Lets be honest about Sailing
The vast majority of haters are either:
- Maxed players who don't want to lose their max capes.
- Shamanism voters.
To be honest, if you're complaining about it because you're not good enough to max a new skill and regain your max cape, then you didn't really deserve the max cape in the first place. As for Shamanism, Sailing won. Whether by 0.4% or 40%, it doesn't matter. A win is a win. Repolling until you get a desirable result defeats the point of voting. Also, Shamanism was Powercreepism, it would've destroyed the game completely, those blessings or whatever they were that you would be able to attach to existing weapons to make them stronger would've invalidated vast swathes of the game, with the few dozen pieces of BIS gear (with whatever those attachments were to said weapons), being the only things that mattered, and everything else invalidated and turned into nothing more then material to break down. Gear niches would be dead, random new additional affects on weapons that would either be completely useless, or be Leagues -tier game-breaking, it would've been EOC 2.0, when the GWD bosses and other significant content became level 3 goblins overnight. Shamanism never should come into the game and I'm glad it didn't. Even if Sailing flops badly, the rest of the game will be virtually unaffected, since most of the stuff will be self-contained within Sailing itself, resources for new boats etc etc. Its not turning God Wars bosses or something into regular NPC's, for example. Boat raids? Probably will reward BIS upgrades for Sailing/boats, AKA not affecting the main game at all, not turning T-Bow into a never missing machine gun etc etc.
Sailing was: The most interesting, fun-sounding, least disruptive option with the lowest potential of doing widespread damage to the game, unlike Shamanism, and people didn't even want upgrades to Thralls, so lets not talk about Taming.