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I saw it as just Noaani's opinion on the matter. And even if I personally like the change, I was also quite shocked when Steven announced it because it is in fact a huge part of the world that has a completely different set of rules of existence now. And I definitely see how and why someone would be quite displeased with this change.
But I'd really have to see their plans for open seas content in order to really understand the reasoning behind the change. If they plan to have a ton of mobs in the water that a ship full of PKers can easily grind to remove their corruption and those mobs are in bumfuck nowhere, then, yeah, corruption at sea wouldn't really matter either way.
But if there's only a few bosses and a few fishing spots there (with maybe underwater treasures) - I see no real point in changing it to ffa pvp zone other than the "AA had it this way" one.
At which point we come to Dygz' supposition that this change came directly from Steven due to there being no Lead Designer to argue against said change. And I personally agree with Dygz' point because I remember quite a few moments during dev streams where Steven and Jeff had differing povs on things. And while Steven would often say "nah, this is how it's gonna be", the sheer fact that the povs were different would indicate to me that outside of dev streams there'd be a long discussion about that design point and Jeff might've just not wanted to undermine his boss in front of thousands of people by arguing against that point.
And now that the Lead Designer is gone we have Steven who keeps saying "this is how it's gonna be" and pretty much no one there to say no or to at least argue why it might be better to not change the design direction. Now, I agree with Steven's design for the most part, mainly because he comes from the games that I myself loved (or would've loved in case of early AA), but what I love is obviously far from what most people love so I think it's not the best situation when every design change follows my preferences
But as we all keep saying, we gotta test it all in alpha, otherwise this whole discussion is someone pointless, outside of the sheer fact that we show Intrepid that there's people who're dissatisfied with the change.
