Frank wrote on Jan 19
th, 2016 at 12:30pm:
My beef with the Gnome is that they are willing to spend time on it, and of course at least one enhancement tree for the race (and they are getting two, right? Vanilla and svirfneblin?), rather than completing the class passes which remain undone and unscheduled. Or even written, in the case of the Artificer and Druid.
They have to stimulate sales. The player base is stagnate new players only coming in at a trickle while the old players leave at a trickle. So new races, classes, are essential.
I think the problem they have really run into is that the passes were supposed to be done by this time last year, but with the swashbuckler's introduction there was a big jump in players and buying, so every pass after that became a 'event' much larger and had much more power creep in a effort to catch the spike they unexpectedly got with Swash. As opposed to just fixing the heavily gimp classes to make them playable which had been the initial mission statement for passes. Try to remember how absolutely broken and useless Bards and Pallys were just a couple years ago.
So as it dragged on, it hit classes that feed the players but stopped driving purchases, instead making existing end-game toons really tremendous, and so the momentum was lost. So the compromised and now are pushing a both new classes, races, along with class passes to feed the existing players hunger for power.