AT THIS POINT in World of Warcraft

[Johners]

Well for starters, this is not World of Warcraft, enough said really and that is all.

It might not be World of Warcraft but there’s still valid takeaways. WoW is roughly twice as old as XIV if you count ARR as the starting point (this’ll start a debate itself but that’s not particularly relevant here). WoW has evolved a lot in terms of game design and even in the people making the game.

Blizzard OGs like Chris Metzen and a vital part in WoW’s success… but they also oversaw the beginning of its decline at the WoD stage, the same stage that XIV is at now. Yoshi-P has been a great service to this game and community but he’s also stubborn in his stances and many of his live letter comments is just him shouting himself in the foot.

Even when Blizzard’s leadership churned, things weren’t always better and it’s taken the fallout of Shadowlands plus subsequent effort with Dragonflight to really get things in track. I don’t think XIV would have the same fate, especially as the exodus location for many WoW players. A Shadowlands moment would kill this game, it would not recover. Unfortunately this game has a massive vocal community that buries criticism and ultimately gatekeeps the game as a result while relies on and fuels Yoshi-P being placed on his untouchable pedestal amongst other things.

There’s many lessons in WoW’s history and lifecycle that Square Enix and the player base should really take a good hard look at (this extends to things like proper QoL changes, plugins etc).

EDIT
I seriously don’t get why Yoshi-P and the dev team gets placed on an untouchable pedestal though. They have and will get things wrong, sometimes repeatedly. Sometimes things need to change despite stubbornness from the devs. Sometimes you just need a new leadership direction entirely. WoW and many other games have survived this and even thrived because of this. Given the growing frustrations with the Endwalker patch cycle, if they repeat this in 7.x then it’s going to be a massacre for player numbers and expansion sales (no big story arc to carry them).