I know I probably haven't my say there, since I've never driven in MoE before, and I doubt I'll ever do, but obviously you have to accept people from outside the series to post there since this forum is public.
I find it pretty much significative that MoE is at the moment the only LFS based endurance league clearly in big doubts about its future. Obviously LFS non-swapping drivers leagues seem to be endlessly struggling for interrest and seem to be endlessly deem to have unstable fields. But at the moment endurance leagues are still quite unhurt by this effect since the team side of the things bring by itself enough stability to all participants to go forward.
Basically, in my mind, the main problem of MoE at the moment is that it can't accept the fact that having consequent turn-up rates within the teams or within the drivers is something you can't eliminate. This barely has anything to do about the lack of updates, the devs could well release one new track a month and do a large physic update, this would probably have a very small impact on the field. Look at the 2005-2008 period, which remains an era of frequent updates(though not so often content based). At that time, MoE had a similar turn-up rate, though you can't realistically argue it was because LFS felt like being on an abandonware like it is now. The fact is that MoE's main public is, as far as I know, composed of teenagers and young adults who are in a stage of their life where they get new passions, and often experient changes in their living styles, which means they can't always give a strong and constant involvement to what remains a very demanding league, and therefore decide to just step down at some point. I belive it's one of the reason for this big turn-up rate, but now I might be totally wrong, I don't know.
Therefore MoE has to accept that its legends are unlikely to come back, and its current teams might well just withdraw at some point, should it be in 3 years or 3 months. Obviously there is/will be a need for new teams, but MoE does barely anything for new participants to take over. This is first of all a problem of organisation. Just an example: last year the field got smaller and smaller, to finish to 19 cars at the end of the season. I didn't quite understand why no more reserve teams were called for back up, to fill up the field and not make the whole thing look like a dead competition, but also(and that's even more important) to allow those teams to prepare for the next season in race conditions. This is also a matter of mentality, most teams that could well have the abilities to be decent midfielders in MoE are not interrested, simply because(and I'll be pretty much critisized for saying that) MoE people are seen from the outside as thick elitist aliens who have sheer laptimes on short run as only obsession. It is true or not, I don't know and that's not the problem, but that's what I gathered from speaking with other non-MoE people. That impression of poor mentality is also shown on track, with a large amount of drivers taking the whole thing as a sprint race and creating absurd incidents, and teams acting like if there were in professional sport, reporting every single accident occuring on track or almost. Not to mention the aggressive pre-season arguments we have every year, which under much more complicated apparences, can be well summed-up as binar debates. This hurts pretty much the image of MoE IMO, trust it or not but you see those things well from the outside and some people do care about that.
About the 3 classes system, I do think it is a mistake, as most people. Some people before me explained why it is not probably a bad thing for the league. Honestly though, I thought at first that the GT1 class would be scrapped to let only GT0 and GT2, since GT1 is the class that will suffer the most this season according to most people. Now I'm quite astonished by DWB's argument, that GT0+GT2 would cause too mcuh incidents, considering last season's events. We all know that the ability of lapping traffic(and being lapped) is a keypoint in endurance racing. MoE is supposed to be the pinacle in endurance racing, yet its drivers are told to be unable to deal with a difference of speed between the fastest and the slowest class that shouldn't be much greater than around 12-13 seconds per lap. Yet in Desire of Patience you see GTR and LRF being on track together without much problem, while the league's standards are supposed to be really lower than MoE's. And I won't even mention real life with LMPs getting with GTs, even in sometimes difficult conditions(rain, night). Yes I know I'll be critisized and flamed for that again, but for me it's also a driver problem in my mind, if people didn't act like if there were hotlapping(like what I saw sometimes on the streams last year) and were a bit responsible and sensitive, we wouldn't end up with those kind of issues.
So basically in an ideal world MoE wouldn't have any threat for a long long future. You'd always find enough people to put the interrest it deserves, and put enough efforts to keep it well alive, should it be as drivers, team managers, admins, or streamers. Yet in reality the issues are probably harder to cope with, with the ego quarrels and the fact that everyone have very different visions on MoE's future. Not to mention that most(if not all) admins seem to get tired of endlessly making(good or bad) compromises and doing everything to put people together.
Just the two cents of an external observer who has nothing to do there, feel free to just ignore them aswell.
Anyway, have a good season everyone!
