You know, I just realized that this is just like the current state of Halo, where the fanbase is heavily divided on Halo 5 and the post-Bungie Halo games in general, with the sole exception of Halo Wars 2, as the 343 Industries Halo games, esepcially Halo 5, was radically different from Bungie’s Halo, both in looks and gameplay. To put a really, really, really REALLY long story short, 343’s Halo games such as Halo 5 has caused such a rift in the Halo community that there was a mod for a cancelled Halo PC game called “Halo Online: Eldewrito.” Eldewrito is basically an updated version of Bungie’s Halo games. Eldewrito received such massive popularity that streamers that aren’t even casual fans of Halo and even members of 343 played it. Eldewrito was adored by long-time fans of Halo for sticking to Bungie-era gameplay. However, Eldewrito used assets from Halo Online, which itself is based on Halo 3, and In Microsoft’s Terms and Conditions, you can’t use any assets from any game they own in your own game, whether if it’s a mod or not. Because of this, Microsoft told 343 to tell the developers of Eldewrito to stop distributing public download links to Eldewrito. However, due to a mixture of poor communication, manipulation of information, and Microsoft puting cease-and-desist orders to streamers and youtubers, which led to some streamers getting 24 hour bans due to how Twitch works, public reception to this wasn’t very well received.
Now, I know that Halo’s situation is radically different from Vainglory’s current situation, but it shows how the action of changing gameplay can heavily alienate an established playerbase, especially longtimers.