Not that much. Yes, AoE2 usually adds new factions, that won’t happen in StarCraft II. But introducing new units or reworking existing one is possible.
Adding singleplayer mission is pretty mich the same.
Also the Co-op mode of SC2 is quite popular and there is room to add a “new factions” there.
The issue is not not players of devs, but the management that probably doesn’t think it’s profitable enough anymore. Yet, Microsoft manages to keep AoE2 going with an even smaller playerbase than SC2.
So MS taking over an abandon francise I care about sounds pretty sweet to me.
There is currently a handful of devs doing the occational balance patch for SC2 otherwise the game is complelty dead from the developer side. On the MS side, AoE2 and other even older games are doing so much better.
I think it’s a qoute from some sitcome, I don’t remember where I heard it. But it’s “Not watching the ads is like stealing TV!”. And it’s about just changing the channel during an ad break. It’s clearly a joke, too. But maybe some people actually believe that.
There will always be adblock in some form, it can’t be removed.
But even if it somehow happened, I don’t see how that would affect my pirating. Sure, some torrent sites might be a bit harder to navigate, but that’s just an inconvenience.