so, just to move the conversation somewhere i think would be more interesting: i haven't heard too many creative suggestions for how to avoid this worst case scenario (the one in the OP).

I was just thinking that a lot of the complaints about how long it takes for new players to catch up to friends might be addressed if it were at all possible to quest with a party I remember when I got one of my friends into the game, I still ended up following him around helping out but we had to constantly drop and re-join party and it was overall a huge headache to try and cover the story together.

At least then you can run around fetching crates with your buddies (they should still remove some of the crate-fetching while they're taking a look at these quest lines, however)


any other creative suggestions? I think releasing 4.0 as a standalone expansion could also have some interesting potential.