I was just about to do the same thing. I've been reading this subreddit daily since before EA and it's just been depressing to see how the entire tone of it has changed in the past 2-3 weeks.
While I still altruistically try to keep my mindset in the "chill and give the devs time" camp, there are some serious issues that are chipping away at my ability to be positive...
We lost a few people yes, but the team has been iterating just as quickly as before.
This statement just irritates me. I get that they are continuing to do their best with the resources remaining, but don't lie about it. That's just not possible. Were the employees that were let go gargoyles? or office gnomes? that did absolutely nothing? If you have less resources, you are producing less UNLESS you are slave driving your remaining resources into 18 hour days and exhaustion. You can't build a railroad with half the number of people in the same time without exacerbating your workers. Sorry, the statement just grinds my gears. I get you're trying to keep a positive spin on things, but reading that is just insulting.
And these "Tears of hackers" videos and posts... yeah they also agitate me. It's PR damage mitigation 101. Who knows if half that stuff is even real. And the reality? For every 'hacker' they ban, more crop up in their place, probably including that same person. Until these known ESP/NoClip hacks are stopped, the game and it's community are going to continue this freefall and that makes me sad.
PvP encounters sometimes are fun, sometimes are just rage inducing when you lose because your character went into "stand still become fodder" mode thanks to crashes. And if it's not our side, we feel bad for the opposing side who may not even bother to log back in again.
It's the multiple days of crashes with little to no resolution that is surprising. Again, EA, I get it. You introduce a patch that brings new crashes with it, it'll take time to figure out. But why not a rollback? Or how did this make it past QA in the first place? I reiterate, you can't be doing the same quality work with less resources, it's just the nature of the beast.
The hacks. It wasn't until the beginning of this week that our group saw any players using hacks. We figured a lot of it was either very limited or the team was doing a top notch job containing the issue. Now over half of the front page reddits are about the hacks and cheaters. I get that they are working on anti-cheat around the clock. I'm still remaining hopeful. But when we see the same players on the same servers using hacks for multiple days in a row, a few issues can't help but stick out:
Where are the automated anti-cheat measures? Clearly they aren't in place, aren't working, or don't exist.
How big is the reported players queue that it takes this long to address known cheaters?
Why does reporting/processing/banning cheaters feel like a VERY manual process?
I've played a lot of alphas, betas, etc in my decades of gaming, but these past two weeks is actually most rampant known abuse of hacks I've seen in a long time. Maybe it's because of H1Z1 using reddit instead of only having their own moderated game forums, I don't know.
What I do know is the whole thing is disheartening and it depressed me to think of the hundreds of man hours that are going into fighting the hacks, reading through the reports, confirming the reports, banning the cheaters, then doing it over and over again since they just activate a new key. All this time that could've been game development time instead of chase-the-cheaters time.
The devs can run ESP in their office just as easily as any of us can. Why not fix it internally and let the rest of us continue to give useful data via Whitelisted Servers or Employing trusted volunteer administrators?
tl;dr
The state of the game is getting rough. We're still hanging in there, but everyone has a quitting point. The crashing. The cheats. It's all going on way too long and I don't believe for a second having LESS resources allows the studio to maintain the SAME productivity. That being said, H1Z1 is quickly climbing up the ladder of my 'hours played' Steam games and I have high hopes for it since it's gotten so much RIGHT compared to the survival games in it's genre, but there's still a long road ahead and this certainly isn't helping.