Quote Originally Posted by Susanoh View Post
Instanced vs. non-instanced was "dodged" by me because it is completely, 100% irrelevant to the discussion. The way to make instanced content with horizontal progression isn't difficult to imagine, it would be exactly the same as non-instanced content with horizontal progression.
Without content being competitive how do you keep people out of say the 8th or 10th raid without spiking the difficulty to absurd levels? You must understand the importance of competition in limiting people's progression through non-instanced content. When everyone can raid all the time any time how do you stop them blowing through content? Non-instanced content has a limiting factor in that things might spawn only once a week or something like that. What are you suggesting? Super long attunements, limited number of attempts, resist gear, or massive difficulty spikes? I don't know if you haven't played many instanced games beside this one, but generally the end of each tier is as accessible as the last end of each tier, sometimes even easier.

However this constant raising of difficulty actually makes nerfs necessary to a point. You can see it a lot in WoW. If literally all you want is smaller ilvl leaps whatever, but if you think you can just foist horizontal progression into an instanced game without having the content suffer for it I have to disagree. Vanilla WoW was reasonably horizontal and Naxx40 was just not reachable for a lot of people. I don't necessarily have a problem with people not being able to touch content. However I think it's sort of disingenuous for you to go "man horizontal progression SOLVES ALL THE PROBLEMS" it just doesn't you'd have a lot of similar problems and people would be less likely to play the game because you'd have to go to huge lengths to keep them out of content.