You've mentioned before that their current design is not "fun". I argue that FUN is a highly subjective term. It's not black and white like a few of you in this thread try to make it sound.
Just because you only find the end-game with your set of friends fun does not mean that anything other than that is inherently NOT fun. It's just NOT fun to you.
Let them focus on the core of the game now. They can get to the instancing, raiding, and other cool shit AFTER the initial game is out there. Otherwise, we end up with yet another fucking over promised, under delivered pile of shit that the industry is so used to putting out.
Of course "fun" is subjective. No one's arguing it's a math equation. But that doesn't mean all design choices are equally defensible or immune from criticism just because someone somewhere enjoys them.
When people say "this isn't fun," they're usually not claiming divine authority over taste. They're reacting to pacing, friction, feedback loops, downtime, repetition, etc. - things that absolutely can be analyzed. If a system creates long stretches of inactivity, forces busywork that doesn't meaningfully change decision-making, or punishes experimentation with excessive time loss, it's reasonable to question whether that design is pulling its weight. We're not declaring an objective truth, we're evaluating mechanics.
And the "they can add the cool stuff later" argument gets real unsteady, because MMOs live and die on first impressions. Early population density shapes social dynamics. Content cadence shapes retention. If the initial experience is thin, slow, or overly reliant on nostalgia doing the heavy lifting, you don't get a clean slate six months later. You get a smaller, hardened player base and a reputation that calcifies. We've seen this play out repeatedly across the genre. There's also a difference between "don't overpromise" and "ship a skeleton and hope to flesh it out later." Focusing on the core is smart. But if the core loop isn't broadly compelling beyond a very narrow slice of players, layering raids and instancing on top later won't fix that foundation.
Nobody is demanding feature bloat on day one. The pushback is about whether the foundational design - progression speed, downtime philosophy, social dependency, lack of systemic modernization, etc. actually holds up in 2026 without leaning entirely on nostalgia and goodwill. Saying "fun is subjective" doesn't end the conversation. It just moves it to: fun for
who, under what conditions, and for how long? In an MMO, that matters - because you don't just need something to be fun for a handful of true believers. You need it to sustain a living ecosystem.
