AptYou know what the difference between all these examples you listed is and the issue I'm bringing up? Not only are the scenarios listed far more serious than arguing over a server setting in a videogame, but none of these scenarios require you to even operate at a loss afterwords. They're no-brainer decisions. There are literally only benefits from protecting your house/data/wearing a seat-belt.
You enable the level restriction to keep out a few hackers and suddenly all the people who used to frequent DM with a steam account below level 5 no longer get to play there and the server stays empty for far longer into the evening/night.
I see and understand this, and had a sentence about it in my original response, dude. I'm just going to paste it again here.
ShearsAptNA DM is more dead than now from the level requirement than it ever was because some 12 year old decided to test his premium cheats there.
This I might agree with, but I'd need to see actual data on numbers of cheaters and the overall DM playerbase.
More constructively, I think changing all 6 tftv DM servers without consulting actual data would be a dumb move, but I would support changing the #3 Chicago and #3 Dallas servers to no-level-cap just as an experiment to see if it really would bring more casual players back.