Has-been here. If the player count is correlated with the acceptance of the changes, why is it that we have never seen an increase during ages where popular changes were made? We changed to hybrid land/nw gains, resulting in a loss of players. Then, in reverting back to pure nw based gains, we lost players again. Perhaps they wanted pure land based? I would venture to wager that the cold, icy hands of death have their own plan in place and that nothing we do on our end will affect it.