Cant really say that anymore.
In the beginning they had a whole different attitude than now.
At the start of Alpha they said they wanted the best possible experience for low ping players over high ping players, ping normalization made sure that was wrong.
At the start of Alpha they turned speed up after the first days of testing, now we are far below the start point.
Weapon damage and weapon swing speed is lower now than at the start.
Combat in general is easier now than at the start.
At the start their whole attitude was toward skill, now its not.
It took months for things to change in the wrong direction, but we all saw it was due to certain players whining and complaining. A year later we are closer to MO than MO2 gameplay wise. Everything has kinda warped back to the result MO became in the same way MO developed the way that turned out.
Sadly I have been here for both development cycles and its scary how alike they are while the development team try their best to refuse it is so. Both times due to player influence.
Funny how history repeats itself...
but to be fair, combat back then at the start of the alpha was kidna atrocious, faster swings & blocks because of ping.
Hits going through your blocks because of ping.
Stuff like block abuse, basicly jsut holding charge and figuring out the right window where you enemy cant do anything and will get hit for atleast blocked dmg.
There was no turn cap and ppl twitch ballerina spinned... worse then now
Animations were way harder to tell due to some weapon animations looking way to similiar.
Over the time they did alot to fix this stuff.
But then the crunch time started and release time and it felt like the work on combat stopped, even though it was missing major stuff they announced to make the slower combat more skillfull again.
Lets hope SV gets back to it in time