Quote Originally Posted by Jaywalker View Post
I do think it would be unfair to say continued commitment to FFXIV after 1.0 was only motivated by passion though. I suspect a big part of it was they had an idea of how to fix things and they had already committed a lot of resources.
From what I've been lead to believe through my time reading these forums is that the money XIV is generating gets leeched off for other projects, which is why they're constantly low on resources. That's why I said this seems to be almost wholly a passion project, because why would you continue to try and deliver high quality content when you're not getting the funding and resources your content is generating? I get that the Japanese have pride in their work and all, but everyone has a limit on what they're willing to do when expectations over takes compensation.

Quote Originally Posted by Jaywalker View Post
If players are using language and/or modding to the point that it goes into hard R or X territory, I think SE absolutely has the right to enforce that. But I think to completely forget and ignore consumer demand is a huge mistake and can seriously lead to the death of a franchise. SE is pretty damn good to its fans, and I think their success reflects that. I don't think they should stop that.
I'm not saying they should ignore consumer demand, just that they should be allowed some wiggle room to be able to say "no" when a demand is either unreasonable/not possible or doesn't fit with what they have in mind going forward and that we as fans need to understand that they have limitations to what they can do from a technical standpoint and from a story/world building stand point. They've made so many concession about adding things that fans think if they make enough noise the devs will cave and that's not a good dynamic to have.

As for modding: that's a completely different area and SE should with all certainty put their foot down on that because the modders are breaking the ToS even if the mods they're adding is something minor.\

Quote Originally Posted by Jaywalker View Post
Additionally, they can absolutely leave off the West if they wanted or had to. It would be a shame, but they 100% would survive. Their domestic success is absolutely insane. They literally do not need us. On top of this, because of Western media being in the toilet more and more people have been turning to Asian media instead across a number of entertainment mediums.
The reason I said that is because if you pay attention to some of the news around anime you can see some minor signs of western values affecting the genre. One example is the creator of Sword Art Online Reki Kawahara. He did an interview where he talks about how he needs to keep "political correctness" in mind in the future. Here's a video talking about the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu2TGF60yGM&t=412s. It may be a minor thing, but that's how it always starts, you ignore it because it seems insignificant until you turn around and it's grown to consume everything, just like it has in the West.