Fantastic Pixel Castle’s Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street has swung by Twitter with an offhand remark about Project Ghost’s development that ignited a debate among some MMO players still on the platform, specifically over Chinese vs. western MMO development and the future of the Ghost MMORPG.

Yesterday, Street initially told fans that he’d just returned from a trip to China, where he’d met with colleagues from NetEase. “Their MMO design is about 10 years ahead of the West, while ours feels a bit frozen,” he said, attributing those advances to his belief that the East has “continued to innovate on systems design.”

That apparently tweaked the nose of some folks who missed the memo that NetEase is funding Ghost and has continued to do so even as the company cuts loose other studios. It also provoked many MMORPG players to counter the broad region-based claim, pointing out the serious problems with Eastern MMOs that make them so unpalatable in the West: the encroachment of pay-to-win/gacha, autoplay mechanics, chat censorship, and the backslide of Eastern MMORPGs into small-scale shared experiences that aren’t really MMORPGs and can’t maintain a satisfying endgame. One gamer even asked for an example of a NetEase MMO that backs up the innovation idea (if you can think of one, tell us in the comments), while another pointed out that the pay-to-win stereotype of Chinese games is rather well-earned.

Street returned this morning with an answer that scales his comments back down to specifics.

“Look I’m not saying if you live in the West you should love Chinese MMOs. You probably aren’t their target audience anyway. I’m saying as a designer I really appreciate the depth of their design, especially horizontal progression which the game I worked on, WoW, struggled with. Our game, codenamed Ghost, is a Western MMO targeted at Western players. That’s what I know how to build. It will have a Western business model, art style, and power progression. It is funded by a Chinese publisher who would love to have more Western games.”

That lit up a secondary argument over vertical vs. horizontal progression (horizontal progression for MMO players includes arguing online, of course). But in the Western MMO genre’s defense, it’s true World of Warcraft may indeed have struggled with horizontal progression, but many other Western MMORPGs had it well-handled, several of them before WoW even existed. And even WoW has caught up quite a bit on that front in the last couple of years by wisely copying the work of other Western MMORPGs. Maybe the underlying disconnect here is treating WoW as representative of the entire Western MMORPG genre in the first place?

Either way, the threads are worth a read if you can skip over the handful of toxic replies to get to the good stuff.