Last Popular thread was in July...

[AriaEnia]

This kind of thread again...

Why don't people just apply and join the dev team and help them with content planning, programming, design arts, theme composing, copyrights, etc.

Or create a whole new game which satisfy y'all.

(Fire now has been lit)

[Alahra]

This is the longest content drought we've had and I suspect they overestimated the appeal that HW's current endgame content would have, for a number of reasons.

The item level structure changed somewhat (30 item levels per tier instead of 20), which means they're probably not sure where to place content like EX primals on the scale in terms of both item levels and rewards. Both EX primals--mainstay content of ARR--were relatively dead once Esoterics were released (and Bismarck EX was a one and done fight). For future primals, we'll hopefully see them carry more relevant rewards so that they're worth doing for longer.

Alexander Normal suffers similar problems to Ravana EX, exacerbated by the fact that the content was tuned such that it had almost no learning curve, so there wasn't even a sense of progression to keep it relevant, only the (artificially drawn out) loot system. Savage has the opposite problem, in that it's tuned higher than most raid content we've had in the past, leading at least some portion of the former Coil raiding community uninterested.

The leveling grind from 50-60 was also probably too short to sustain a 5-month content gap (but I know that having it take longer would have been quite unpopular in its own regard).

That being said, there's a degree to which things were the same in 2.0--it's just that we had 50 levels to work on and were starting on scratch with *everything* so it took longer to get to the end-game content we did have (which actually only had one extra Primal fight compared to HW). We actually have more endgame content in 3.0 than we did in 2.0, but the content itself isn't designed well enough to keep us occupied.

3.1 looks to be adding even more than 2.1 did though (which was the largest content patch of the ARR cycle). Hopefully, the new EX primal is relevant the way the originals were and Exploratory Missions are, in addition to being a good source of gear, engaging enough to remain fun for the 3 months after patch day.