So my thoughts on this relate to support of the community and SOE itself. I feel like you guys dug into the game mechanics a bunch.
First off let me say this - the game isn't dead. It was dead for a ton of people before they even gave it a chance. And most of those people were... here on PSU.
It's certainly not as successful as it could or should have been. Which brings me to my first thought.
SOE started to drift away from this website I'd say after the first six months or so. It appeared they got most of the feedback they wanted from the original PS1 vets and moved on to another method of feedback. It's not a mystery that the majority of users of this forum are PlanetSide 1 vets and honestly (my opinion) would probably never be convinced PlanetSide 2 was any good unless it was a prettier reskinned version of PlanetSide 1.
I continued to reach out to the devs and Jen and I were lucky enough to be able to participate in a variety of promotional things for the game. Which brings me to my next point..
SOE and the team wasted entirely too many cycles on MLG and promoting it. I was at the various events where PlanetSide 2 was promoted and it largely felt like somewhat of an afterthought. Sure I think it brought some players to the game.. but no real effort was ever put in to making the game actually work for any sort of competition (despite whether you think it should have had a competitive side or not) it felt like they only went half way. A variety of community driven events were largely hamstrung by the fact they had to find 300 workarounds to broadcast the game and do a competition.
I think that some of the cardinal mistakes that have been made by SOE continue to be made to this day on other games. And that is continuing to take feedback from communities that may not actually be playing their games. The constant reliance on Reddit, Twitter, etc I believe is a mistake and I also believe only relying on a fan website is a mistake. I think some of the failures we have seen are due to people giving feedback who are either negative or just simply not playing.
That's about all I have on my brain right now. I believe with this last round of layoffs the team has truly been gutted of its heart and soul. The game as you see it now is what it will remain until the servers are turned off someday. We will only see performance improvements, optimizations, occasional balance. I doubt we will see new features, or continents.
SOE/DBG suffer from a massive "ooohhhh shiny" complex. Most of the games they are making require
real long term investment but they are treated more like short term projects. This wasn't really a mystery to any of us here.