It's so incredibly obvious that they spent a lot of time and effort on mechs and are desperate to not remove them as a result, but they're total dogshit and this does absolutely nothing to address it. When the casual AND competitive community has been more unified and loud about the mechs than the sword or planes and they still won't ditch it it really says something lol. Fuck, I saw more people arguing that them removing siphon and mats on kill was a GOOD thing then I've seen anyone defend mechs (which is virtually no one).
What an absolute goddamn shitshow and disgrace. Even as a filthy casual who is terrible and has more or less shrugged at all of the big past uproars I just outright don't want to play this game anymore right now.
I think they want to leave the door open to making radical changes to the game in the future as well.
Yes basically this. I'm also guessing that there a couple of things happening internally where there is discussion as to how much they actually want to let competitive play affect/limit the game compared to how much of a return it gives. They invested a lot of money in the WC, but was it THE event of the year? My guess is that there's some disappointment there, I'm not sure that there were any significant financial gains from it. They have also reached a point where they may be unable to get new players, so the focus is on relapsing old players that stopped out of frustration or at least started playing less and less.
The answer to me seems simple in that they should just let competitive have it have its own lootpool; doesn't have to be large changes but things such as the Mechs are obvious. However, since the higher ups most likely see it as just a marketing tool they want the commotion that's happening now, even if it's negative it's still free promotion. And someone may see Bugha be taken down by a mech and think 'wow I can now defeat worlds best player'
I've also imagined that there's probably a couple of people there who come home to their saddened kids who couldn't get a win in daddy's/mommy's game that day and 'well daddy/mommy is gonna fix that for you' and they come up with these things :)
If I sound a bit frustrated it's because I probably am. I've kinda dropped out of playing the game as much as I used to, back to once a week for an hour or two, but I still want to see it hit its full potential. And for the competitive players they're just wasting it right now.