It was similar, but very different. The most important difference is that the thrall limit is an in-game mechanic, whereas this is a “change” in rules. That’s why people are treating it so differently, because they tend to view rules as something that has to do with cheating, justice, and similar morally charged concepts, rather than something utilitarian.
I was one of the people who were very vocal in their opposition to the thrall cap when they announced it. For context, back then the thralls weren’t as beefed up as they are now, and people like me relied heavily on them for purges. I usually play either solo or in a small clan, and back then I was the owner and maintainer of most of the public map rooms on the server where I played, so I saw the thrall cap as something that would leave me without proper purge defenses.
During the enormously long time between the announcement of the thrall cap and the moment when they finally activated it, I came to see it as a necessary evil. There’s plenty of evidence that having an excessive amount of followers does hurt the server performance. I still think there were better solutions they could have implemented, theoretically, but they chose this one because it was the cheapest.
That’s why I’m also adamantly opposed to simple building limits. By now, we can all see that a simple follower cap did not, in fact, solve the problem to the degree it was promised to. Sure, it helped, but the problems are still there. And there’s plenty of evidence that it’s not the size of the build alone that screws up the server performance, but also how the pieces are arranged, which placeables are used, etc.
I believe Funcom came to similar conclusions, which is why they decided to go down the route of handling overbuilding through rules, rather than an in-game mechanic. If implementing a solution for properly managing the followers’ impact on the server was too hard, implementing such a solution for the building system would be even harder.
But going back to your original question, yeah, the announcement of a thrall limit caused a shitstorm of legendary proportions. All the usual tropes were there:
- people claiming that this would kill the game, and others claiming that the game was already dead
- PVP players blaming PVE players for this, and PVE players blaming PVP players in return
- proponents of the limit pointing their fingers at the detractors, accusing them of ruining the servers with thousands of followers
- people telling each other to git gud, and calling each other names
- insults and personal attacks at devs coming from everywhere, including calls for firing whoever came up with the idea
- people saying that the devs were wasting time on this instead of fixing “important” things
- complaints about how Funcom never listens to feedback alongside complaints about how Funcom listens to feedback too much
Like I said, the biggest difference was that any moral judgment came from people being too caught up in the discussion, rather than being somehow “given” by the nature of the change itself.
If you’ve got a lot of spare time and a masochistic streak, you can look take a look for yourself: