Please don't change Viper

[Kazimere]

You’re being hyperbolic. Yoshi a literally the guy who saved the game from the fire.

[ValStormbreaker]

You’re being hyperbolic. Yoshi a literally the guy who saved the game from the fire.

That's a nice fairy tale from 11 years ago SE loves to push for marketing purposes, but not the reality. The game was still ultra-primitive back in 2013 for a WoW knock-off and wasn't very popular, it just became more playable than it was in 1.x. It wasn't truly successful until the then-more-popular-in-Japan Guild Wars 2 had its JP servers pulled by NCSoft in 2015 due to rising anti-Japanese sentiments in South Korea.

He's also the guy who told the entire player base that Eureka Pagos wasn't poorly designed, it was the players who were doing it wrong (it was, and they weren't), has made loads of promises he hasn't kept, and said he wanted to quit by 6.0 with aspirations to work for Blizzard on the Diablo franchise (before the Blizzard controversies which drove SE to promote him to department lead out of fear he'd leave the company otherwise).

Whatever he may have been to the game over 11 years ago, that was then, and this is now. At this juncture, he has dropped the ball and doesn't seem to have his heart in it anymore, so he should turn it over to someone else.

Don't treat the guy like he's Jesus. He's just a man, he's not perfect, and eventually we all get tired of working on the same thing for over a decade and want a change of pace. If his heart isn't in it anymore, SE forcing him to do it out of Japanese corporate culture pressure isn't good or healthy (nor is Japanese corporate culture in general, given the suicide rate there due to overworking employees). If you care about him, let him take a break and give the reigns to someone else. Sakaguchi seems to love the game a lot more than Yoshi-P at this point, and if he wasn't more interested in playing the game than working on it (or even his own company's projects, according to interviews; he's an XIV addict :P ) I'd love for him to return to the franchise and helm the game in Yoshi-P's stead!