Quote Originally Posted by HighlanderClone View Post
despite crafting and gathering being very hard to penetrate
Anecdotally, though, I can say that I know multiple people who found the Ishgardian Restoration a really simplified in-road into crafting - something they wouldn't have tackled otherwise.

And it certainly seems to me like that's an example of them greatly simplifying a system that, on the surface, seemed to bring in a lot of people who may otherwise have never touched the 1-80 crafting and gathering professions (though, granted, I doubt anyone started playing the game for crafting!).

Just to be clear - I think you're bringing up a bunch of good points about how what they think they know could be wrong! But I also think that in an example like crafting and gathering, they can certainly look at how having a simplified path for the player to follow has increased the usage of those systems across the entire playerbase.

The same is probably true of player jumps in something like, say, the introduction of Crystalline Conflict and the levels of overall participation in PvP. "We made this easier to get into, and now 75% of people play at least some form of this mode semi-regularly, as opposed to the 20% before" (he says, pulling those numbers ouf of thin air) probably isn't that hard to see as a win.

I think if we're talking about the overall userbase, there's certainly an argument to be made that it was some combination of COVID, the WoW-pocalypse, and probably 20 other small factors that led to the userbase growing so quickly. But when you get down into the details of participation in specific features, "more players playing this mode/using this feature after simplifying it/adding new x reward stream" can be pretty statistically clear-cut.

And that might be the whole point - they're likely interested in participation, because participation equals retention. If one healer quits due to system simplification but another ten people start raiding for the first time because they "get it" better or even just flat-out prefer a simpler system, the math becomes pretty clear.

That's what I'm assuming is going on behind the scenes, anyway.