The Graphics update was unnecessary

[Malthir]

Game developers are specialized. The graphics programmers who worked on improving the lighting would not have otherwise worked on gameplay features, because that's the job of gameplay programmers.
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The work required to create a new lighting and shading solution inside the engine would 100% be the exact same devs that would be working on a movement system. The role is usually called Engine Developer or Engine Programmer but realistically in tech every company changes the titles slightly. But again it's not just about those specific Devs.
Ultimately though my point is not just about the sucky movement in the game.

For an MMO in order of importance:
Setting and Art Style
Core Gameplay Loop
Movement and combat
UI design
Story
Community
Graphics quality

I was initially using movement as an example, but if I was going to tier list the high priority issues in the game, the more important barrier for new players is the new player experience being awful, if you were going to play this game and your particular class fantasy is say a Samurai, only to be told O you will have to go through 3 expacs, about 100 hours of play time, as a class you don't want to play before you can play the class you want to play. You would probably just bail on playing. From their you need to look at the server tick rate being crap, and the movement system. Then the overall reduction in mechanics the games gone through in the past couple expacs, what I mean by this is you used to play with your mechanics alongside your standard rotation, now they are merging more and more the mech into your rotation to fit into the 2m burst window which is favoured by people who want to do world firsts, that's the largest gameplay issue they have. At the bottom of that list is HD and graphic overhaul.

Think about it this way, if you ordered a burger and it looked great on the plate but when you it bit into it, the cheese hadn't fully melted in places and their were bits of gristle and bone in the meat, you wouldn't care how good the burger looks.
Where as if the burger looked ok not terrible but not great, but when you bit into it, it tasted great you wouldn't give a crap what it looks like on the plate.

It's not that graphics don't matter but the game has some serious gaping holes in it especially when it comes to being able to add new features and gain new players that updating the graphics wont solve.

Adding new classes that feed into the other jobs and letting all jobs unlock from level 30, with new low level story quests made for said jobs, fixing the terrible tick rate and making it so movement is collision based would allow for alot of future development with new features