Data from lucky bancho about participation in field content

[Sindele]

If the zones are dead, can someone please remind them? People keep doing drivebys on the south bunny fate in Pagos every time I try to powerlevel people and it's extremely inconvenient.

I think the only zone you can argue is conclusively dead is like, Zadnor Z1/2. And that's a) just a subset of the zone and b) a result of a flawed design that gives most people very little incentive to go back there for any reason ever.

"I can't do X, because I need to do Y first, to get the gear to be able to survive/enter/clear X" seems like something that's now considered "problematic", and so the game has stretched itself to try to provide what is basically an illusion of a gearing process, and one that it tries to make sure can be quickly and efficiently bypassed each tier.

I mean, it is, because it is, because of people. Activity in previous tiers plummets as soon as new tiers come out. Always has. Always will. Again, in WoW, it did so even when the game had powerful incentives to go back. People get fatigued and don't want to go back forever after wrapping up a tier, so if you don't reset the tier to where previous gear has only a marginal advantage, you're just going to wind up funneling anyone who missed the previous tier into a small and ever-shrinking pool of people trying to play catchup because player activity at every tier of progression is never, ever even close to equal.

It is not a stretch to say that every game that has ever done this has paid a stiff price in player retention by doing this. It makes it difficult to both onboard new players and welcome returning players back to endgame, often at mid-cycle times where you need new blood to juice your numbers the most - precisely why most broad-appeal MMOs have moved away from that paradigm and left it to the handful of MMOs deliberately courting more 'hardcore' experiences.

E: I should note I say this while deliberately playing on an individual progression WoW server in my spare time. I have no ideological opposition to the idea - it's just objectively bad for business these days.