Cantatus
Lord Nagafen Raider
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- 79
It's always going to be a balancing act with MMOs. To get the most players, you have to develop many different types of content to cater to each preference, but by doing so, you are decreasing the amount of resources for each part. Either you focus on a couple things and try to do them well or you try to do everything and worry about fleshing everything out after release. Blizzard was fortunate enough to not have to really worry much about resources due to past successes, but even they didn't do the greatest job at catering to every player when they launched (see: PvP).I'm surprised they thought that. Even in EQ, most players were not in high end raiding guilds, nor did they want to be. But EQ had a ton of content for everyone so it didn't matter.
WoW learned that lesson well. They catered to both casuals and hardcore. plus adding viable pvp, and it worked. I am amazed sometimes by how these simple lessons are so misunderstood by the mass of MMO devs. It's like they have willful blinders on.
I think Carbine was smart to make sure they had endgame content in place when they launched, but it shouldn't have been at the expense of solo content. You go the entire game being able to solo - and considering the way many quests are implemented and the amount of exp you get from doing non-vet adventures/dungeons are almost discouraged from grouping - to suddenly hitting the level cap and being expected to only progress through grouping. They made a big deal about being "hardcore", but that's really not a philosophy that comes into play until you are finished leveling, which is just like running people into a brick wall. Enjoying the game up until 49 is sort of meaningless, since the game takes a significant turn afterwards.
They are supposed to be doing some work to smooth out this ramp in difficulty (eg tutorial dungeon and better exp/rewards in pre-50 dungeons), but it's good to see they are going the other direction to close the gap by putting some more focus on giving people at level 50 more options than grouping or grinding daily zones.