I realize I will take a lot of heat for this but go back and do missions like Gribbles. Difficulty can be a bit higher but the basic idea seemed to work. No need for HA scaling if its too much work. Seems to me we wouldn't have had the massive number of jokes and comments about people doing Gribbles over and over unless they were very popular. Sure do the raid copy group content but knock out 4 Gribbles style missions each expansion and see which people seem to prefer playing. Speaking to the devs: Which is more important raid copy challenging group missions or missions that will get done over and over? I sort of think creating content that gets a lot of use would be the best way to spend your time.
I remember playing one on one basketball against my cousin a long time ago in high school. I was 6'5 and he was 5'8 and probably 270. He could not dribble or shoot or move his feet. I would routinely beat him either 11-0 or 11-1 every time we played. It was boring and completely unchallenging. I felt as though I never got any satisfaction out of constantly beating him. Then I went to college. My roommate was a high school all state player. We would play one on one, and it was so hard and tough! He would constantly beat me early on. But it made me work harder, improve some techniques, and try new things. And then one day... I won! It was so exhilarating and exciting. What a rush! I did it! I accomplished something I thought I could not do! But I never gave up, never complained, I just tried harder and learned and did different things. And then we would continue to play one on one in hoops, and yes sometimes he got me. But I also got him too. And it was still a great feeling when I would beat my college roommate because I was overcoming the challenge. I felt so satisfied when. I won.
There is a Gribbles. Zlandicar. There were a couple of them last expansion. Griklor and The Great Divide.
There's a lot to unpack here. I think the request for some easier instanced content to complement standard "raid copy" missions is totally valid. Absor mentioned that he would like to include more quest-like missions. There are clearly a lot of people here who don't enjoy or can't defeat those "raid copy" missions, and having content for them that provides meaningful ways to progress their character is important. That having been said, it seems like you're conflating the frequency with which content is run (you describe Gribbles as "popular") with what "people [...] prefer playing." I ran a ton of Gribbles in and out of era; not once did I enjoy doing them. People ran them because they were trivial and provided the best XP in the game. They had unlimited replayability in era (they didn't have lockouts) and the currency could be used to purchase the best group gear in the game. Prathun put it well here: The same concept applies to content that doesn't scale but offers best-in-era rewards without requiring an appropriate amount of effort relative to other content. Efficiency plays a larger factor in what content people replay in an MMO than enjoyment. People did not interact heavily with most of the content in CotF because the rewards did not justify the effort. That contributed to the wide perception that CotF was small and not much more than an HA generator. The final paragraph of your post seems to imply that they should spend time making this content instead of missions. Having accessible content is important, but so is having challenging content. That's a core part of character progression - why continue to progress if all the content is already trivial to you? There should be content for people that don't want to or can't group up, but people who can should be rewarded for doing so. That's what the "raid copy" missions do. I know Absor said that raiders aren't a consideration for mission difficulty, but group missions that are "raid copies" are the only group content I actually enjoy. I often run them on 3+ servers in a lockout cycle, each time with different groups of people who also enjoy missions. Having some content for people (including group geared people) who enjoy dealing with challenging mechanics that provides commensurate rewards is important in an RPG.
Gribbles gives me some mixed memmories, they where fun at first for quite a while, and allowed me as a returning player to catch up, but in the end I hated them, and I hated them for years. In the beginning, me and my RL friends would actually die in Gribbles, and we would have to be ultra careful, after having been away for many years. As we leveled up and got some gear, and relearned the game, we got the feeling of achievement Cicele talks about. I like the idea of some easy (down)scaling content each expansion, that can offer an inclusive experience for returning players, but it must never be “the best xp in the game”, because it will lock players into a Gribble-grind. I am wondering if they could be made with differentiated XP; so that they are really good XP, until you have Autogrant AA + 2k AA, or. something to that effect. That would give a “controlled” easy linear environment to get back in the game, maybe you could also get a couple of decent augs, so a returning player could start building up gear. Key is that it should also have some mechanics to make sure the player moves on, after for example max 30 runs.
Everquest has a very bad history of designing entirely new systems for an expansion and abandoning it entirely one or 2 expansions later. Heroics are not used anymore and it ended up being a complete waste of resources. They did the same thing with LDONs. COTF had dozens of heroics, TBM had a lot also but not as many, TDS had 3 ? ? in EOK you got 3 ? in ROS none, TBL none, TOV none, COV none. They took a really good idea and system they used resources to create and abandoned it. Why use it now though ? Without the scaling its just the same as group missions.
Some expansions have scaling rewards based on how many people are running certain missions (TBS comes to mind I'm sure there are others). I wonder if that system could be retuned to be on a personal level to encourage not running the same thing more than a handful of times a day. I don't know how that would work with different people grouping though.
Which are boring and over far too soon. Except GD, GD was fun, more running around killing lots. While many enjoyed Gribble. I preferred the bixie theme. I found these a lot more enjoyable than jumping through hoops following emotes. You also got to see the majority of the zone. Chardok mission was fun, as was lab. I really don't enjoy the kill as fast as you can missions and the kill 1 - 5 mob missions. These seem like a waste of dev time when there is so much more that missions can offer.
