Quote Originally Posted by ACE135 View Post
Shouldn't the fact of more variety in dungeons be enough of a reward?
Variety is a novelty. Its only necessarily good parts have an expiration date. The rest comes down to setting beneficial precedents, but you can't expect someone to appreciate those things each time on a daily basis (or however often they're running dungeons).

Quote Originally Posted by Frosthaven View Post
You'd need a way to ensure players enjoy the mechanics and side content of dungeons enough to want to do it - and I'm just not sure how that can be accomplished anymore.
For me, doing pre-nerf Pharos Sirius -- at least with more or less competent players without any significant attitude problems -- was intrinsically fun. It could have been better in a handful of different ways or an extra load of excitement or whatnot, but I quite enjoyed it. But that leaves two issues: I'm me, and may not be representative of most players, and that requires a group of "more or less competent players without any significant attitude problems".

So how do I, say, get access to a boss that finally stimulates my interests but doesn't create an effectively impassible or just heavily frustrating wall for the typical player? (For those performing far below the typical player, let us assume for now that the game might one day care about a reasonable difficulty curve, in-game teaching, and so on and thus raise the bottom tier as to no longer be either isolated from everyone else or pandered to at everyone else's expense.)

Now, the easy response would be that you can't and are forever doomed to one majority of the players... despite . It usually happens to be false, however. There are much smaller components that affect whether content attracts or repels us, and in what way, and to what degree, and to what overall effect. Most of those components can be more or less uniquely targeted. Even when you think they're inseparable, that's usually because of something else in your package you have yet to identify, or just a small mechanical issue you have yet to have your Eureka / feel-dumb-once-you-see-it moment to fix. Problem is, those corrections take time and what incredibly few things can't be feasibly separated excuse... nearly all design issues as a vain effort in compromise.

Let's consider some examples. Mechanical and gear-based difficulty are night and day from each other, despite falling under the same buzzword, and even within each there are things people like or do not like. Complexity (interlinking systems) and convolution (bloat and excessive codependence) both raise skill ceilings and knowledge requirements, but one tends to feel far worse because it devalues general intelligence in favor of counter-intuitive memorization. Even if we limit things down to "button-based engagement", so we're not looking at any feelings towards button bloat or the like, but just the results based on whether a player feels they do or do not have enough to press in any given moment, there are preferences for apm over time, minimum apm, maximum apm, and the frequency of apm spikes; more complex, there are going to differences based on whether one is using a controller or keyboard, and whether they toolkit lends itself well enough to an efficient layout for either to work as efficiently as possible. That's not to say that ever component will oblige a dive into an unknown depth of other factors so much as that simple, often seemingly trivial issues and inefficiencies are going to have cumulative effect on content, even if they normally fall outside of discussion and there are some ways of providing a given component (e.g. "difficulty not owed to memorization") that most players will agree is better, even if they disagree on how much of that component they want in the course of trying to achieve... some other component.

I'll spare you all the rant on examples of 'generally good' vs. 'noticeably flawed' design for now; I ask only that you trust that most of these so-called compromises aren't as clear-cut or zero-sum as they're made out to be. The challenge instead lies less in whom to target (and whom to leave out, by varying degree) as which processes are enjoyable and how can those processes be combined in such a way that more people feel like they've suffered little to no compromise in that content.