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Notes -
There's been some similar drama with Star Citizen. It's an aethestically and conceptually fascinating game, limited heavily by the combination of a) bizarrely poor development priorities, b) incredible bloat in development goals, and c) a financial model that's become dependent on selling ships to whales, d) with corresponding impact on game balance.
The same people who can't get mission selection working reliably are, unsurprisingly, not great at handling game. So now there's 'mods' that allow an offline mode that gets past the notoriously buggy physics sync problems (just fixed literally two days ago), allows spawning in of resources and characters where they wouldn't normally exist, and has been modded with things like a Star Wars Star Destroyer. And CIG has issued takedown notices, with the corresponding totally predictable Streishand effect. This is particularly sticky because the original Kickstarter promoted private servers and modded play, only for those to be removed from the road map and eventually disavowed.
In practice, the shared persistent universe is enough of the call for this game that it's not going to have too many people jump ship. But there's reason CIG is treating it like a nuclear option: even minor improvements to the small team multiplayer environment or to casual gameplay, or for PvE-only worlds, would be something the actual game as presented just can't do, at least from past practice.
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