Quote Originally Posted by R041 View Post
Nothing will really work with the current setup they have, they had their opportunity in Stormblood but decided it was better to continue the snowball. They even had an example of bad practices by looking at WoW, and continued to just keep copying bad practices. Meanwhile WoW actually evolved past the linear 'Themepark' disadvantages. It's practically more of a Sandbox than most MMOs these days.

It's funny because in ARR-HW, they actually tried to be different, and slowly fell into the trap of conformity and homogenization.

This all tracks with some studies comparing NA vs JP development practices, where JP businesses prefer standardization and long term commitments over moving to match trends and experimenting. Is what it is I guess, just kinda thought Yoshi was gonna be better, but SE pushed them into the same trap.

Blizzard as a business is running with 'Live-Service' these days, and it shows. They're quick to fail and quick to react. The quicker you are to fail and react, the quicker you are to succeed and find what works.
SE is failing to really understand what 'Live-Service' means in today's world, so any failure they have they never react to - They just let it fester and hold everything hostage on a 2 year cycles. They might still succeed, and if it works for them then whatever.

I wonder if a lot of those live service adapting techniques wont apply to 14 due to their content pool of resources being allocated long in advance and not having the team size that blizzard has to be able to adapt to those reactionary approaches. I do agree they definitely are reactionary as devs but then a lot of that is they are lucky their playerbase took that much of a beating till it finally clicked that maybe their direction isnt correct. The thing is from HW-EW they have consistent growth...playerbase has increased expansion to expansion...its easy to say they fell into comfort and their loop....but the players haven't bitten back enough to change it and to be honest EW is the only time some cracks have formed and whether 7.0 reacts to that is unknown at this minute. If it doesn't change and say the playerbase keeps steady or growing then what does that tell them honestly? I know player numbers are lower in this lul but a lot come back for 6.4 onwards for the long term into 7.0 plus the hype of fanfests will entice people to come back etc so il be curious how the next year goes.