Length MSQ from all the expansions - it is getting insane

[R041]

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.

Yeah, I mean XIV could obviously do some things correctly. I think playbase will stay steady for a bit just because of natural online game progression, and not necessarily because XIV is getting better. People are concerned that their reaction time to anything is just way too slow, especially this year when we're getting a lot of 'Live-Service' M/MO games. So imagine all of these other games coming out that actually offer a living, breathing experience and somehow managing to keep it fresh every week, or month.

It kinda feels like XIV is only a few bad decisions away from losing players and losing momentum. They're almost too safe. Not very exciting. It's like putting your stocks in Microsoft. Slow and steady, but not actually fun. So when that dips you know it'll take a very long time to get back up to pace.

I'd rather have a game that pisses me off half the time but fixes them on a monthly basis, than a game that pisses me off and takes 2 years to MAYBE resolve itself. You know? lol

I also kinda find it sad that even while 6.0 was releasing, we were saying "Yeah, but 7.0 will fix all these problems just wait" .. Most people aren't going to wait? Things need to change now. It's like all the changes they're doing over the past few years are just trying to scrape the bottom of the Single Player barrel, like they already gave up on the Live-Service race.

It's also pretty strange how XIV is still making dungeons and zones the way they are - For a business that's all about saving money, they really clutch the design philosophy revolving around throwing it away. Like what's their goal? How does Yoshi advocate spending money on them? "Yeah, so.. We have these zones and we're spending X amount of money on them." .. "Oh, what do players do in them? Uuhh.. Marketing and zone music!"