>>528071430
yes, but mainly "good for its time", "good for an MMO", etc, because MMORPGs generally cannot stand on their own with the core gameplay alone
they're jack of all trades and not particularly good anything, but people grow attached to the shared world, the community, the story, raiding, whatever
so what happened was:
>for a lot of people the main (or only) attachment was the story, and when its quality dropped, picrel happened, as people were left with the rest of the game
>the 2.0->4.0 era was generally worse as a game, especially in terms of QoL, balance, and technical things, but there was a lot more experimentation and the community felt that the game was constantly improving, rather than getting stale
>SHB's success made the devs complacent, so they stopped experimenting and doubled down on the streamlining, sticking to the same formula since for 6 years and counting
>EW was the expansion cycle that dropped right as the game's popularity peaked, and 6.x was atrocious at keeping players around, the timing couldn't have been worse to deliver the worst post-expansion
it seems they believed they had a much better game in their hands than it actually is, so now the flaws are more apparent, more grating, and turn people away more easily

tl;dr: the game's main pillars are the visual novel side, the battle content, and the community/rp/etc
when 2/3 get stale or feel bad for most players, you're in trouble, especially if the other 1/3 didn't matter to them or was even a downside