The recent decision to make playing with PC players from the Xbox perspective opt-in or opt-out is something that has made my decision final to uninstall and not play until there is a change. As a PC player that genuinely enjoys the Xbox community and open communications being brought into the PC world with games like SOT, I feel this decision is against what the game is meant to be. I am now put in a situation where in order to get the full community, sandbox, and emergent gameplay effect of the game, I will need to play on an Xbox. Making the game I purchased a waste of money because I do not own an Xbox One.
Adding the opt-in or opt-out option instead of properly balancing the game to where it matters less, is something that I fully disagree with the design and balance team. This will fully alienate your PC playerbase with low population servers, and eventually die on PC.
If Rare is committed to this game and the ideas set forth by Microsoft about crossplay, then this change would not happen.
There is very little issue with PC aim vs controller aim. This idea that using a mouse and keyboard is such a large advantage is entirely based off of image of PC players by Xbox players because there are other balance approaches to solve these problems. I find it a little ironic that the update stream was started by saying you're going to find and ban people who marginalize others, and go right ahead and marginalize a minority of your current playerbase through an opt-in opt-out UI component.
This idea is the main reason I'm completely giving up on the game, and only shows to me that Rare doesn't actually care about the health of the game, but instead only cares about the image of their game. So much so, they're willing to further marginalize and separate a small but significant portion of their players.
It's sad to see this decision, and I hope that the developers read this to understand that this isn't what everyone wants, and those that are vocal about the separation are simply misinformed about crossplay. I've enjoyed the time I've played, and hope to enjoy more if this decision is changed.
Thank you,
Modern Inferno