Wouldn’t groupable AoC instances solve all problems?

There has to be a happy medium between keeping what made us fall in love with EQ, and QoL improvements.

I feel that personal instances of every zone is to far towards the latter.

THe biggest problem with this is probably development time. They were barely able to keep up with making AOC instances for just the raid zones, and not even always those.

So, LDON instances are just one (weak) example of instanced content. And while many instances are like this later in the game, many others are not. In quite a lot of instances, you get full repops, with random chance of named that you can camp just like any dungeon. Take mech guardian as a premier example. It would be up there in complexity with most any open world dungeon zone, a variety of areas, a variety of named, all of which are on a fairly standard repop timer with PH's etc. It's great to crawl through, or cherry pick named, or just camp out on one floor and clear everything repeatedly. Same thing with most of the GoD and OoW instances, some of the DoN instances, and a fair amount of Underfoot and later instances.

In other cases, the instances are much more interactive than just "clear trash from point A to point B." Take an instance like Safe Passage in SoD, or Murdunk's. Or some of the missions in TBS. Or even some of the DoN missions. All sorts of complexity and interaction that you don't get in LDoN. More and more, the later you get in the game, the more you get this sort of complex task based instance, where the devs are able to do things they never could in open world.

Why not just copy the setup of AoC raids?

Let us have AoCs for zones, with respawns, but cut loot by 50%, or whatever the number is. You can even cut the exp by 20% or something.

Want more rewards? Compete in open world. Open world super camped? Open an AoC and do your thing there.

It will probably never happen, and if it did it would probably be only a few zones because of dev time constraints, but id love this.

Because there are a whole lot of XP zones that don't have raids, so don't have existing AoC instances.

My wording there wasn't perfect, but I feel like you didn't read the rest of my post.

When I said "setup" I ment, that you compete for open world if you want more rewards, but you have a backup plan if open world is always taken.

Basically something like Old Man Mckenzie instances except for your actual character