Hello folks, as many of you know, Agility is getting removed and turned into an out-of-combat gem substat. I've listened to both PvE and PvP players on the subject, and the consensus for now is that this change was a bad overall move.
Though, a decent chunk of players think it was an oppressive stat and deserved the hammer, and so far, no utter conclusion seems to have been reached.
So, what is the problem? Could the situation be handled better? Here's what I think about it.

TL;DR: To improve development, smaller and gradual changes that sum up to a big rework could be used, so that the community can adapt. In this case, tweaking Agility while in combat would suffice. Another good practice could be using in-game media to reach the player base's opinions and have a more accurate idea of their thoughts.

The Problem with Agility

The main complaint from the PvP side is that agility builds could negate their lack of defense by being near-unhittable, and still have powerful attacks to sling during downtime, making an agility player very hard to beat for anyone without agility.

However, as many people suggested, it was not necessary to remove Agility entirely, since just a nerf while in combat could've sufficed. Taking away the stat not only is a great deal for many players who didn't necessarily use it in combat - rather for things such as mobility - but it also strips variety from the game by deleting a possible playstyle and related counterplays, making the PvP community converge further towards a meta, and making PvP itself less fun.

A natural change given by a small input (an Agility nerf) could've also given the team opportunities to experiment with further small changes to try and overhaul Agility over time into something more healthy for PvP. By deleting it instead, all possibilities for a natural development of the meta are cut off.

However, this Agility change is just a piece of a bigger problem. The tip of the iceberg, if you will.

The Underlying Problem(s)

There are mainly two problems related to the development of Arcane Odyssey, which are quite closely related and can feed into each other.

Problem #1 - Changes are too quick and big

People have to adapt to changes. Big and sudden changes force the community to adapt quickly, which can be overwhelming. In our Agility example, many armor sets will have their agility taken away, and players will have to grind for new armor sets to have something similar to what they liked to play before.
In the similarly recent Vitality overhaul, players will now have to find different ways to be as tanky as their Vitality build used to be.

If these changes could be small and slow, the player base would have time to change and adapt without hastily piecing together something just to be able to compete with other players. This way, there might be also a way to watch the community's playstyle evolve for the better.

Problem #2 - Not the entirety of the community is speaking

For now, Discord is the main channel of communication between developers and players. Don't get me wrong, the fact that devs and players are communicating is still a decent step ahead, but the problem is that only the Discord demographic of the player base speaks with the devs, and this demographic consists mainly of older players who look for the replayability of PvP, and there's a higher concentration of PvPers.

If the entire player base could be reached, this issue would become almost negligible.

Well, since screaming at the problem will not solve anything, let's try to propose something.

Possible Solutions

#1 - Slowly rework stuff

Making smaller changes that sum up to a big one over longer periods is the ideal scenario to let any given system adapt in return. In this case, our big change is reworking Agility, and our system is the player base and its meta.
We could make a small change (nerfing Agility while in combat) and watch how the community reacts. After the dust has settled, make another (for example, have some Strength attacks be more powerful when having high Agility), and again, watch how the system reacts. After a while, the sum of these changes will be bigger. It could look something like this:

- Agility's buffs over dashing power and jumping height are reduced while in combat.

- Agility no longer grants teleportation while in combat.

- Rushdown, Selino, Uppercut, and Blitz now all have high Agility variants, which have a higher deploying speed and higher damage.

With these example changes, Agility would turn from the "run away and don't get hit stat" to a stat that promotes more aggressive fighting and makes it easier for the Agility player to pressure the opponent.

This fits nicely with the current Agility distribution (there are almost no armor sets that give both Agility and Defense, forcing Agility players to give up health in exchange for mobility), and also addresses the PvP complaints since Agility players will be easier to hit and less mobile, as they will almost always be standing within your range.

#2 - Use the game itself to fetch the community's opinions

The second problem has a fairly straightforward solution: reach the community directly within the game. Whether it's an NPC, a mailbox on the player's boat, or a UI implementation, it doesn't matter.
As long as all players who have tried the game enough can give their opinions to the devs, it will be much easier to understand what the community wants.

In short, more frequent contact with the community through small changes and in-game discussions could really do wonders for the state of the game.

And that's it. Let me know what you think, of course.