So apparently I was cited by Polygon, don't know this website, for propounding the business rationable behind nerfs to Story content, https://www.polygon.com/2017/7/11/15...oyal-menagerie. It got me thinking though that a root business issue underlying these sort of "nerf contents" debate is that MMO devs have not figured out how to monetize hardcore PvErs.
The basic framework is that sub-based with buy-2-play ("B2P," one time payment for X-pacs) goes for quantity over quality, so sub-based has to appeal to the lowest common denominator to get the most amount of people through the door. Retention after someone pays the entry fee, the X-pacs, is not as big a concern because the host already captured the lump-sum payment by getting the player to sub at least once.
In contrast, F2P is all about "quality," appealing to a small group of hardcore players and "whales," over quantity because F2P can exploit individual players for very large sums of money. Consequently, in F2P games, hardcore and whale players are catered to because, playing the odds, they are most likely to be willing to spend money in F2P to "stay on top," and once they cross the threshold of being willing to spend they will spend a lot. This subsidies the vast majority of F2P players who don't spend any money, and part of the exploitative logic is to essentially feed the non-spenders to the whales to give the whales a sense of achievement, and spur the whales to spend more.
But within F2P, F2P games cater to hardcore PvP, not PvE players. Why? Because PvP inherently is relative, pitting players against other players who shift the goalposts on their own. Someone will spend, encouraging others to spend to keep up, and then someone will spend more to try to get an edge, and the cycle continues. It helps that there's an information disconnect when competing against other players, rather than a CPU, since you can get exact info on a CPU generated PvE challenge that is prescripted, but you can't get an exact read on an evershifting human player.
Meanwhile, F2P devs as is have realized long ago it is very difficult to try to monetize hardcore PvErs? Why? Because PvE is inherently a set goalpost; it's a prescripted NPC. And the hardcore players tend to be very good at quickly figuring out how to beat something that's prescripted with set criteria. Consequently, that creates a softcap for spending instead of the no-holds bar world of PvP where the goalposts, and amount needed to compete, keeps moving up over time.
One might ask, well won't the devs just keep making the content harder or just nearly impossible and encourage people to whale to beat it? The problem is then it becomes too obvious that the hardcore PvErs are being exploited. One of the premises of the gamblers paradox is that the gambler does not actually feel he/she is being exploited.
In PvP games, the lack of clear information caused by the human element inherently generates enough uncertainty that people won't know what the true goalposts are, so the whales will be thinking "well if I just spend $200 more, I'll be just about on level with the top player." In contrast, if you just made an arbitarily difficult PvE boss that, lets say, required $10,000 worth of game purchases to beat, that information would spread quickly (because PvE is prescripted, once people find out the marker they know for sure), and then enough people will stop playing because they know for sure they have to spend an arbitarily high sum of money to progress.
Back to sub-based though, the problem of appealing to hardcore PvE is the same as hardcore PvP; there is an inverse correlation between content difficulty and amount of subscribing players, and sub-based isn't able to monetize a single player enough to make it worthwhile to appeal to the people who have higher demands for retention. Stated another way, to convince a hardcore PvE to sub for one more month by ratcheting up difficult will cause the loss of at least 2 other subs/prospective buyers. The devastation caused by Alexander Gordias/Midas Savage is a case-in-chief and SE knows this.
So the question remains, how can hardcore PvErs be monetized?
TL;DR: The good business from hardcore singe player PvE games like Dark Souls is because the hardcore PvE segment is a niche that can be properly catered to with single player since there's no worry about adverse consequences on the rest of the player base; each single player sale is in a vacuum. But there are tradeoffs once you get to MMOs, and MMO devs have not figured out an effective way to monetize hardcore PvE players in contrast to hardcore PvP (F2P model).