It's inarguable that the removal of the Landing has just made the SC more of a zerg v zerg. Which is not a good thing considering current class/tier imbalances. Removing the landing is basically removing the ability to win more on strategy rather than brute force, gear, and the class to healer ratio.
It's not the end of the world. But I feel like a bit too much artistic license is being taken here.
Was there ever an official response as to why The Landing was removed?
It's not "inarguable" at all.
The problem was that having battles at the Landing resulted in the entire force taking the most direct path, through boring, open ground, to hit each other, ignoring the rest of the flags. This would inevitably end in a pure camp at the spawn which was very difficult to break, as the only route out was blocked. In most scenarios you couldn't get people to cap even if you tried. This also had the side effect that all of the design of the Factory and rear area was being completely ignored. If you want a linear scenario, Gates of Ekrund is for you.
Moving the battle outside of the Landing takes it more into the other three flags. Your issue is that PUGs don't use strategy, and as such will ignore all the alternate paths in favour of taking the next closest beeline. That they do so does not matter too much, as long as better groups can actually flank and use alternate routes.
The second advantage of removing the Landing flag is that it allowed the spawns and guards to be pushed up, thus keeping the secondary routes (under the bridge to the Landing and out towards the latter two BOs, plus the wooden platforms up to the Factory roof on Order's side) open. This helps a lot with the spawncamping, and is the primary reason that the Landing flag was removed.
Finally, I'm a little offended at "too much artistic license". It seems people have a lot of respect for the devs when they're doing what everyone wants, but when something new is tried to deal with a proven problem, suddenly they're going too far.
Pretty much. This is WoW's problem right now. People complaining and wanting changes without a greater sense of the game as a whole, and the Blizzard giving in to them. Too much bias. I feel like the official developers who created this game and never changed RF had a reason they didn't change it. That's one thing I loved about Reikland, it required more than just a gear check and skill.
Making assumptions about what the developers of this game thought is a waste of time. You can't ask them; neither can I. Therefore, analyse the game for what it is - don't resort to claiming that because the original developers never changed it, it was fine. Had the game been shut down a little earlier, we could be sat here having this discussion about bomb groups and I bet some BW or Sorc would come in making exactly the same argument.
While the outlook I'm about to explain is not shared by everyone on the staff, I view it like this: people can talk about whatever changes they want. That's what a discussion forum is for. We're under no obligation to implement them (regardless of whether we may implement other, similar changes), and if they suck, the community themselves can serve as a means of displaying that through proper analysis and debate.
