Glamours: Re-work the entire system.

[GeminiReed]

I mean, it would likely be more than that if they ever added inflation to subscriptions lol. Mmo sub pricing hasn't changed in at least 20 years.

Advances in technology and manufacturing capabilities have made the cost of computing power and network speed and bandwith significantly cheaper. While salaries have increased they've been more than offset by the decreasing operational expenses.

Have you read the classic "The Mythical Man-Month" -- just for starters?

MMM explains the dangers of throwing multiple people on the same task. A sub-system rewrite should be self-contained enough that a small dedicated team can work on it without requiring significant amounts of coordination with the larger organization. "Should be" being the key assumption. Who knows what vile hacks still lurk in the framework? It's those areas that need the most focus to allow them to scale the development staff.

...I don't know how you managed to make an eldritch abomination worse than anything Lovecraft could come up with.

But you have, and now I am frightened.

SQL already gives me nightmares and makes me very happy that we have tools that automate the process.

If you think that's horrifiying then I hope you haven't tripped across the rumors that character data is stored as a flat file in a filesystem instead of something sane like an RDBMS.