Quote Originally Posted by Quor View Post
That used to be part of the underlying design direction but it feels like something changed recently. Yoshi P. once famously said in the NoClip interview that he wanted to introduce choice into resource management, using an anecdote of 1.0 game design where players would just use the most powerful available spell because MP was essentially an infinite resource.

Of course, looking at the state of Kenki now, it's clear that such a belief no longer seems to hold sway, what with how the removal of Kaiten killed what choice still remained in terms of SAM resource management.

This is a big part of why we can't stop even if SAM is reverted. The direction the game is going is not one that will be healthy in the long term. The jobs need depth to them in order to keep people interested in the core gameplay available. Yes, this stuff isn't the *only* part of the game, but it's a pretty major part of it nonetheless. This race to make everything as simple and accessible as possible is going to come back to hurt SE badly if they keep pursuing it.
To be fair, the developers consider "leveling" to be valid "content" enough to neglect open world entirely, and they further dumb down classes so even that "content" is pointless. Question is, do they even intend to not shut the game down in a year or two at this point? Because all of this, current lack of meaningful gameplay content and job design direction for the past expansion and a half, seems to be the devs way of emphasizing: "Yeah we don't care enough to maintain servers for this, or a healthy population because we are going to make a single-player only mode soon. And we have decided that single-player entails not having any sort of gameplay challenge whatsoever, since that's the audience we are targeting. Anyone else can be thrown under the bus as long as they keep giving us subscription fees for what is basically a hub game masquerading as an MMO."

Obviously, I could be "too emotional" (and consequently wrong to perceive this) at being ill-treated as a customer despite spending more than my fair share on this game, but nothing in the past 2.5 years that I have played tell me that the devs actually care for this game to exist for another "10 years" like Yoshida wants us to believe.