We Really Need To Talk About The State And Path Of FFXIV

[Stanelis]

That's a bold claim you made. Unfortunately, there's no way to prove or falsify that claim.

Actually there really is, if you had played wow at this time you'd have seen. The sky was literally falling at the end of wod. There are no shortages of interviews where blizzard admitted they screwed up (according to them it was because they trained new developers).

Second, since you mentioned the time aspect, this only makes the RPG claim that much harder to prove. Yes we see the decline, but you can't prove to me if that was a natural over-time thing, or if it was because of WoW focusing on action-based gameplay.

Except the decline in the case of wow is correlated to the beginning of the bad design decisions they started to make. As a long term wow player I can tell you there was a noticeable point in time when the game stopped to work as well as it used to, WoD being the ultimate low point. Sure legion and BFA aren't perfect yet but there actually are improvements.

Warcraft was an RTS game for RTS lovers. While I'm sure people flocked to a Warcraft RPG, I don't think they were as married to the idea of it being an RPG as you claim.

Except, as already said, blizzard never claimed that wow would be a RTS. So, here again, I don't really understand the point you're trying to make. Sure some people would have loved to get warcraft IV, but that's beside the point. Nobody forced the RTS players to come to wow.

If SE wanted to make a race game out of final fantasy one day, they perfectly could. The issue would be if they made a race game while advertising a RPG.