Enphetamy it's 2 main reasons imo.
#1, most players have a huge amount of passion for the game. It's because they played it 20-30 years ago, we were all different people back then, younger and bright eyed about the world. Now a few decades later, those same people have had their run at the world and seen how life really is, more jaded yet more wiser, looking back on our younger years with rose colored glasses - many of us have a romanticized memory of Thardferr, as those memories inherit the other good feelings of the time.
#2, we had disastrous open alpha/beta rounds. The players were not knowledgeable/mature enough to understand what that meant. Even to this day some players aren't sure what the development rounds were about, or if we're still in dev rounds. Shoot, there was one guy that filled out an 8-man province at the beginning of the round that we had to take care of - he thought it was ok because "it's a test round" lol... Not only that, but we were also very generous with development feedback, probably too generous - which combined with #1 seemed to give people a sense of desperation to steer development in a way that matches their own perception of how the game worked back in their glory days. Unfortunately, everyone had a different experience and clashing views of what was fun or not, hence a battleground of suggestions and demands for "how the game should be".
I shut down polls and we've largely stopped gathering input from the community about changes. Dev has reached a point where we don't really need much input anymore anyways, so this is good. Less arguments/debates, because we're not tasking the community to come up with ideas anymore. The community can now focus on playing, and we can focus on actual development - instead of hours and hours of debates.
It's probably going to be some time before conversations stop being focused on "how can we change the game" and more "how can we win at the game". I'm already seeing conversations drift more in the right direction.
Many of the features we're focusing dev on nowadays is centered around bringing new players in as well, like translations to broaden international player base, New player advisor system, and some other interesting ideas in the pipeline that will be released soon. Getting new players in will help too, the veterans will have their hands full teaching the new players, give them something to do other than trying to break the game or stir up useless arguments on the forum.
