Why can't Dungeons be longer/harder, but more... piecework?

[Shurrikhan]

The 'community' has a 'set way of doing things' and wooooe-be-it-to-you if you dare to deviate from that. You mass pull, you burn it down, and if you don't do that you are bad and deserve to be kicked. You waste everyone's time otherwise. Git gud.

The 'community' doesn't want new things that require straight shot 'pull it all and burn' because that isn't fast-efficient-rewards-out that is the 'way it is'.

To be fair, though, that's not so much "mass pull or get gone" as "do the obviously two-to-three-times as efficient option or get gone". If you change the dungeon designs, you change the optimal choice. Heck, you might even be able to make two choice in tight balance of each other. After all, we still run more than just 8 jobs, so clearly "near-enough to optimal" has a place. A 30 to 60% efficiency loss is just a far cry from 1-3%.

Now, alternatives do not somehow have to be winding dungeons. A "straight-shot" dungeon can still amount to far more than "Sprint, tank AoEs pack 1 while running past, tank AoEs pack 2 while running past, tank reaches and AoEs pack 3, and we all AoE them down; boss; repeat."

There's a lot that's a mere easily manipulated consequence of tuning, mechanical scarcity, and spacing that we take as inseparable from the medium just because each dungeon thus far has so tightly imitated the ones before it. They're not. They're side-effects of something that could change with any new dungeon, possibly even without a sudden spike in general difficulty.

Put simply, players don't want to waste time, and many are playing under time constraints. If a winding 90-minute dungeon (including, say, a semi-weekly bonus) with side paths produced more reward per minute than our current ones (including the daily roulette bonus), players would probably use the 90-minute when possible, and then a few 30-minute ones if they can't manage a second 90-minute in that week. Imo, that's not a rut so much as common sense; it's just the choices that are forced upon them that are in a rut.