Is that a producer or player perspective ? Anyway, I think that the hyperfocus on efficiency is a sickness that does affect everybody today. Player wise it started with DPS parsing software, class restrictions for raid guilds, and min/maxers on raids. Those players do see the game as competitive sport and have destroyed all immersion, roleplay, and most other MMORPG aspects. They should play 3rd person shooters instead but most likely would fail there. Even worse is that this selfish and competitive behaviour (I want to be the best player/guild !) got furthered in all those years by the game producers, by primarily catering raiders. For EQ that has changed in the last few years by implementing more group content, events, and quests instead of raids, which I think is a good change. It maybe got recognized that raiders are a rather small group/type of players and that catering primarily those, had led to an exodus of other player types. Not sure if "Hyperfocus on efficiency at the expense of all else" is the achilles heal of modern MMO players and design, but it is an important aspect. Greediness and costiveness* are closely linked to those, so basically it does break down to the seven deadly sins. * "Let's fire that dev (or pay them less) to make more profit for the investors ! Seven zones and 2-4 missions are enough for an expansion, at the same expansion price than 15 zones and 10 missions."
Been playing RPGs as a player in some form or other since 1996 rly. So as a player. I like your comparison to the sins.
I enjoy improving my lethality, it's a lot of fun. I'd love to see at least one hard group mission in the next expansion that requires me to improve it further. And I bet those who raid and enjoy improving their lethality would love to see at least one hard raid.
This applies to just about any small development studio or any small company. They run as lean as possible in order to gain maximum profit.
Do more with less. Even in the Army, we experienced that back in the Clinton years. Too many times we had to do training runs without even blank ammo, instead running around going "PewPewPew". Not kidding.
Make it a special add-on. Make you pay for it. See how many actually buy it, especially if there is very little (or even nothing) better gear/actual game impact stuff as a reward. My guess is that the numbers would show that it does not make sense economically to cater to these folks. People like better stuff, and they are willing to play harder content for it. But it's the better stuff that drives folks, not the actual play content. But regardless of what you, I or anyone else thinks, they would need to do something like this to see what the pull for "harder content" really is.
Stand still soldier ! Would be nice if wars would be like that on both/all sides. So much more efficient. Move !
