel like it would be weird to continue after the series took us to the literal end of time.
I would love to see a sequel to one of their other properties like Bloodborne, Elden Ring, or Sekiro.