That's not at all what I'm saying there. I'm not making a judgment about people and their enjoyment about the experience. I'm talking about a very obvious thing about how communities like this work. Which is simply the idea that there is a spectrum here. Right. There are people who are actively engaged and there are people who are not (and everyone in-between). You're reading too much into the word "fan" here. I could just as easily had called them community members. There's obviously a distinction here. What I'm getting at is that Bethesda is tone deaf to these people on that end of the spectrum despite their years of dedication to the IP. Any connotation about gatekeeping is not something I brought into this conversation. There are clear aspects about people's behavior that anyone can observe and agree on here.

And if we want to bring in people who played Oblivion and tried Morrowind later I'm one of them. Morrowind is clearly a labor of love in so many ways that their later releases just aren't. I like Oblivion it's a good game, but it's not a great game like Morriwind is. Everything that Oblivion has that makes it good Morrowind had and so much more (assuming we ignore things like how they've aged and all that).

I hear what you are saying and I'm not disagreeing with the idea that Oblivion has been more successful from a raw numbers perspective (this is an indisputable fact from any measurable metric). What I'm getting at is that in this pursuit of numbers Bethesda has lost something along the way and they have never really recaptured it. This always happens when you start to appeal to a wider audience

Obviously Bethesda knows what they are doing as a business they wouldn't still be around otherwise