A Lived in World?

[Avoidy]

88k active subscribers with a game that should have no reason to be alive today.

Setting the standard all MMOs after you continue to follow, with 20 years of no real innovation beyond it.

Even with all this tech, people are still going back to retro mmos because they had something modern mmos dont.

Good design and creative vision.

Today is just about which content model gets your company paid.

Them's the sad facts.

In an era where cash shop mounts bring in more revenue than an actual game, I feel like companies are being rewarded for the worst garbage and learning all the "wrong" lessons. I put wrong in quotations because from a business perspective whatever earns revenue for the least amount of work is great for them, but it's terrible for the players. I'll be surprised if we get an MMO going forward that's anything but a paint by numbers dumpster fire or a mobile game autoplay style thing ported to PC last-minute to get money from mmo-addicted oldies afraid of smartphones (like me, haha).

So yeah I agree with you, it's not looking good going forward. Really not looking good at all. We kinda see it in XIV too, where there are more frequent updates to the cash shop than there are to the actual game. Every month like clockwork there's a new cash shop rollout but for actual gameplay content we have to wait 4 to 4 and a half months. Diehard fans will always see this and be like "it's one team doing cash shop stuff and one team doing the gameplay stuff" but that's beside the point. Why is the team making the cash shop stuff able to churn out something every month while the gameplay dudes can't even toss us a moogle tome event? Hell, we can't even get uncapped tomes lmao. This game gets straight up neglected for like a third of the year until it's time, once a month, to roll out a new mount -- and the only excuse I hear is that the people selling us a mount are part of a different dev team. It's gross watching people defend this sort of thing. It's like these people don't know that you can like the game and admit that they could do a better job of tiding us over between patches, it's okay.