The Business: Contempt Leads To Collapse In MMOs

If you want to see what being myopically focused on endgame does for an online game, here's your video.

What, you expected another World of Warcraft post? It's not quite that bad yet. Yet. Give it time.

Look at the key complaint here: the game routinely abandons all of the work that went into creating the zones and dungeons in the game as soon as they are no longer the current end-of-game content that it might as well be a seasonal game like playing a Battle Royale.

Couple this with completely non-sensical cash shop monetization--increasingly predatory at that--and you have a recipe for a swiftly-declining user base that turns the entire process into a negative feedback loop focused on squeezing whales for their cash to stay in business.

This has knock-on effects. New content is not written with care for anything but the encounters themselves. There is no attention given to narrative, to verisimilitude, to player experience, or anything else. You show up, beat on bosses until you hit the point of diminishing returns of rewards vs. effort, then dip out until the season resets. That's poison to this genre of game, and it reflects in the decline in Tera's metrics.

Compare that to Final Fantasy XIV, which goes out of its way to ensure that all of its content remains relevant and engaging years after its original release in multiple respects, and the clear demonstration of care--barring technical issues at present, which really are outside of the control of the producers--and respect shown to the players for their time is richly rewarded.

Every single company that goes the route that Tera has is failing. Those that follow 14's example are thriving. Learn from this, and you too will thrive.