You know, I think that new World of Darkness fans and even longtime fans who aren't super familiar with White Wolf's publishing history miss an important aspect of the WoD. Like, if you only got into the game with V5 or W5, it's easy to miss that White Wolf has this bizarre, adversarial relationship with its own fan base So many decisions that people complain about in the WoD come from the fact that White Wolf writers and editors will see a certain section of the player base and go "Oh, they're playing the game like this? That's unacceptable, they're playing the game wrong, they need to play it like this instead." And then they make weird changes to the rules or lore which are designed to mechanically force players away from playing a certain way. Details like the Tremere Antitribu being all killed off or the Stargazers leaving the Garou Nation were justified in-story, but the reason they happened in the first place was at least partially due to staff at White Wolf being annoyed that a lot of min-maxxers used those Clans/Tribes to make overpowered characters. Rather than just nerfing them, the writers got angry and decided to try and remove them from the game out of spite. Like if you're a V5 player who just got into the game in that edition, you might not even understand that the primary reason that kindred of 8th and 9th generation were all said to have been forcibly removed to the setting to go answer the Beckoning was at least partially because certain writers at White Wolf were extremely peeved that most players in previous editions played at 8th or 9th generation since it was very easy to dump most of your Background dots in Generation during character creation, and it made certain writers angry because kindred of those generations were narratively supposed to be rare. Players who put most of their dots in Generation just because it objectively made their character stronger were playing the game "wrong." Thus kindred of those generations had to be removed. Out of spite. There are a lot of changes across all the main game lines that White Wolf has done out of spite like that. V5 gets more hate than it honestly deserves in large part because a lot of the decisions it's easy to perceive as these kind of "spite changes" that White Wolf loves to make.
