Quote Originally Posted by GeminiReed View Post
Let's call it metrics myopia if you will. It's what happens when you treat the symptom instead of diagnosing the root cause. They've identified a certain point where their metrics told them a significant amount of subscribers gave up. The question is why did they give up? Did they give up because ARR badly needed a QoL pass or is there a deeper complaint (I have to spend how much time before I can play with my friends?)

Of course I think they missed the mark. Or in my more charitable moods think perhaps they were being conservative. Either way they have a lot more work to do to make it palatable to those that consider story grinds a chore. They can shrug and say we don't need those subs but somebody thought chasing them was important enough to divert developer resources. I'm not convinced they have that freedom.
You say all that, but it took them how long to touch one part of the story? Again a single part that has been complained about since 3.0 dropped, while I personally had no issues with the post ARR stuff, I can see why some would, it was abnormally long compared to how they've done things since.

I'm just not seeing this link between dealing with a single trouble spot equating to them going through the whole MSQ to prune or making it optional, they delt with the sticking out nail so to speak, beyond a near universal trouble area a lot of these complaints are subjective, different people will find different things filler vs not needed vs can be cut, as Theodric stated, he'd be happy if they cut out bonding time with the characters he's not fond of, others would like that to stay and even less bonding time with the characters he likes, some would be happy with the story moving from beat to beat with no downtime, no "filler" others would hate it, they can't please everyone and as the game is doing fine there's little reason to make radical changes.

At the end of the day, the skips cover the ground if someone really doesn't want to play through the MSQ, could they offer it for free? Sure but there's no guarantee all the people who skip would just magically stay after either.

Funny thing is, WoW is doing the opposite now, you HAVE to beat Shadowlands campaign to unlock endgame, so they're now pulling a 14 while people are asking 14 to pull a WoW.