As we approach a year since v2.0 ARR launched, I really think it would be a good idea for SE to release a new official survey to gather feedback from players on what we like/dislike and what we want to see improved/added. Since we don't have one of those yet, I thought it would be interesting to at least poll the forum on the topic of instanced dungeons vs open-world challenges.

Right now we can expect a few light-party dungeons to be added in every major patch. I was wondering if anyone else thinks it would be a good idea to divert some of the development time that's being put into locations used only for 4-man instances and instead create more open-world zones, more often, where we can do quests, fates, leves, hunts, etc. and stop to admire the beauty of the world.

I am personally very fatigued by 4-man dungeons at this point. I feel like it's very transient content, it gets used up quickly and we then migrate to the next dungeons to be added which temporarily offer viable rewards, spam those until they get old and we are done with them too. If the next 3 dungeons to be added offer more tomes than any previous dungeons, people will pick the shortest of the new three ones and play it a huge amount of times, if only because there's no real alternative for farming tomes, not necessarily because they enjoy doing it.

I would love to see a focus shift where open-world zones are added regularly in major patches instead of all being saved for expansions which we have no timeframe for. I feel that they are more interesting for a longer period of time, they offer flexible challenges for groups of varying sizes scaling up to very large-scale fates like odin and behemoth which I would like to see more of, and they allow people to move at their own pace so that social activity can still take place, whereas instanced dungeons really shut out communication to the outside world for their duration as you try to keep pace with the people you are matched with.

tl;dr: Should S-E maintain the heavy focus of piling on more instanced content, or reduce that output to instead extend the open-world at a more frequent rate?