There's a couple of ones on the horizon
There's a couple of ones on the horizon with a theoretical endless budget such as fresh world and ashes of creation but these mmos would need to be polished to perfection and WOW TBC Classic Gold revolutionary to get folks to remain on them along with my hopes for them are not quite significant.
I used to talk with Hazzikostas regularly in Vanilla. We played on exactly the exact same server. He was one of the most friendly and intelligent players I've ever met. Even back then he and his guild were renowned for its theorycraft they brought to the game. I cannot fathom he is genuinely incompetent. There is just no way. He came into the gambling sector via guild management like Pardo and Kaplan.
This is what I remember of him. He had been one of the posters who persuaded me not to get involved and donate anything to EJ - just be a lurker and utilize other people's mathematics to my benefit. Ion was real big on jumping down people's throats for daring to oppose him, even if he was clearly erroneous. He was a prick then and he's a prick now.
They never developed for the game they played, they went from EQ to WoW. But Ion came from WoW and now develops WoW. WoW's current state might be his attempt to fix all the problems he had with premature WoW for a raider, which caters to his specific experience and preferences, which could just flat out not function in an existing game. It means he's molded it to what he wants, which involved cutting off balls and stitching on new ones to attempt to get it to match.
However, in the instance of both Pardo and Kaplan, they had been designing a fresh new game. They were still able to bring all their encounters out of EQ forward and apply thembut they were not hacking apart an present game. Maybe if they had been hired to work on EverQuest, it might have had similarly disastrous results.
He can be the most intelligent participant but the very incompetent game director. They are not mutually exclusive. I am not saying he definitely is incompetent, but my impression from the interviews he did is that he don't understand what the players want or he is always in a situation where he is at the point of no return and wind up doubling defending and down the game layouts.
When you are a healer doing less overall healing than your tanks in raid you have fucked up, the guy lives in a bubble and has no idea what the sport is like for your typical or even top end player because he doesn't bother. He grey parses in raid, and maybe runs 1-3 mythic plus dungeons per week even early on in cheap Burning Crusade Classic Gold spots while his guild funnels him gear probably.