How to keep old contents relevant

[Kosmos992k]

How to keep old content relevant?

Easy;

1. make Level sync actually bite
2. add an extra (and hard to beat) Boss to the dungeon when all players are level 50 or higher
3. since level sync will be worth a damn, give XP
4. make drop(s) from said boss relevant to the level 50-60 players, rare mats or something similar such as the drops from the top tier treasure maps.

Other than that keep everything else more or less the same. This makes the older dungeons worth doing.

When I first came to FFXIV one of the things that held huge promise -as far as I could see - was the idea of level syncing players in dungeons. I thought that this would be a great way to prevent player fatigue because it would help older content remain challenging - to a point. Unfortunately, level sync seems not to be strong enough - or consistent enough - to achieve that intent, and players can still effectively overgear older content and speed run it right into player burnout territory when farming things.

I'd far rather see a much stricter level sync to prevent speed run farming and slow folks down a bit, but at the same time increased drop rates to compensate for the additional time taken. In my opinion, this would reduce the number of times people blow through content while farming, and long term might reduce the burnout rate among higher level players.

An alternate way would be leaving level sync as is, but add a new difficulty mode to the older dungeons where all the trash mobs and Bosses are upgraded one or more tiers (each tier being 5 levels maxing out the dungeon20 levels above it's original). Of course this would require the dungeon drops to re-scale as well, but you can't tell me that's hard to do when all the gear and item lists are listed in rough ilvl/player level order any way. This way you could run Sastasha as if it were level 36 if you wanted to, or Arum vale as if it were level 69. Yeah, you want a challenge? Try AV at lvl 69 and see what happens even if you're unsync'd. Allow the dungeon to grant XP based on the relative player level to the effective level of the dungeon and what sync options were chosen.

The key thing about both these ideas is to make the drops worth it, and to allow XP to be earned.