I think - from what I hear right and left - that most players are actually unhappy about the solution at all because of instead one realm, many realms of them are affected and would just hear from the dev team an honest "ok that didn't work out as we wanted, we should just have done better something else".
Yes, that's always what people want you to say when they think you're wrong.
But what about when
they're wrong—or, at best, very premature in their assessment?
An event like this is
guaranteed to produce those feelings in a large number of people, no matter
how we choose the regions to remove. And the other alternative—simply doing nothing—is also not viable. Sure, it doesn't piss lots of people off and make them leave
now—but it also doesn't make the game engaging and exciting in the future, which will, over time, cause a lot of people to leave nonetheless.
if you are wrong, that is not decided yet,
This is the key here.
but for most, with the limited information given, it sounds like this.
Limited, biased, non-scientific information—and, ultimately, however accurate it is, all of it is simply giving the result we
knew would happen: Some people who are being affected by the ice and the monsters are leaving the game. During the event and a period immediately following it, I would be
shocked to find that account deletions did not outpace account creations.
The point is not, and never was, for the shrinking itself to create more interest and bring in more people. We tried to come up with ways to fluff and manage the shrinking that would help to mitigate the damage, but there's no way we can completely eliminate it.
The point of these actions was never about making things better
now. It was always about making things better
in the future.
The sooner you all realize that, and stop looking at the results in the present as "proof" that our actions were wrong, the sooner you can all get back to
playing the game, and we can get back to
improving it, rather than having to spend vast amounts of time on the forum each day refuting the same tired arguments over and over again.