I'm sorry KiyoSenkan, but you are drastically wrong in many of these conclusions. Let me address some of your statements:
We don't care what players want or how reasoned their debate on the subject:
We do care about player sentiment on various matters. We have community teams in each region whose main role is to document, summarize, and present player feedback and sentiment. While yes, players do pose interesting solutions to perceived problems, they often are doing this based off incomplete information/data or feelings alone. While we have access to considerably more data which is not possible to present to the community in an understandable manner, we are able to see contradictions/issues with player suggestions. While we'd love to share our data bases of information to the wider player base it would open the door to further misunderstandings and subjective viewing of data.
We like losing money by spending our time on premiums nobody will buy because they're too weak when forced to fight superior ships most of the time.
As other games, we do not publicly disclose our financial situation, we're not going to purposefully take action which will negatively impact the game. When we design and balance ships (both premium and tech tree) we consider how they play both at Top and Bottom tier. You cannot have a ship being powerful at both ends of the spectrum, and majority of the ships released, when played correctly regardless of being bottom tier can still rank high in teams. Its all about adapting to the situation and adapting an alternative method of play when you are the smaller fish.
We like massive player churn at tier 5 when new people get farmed by T7s
We of course do not like player churn, we want the game-play experience to be enjoyable for all players at all tiers. Yes, there is a shift when moving from T4-T5, but majority of complaints about MM +/-2 MM come from T8, not T6. Furthermore, as mentioned above, we have access to the data sets that show this "fact" is not as factual as you'd think.
We like players quitting rather than giving us money because the MM is hilariously unfair. We like a business model built on frustrating a player into spending money or quitting. Money spent in anger tastes so much better than money spent on a product they're enjoying.
If this was the case, the game would have failed years ago. We have made improvements to the MM over the last 6 months, and we have further intentions to do more to ease the concern further. However -/+ 1 is not in that road map.
The brief outline of details I can remember, there are many many factors in play but here are a few of them:
Positives:
Less development/balancing resources required.
Less of these threads.
Negatives:
Reduced diversity in game play.
Reduces the diversity of skill for players to develop to adapt to game-play scenarios.
Increased MM times (particularly at low server times).
Unknowns:
The impact of balance on already over-preforming Premiums.
How much re-balancing would need to occur of current ship lines/premiums to fit one tier differences.
How would this impact the perceived value of Premium ships given their more restricted gameplay.
Map dispersion concerns.
Impact of stagnation of gameplay.
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