Quote Originally Posted by TaranTatsuuchi View Post
And, none of the staff that would have worked on cosmetics would have been working on dungeons, or eureka, or other 'battle content' in any meaningful way besides possible art work.
Which means very little. Shifting budget from X to Y doesn't mean these three developers are now artists. It means you hire what you need, and if you no longer have the budget in the other department, get rid of someone. Same result, and "none of those people are doing it." Which is technically true but also totally meaningless.

The phone app...
I'm inclined to think that would have been outsourced to another company.
Since it interfaces with the game servers, it would need a way to do that. That'd require people at SE. They're not going to hand over the source code to the servers to a contracted company and say "sure, just add whatever service interfaces you need and let us know when it's time to publish it." Most phone apps use HTTP, so the same commands are open to anyone who sniffs the network traffic and wants to duplicate it, thus they'd want to be very careful about what said interface can do and how it accesses the backend.

There is absolutely no way this was done without some internal resource involvement, even if the app itself was contracted out.