Right. Maybe I just saw the post mid convo and misinterpretted what you said.
Businesses generally seek to generate the most revenue with the lowest cost, so if there was a way to extract a maximum amount of money from subscriptions without investing a single cent in development, a company would be stupid not to do that.
I can’t say what the logic is behind the changes - maybe they want to boost subscriptions, or maybe subscriptions have been declining due to competition stepping up its game, who knows - but “we have to change things because otherwise our operational costs would be too low” is not a solid business strategy.
(That doesn’t preclude the scenario that certain actors within a company try to create busywork with little value in order to justify their position. But they would at least argue that it would serve a purpose and not just say “let’s burn money because we can”.)
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What I meant is that the average customer wouldn’t be willing to pay a subscription if the service didn’t evolve and expand, because they wouldn’t see enough value in it. Basically the only thing they’d be buying is some server usage but this doesn’t justify the subscription price in their eyes, not from the business point of view. The business acts and expands not because they want to burn money or because they feel nice, but because otherwise users just stop paying and leave. Nobody would be playing WoW or paying for it if it never changed. The same probably applies to wanikani.
They would if there was no competitor. That’s what happens in entrenched monopolies.
But yes, in this case, there are competitors, so the drive to innovate probably stems from wanting to be better than the competition. That only works if the changes you implement end up actually being better than the competition, though.
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And look at how many subs it has now compared to it’s peak.
Why is that? Oh because they made massive changes that people didn’t like.
People didn’t like it that much that Blizz rolled out a classic server because that’s what people actually preferred.
There’s such thing as bad changes to products, not every evolution is gonna be good.
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It’s a very old game, it’s normal that the user base shrinks. People move on and play different things. Combining the classic and normal servers you don’t get a mere portion of the user base they had when the game was hot. Anyway I wasn’t using the changes to the game as exame, but rather the fact that that sort of game can only have subscriptions because they keep adding content. If they were stuck with the quests, characters etc of the first day it was released people would have moved on after a month or two.
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And yet people ARE going back to the old, non-evolving world and ARE paying a subscription for it.
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I think entertainment that thrives on new content, and a learning method for a language that evolves very slowly over multiple decades are way too different to be evaluated by the same metrics, even if they are both software that use computers and the internet
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Well, the situation is vastly different. We’re comparing
- a MMO with a periodic subscription model which like any MMO relies on new content being constantly added to keep people playing
VS - a learning platform with a known endpoint, which on top of that has a lifetime subscription option
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If Japanese is so great why is there no Japanese 2? 
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二本語
(post must be 10 characters)
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The language evolves very slowly, but wanikani covers a tiny portion of it so it makes sense it keeps expanding until it covers most of it, or at least what is reasonable to learn with SRS (essentially vocabulary, kanji and perhaps grammar like bunpro does).
Just like the universe, WK will keep on expanding until its inevitable heat death due to too much flaming on the forums.
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Just went throw the last batch of kana words. Still fairly easy words, but one has to start from somewhere. I hope @moderators will release the schedule for the next words soon, and that they will be a bit more challenging so more advanced users can also benefit from it. Ideally rather than slowly working their way up in difficulty they should be a mix of rarer words that go in high levels and intermediate or basic words that
go in the middle or first levels.
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There was a list somewhere with all the planned kana vocab so far. But I don’t find it at the moment.
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It’s the first post of this thread, but the last batch listed is the batch they released today. It doesn’t say what (if anything) they are realising next week or the following weeks.
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If we’re lucky, the dev team will take this opportunity to stop, rethink their life choices, and put a halt to this experiment-gone-awry before it does any more damage.
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I wouldn’t go as far as “rethinking life choices” and would settle with just improving communication with users 
.
And making kana vocabulary opt in/out of course.
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Why the heck would I ever want to go out of my way to learn this…
Please… please make these Kana only vocab opt in/out, I didn’t pay for a lifetime subscription on this site to learn kana only vocabs, especially very simplistic vocabs like hello…
I’m mainly on Wanikani for the kanji only, please don’t make me feel like I got cheated…
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