Quote Originally Posted by znushu View Post
they were but the developers killed the system itself by making leveling faster and by not increasing the rewards for the system or even questing.
Oh, believe me, I know.

My life was deeply entwined with that game for a while; I was somewhat infamously the only person in the closed beta allowed to admit to it for like nine months, because despite the NDA, Bitwise had outed me as a tester on the Carbine blog. (And like two weeks into the earliest beta, no less.) I seriously considered returning to game development professionally -- something I'd sworn not to do -- when there was a possibility of going to work at Carbine.

WildStar remains near and dear to my heart even now... and I am deeply, painfully aware of the numerous mistakes that were made.

Quote Originally Posted by znushu View Post
people only really played through adventures in like the first few months and after that and the few years of the game that followed adventures were 100% dead.
I mean, I think the issue was that people explored all the paths very, very quickly and eagerly... but the rewards were (as you noted) not proportional to the time investment, so once they'd seen all the possibilities they stopped running them.

And while I think the more casual players might have kept Adventures active in the longer run as they got there at a more leisurely pace... there were also some decisions made which alienated and chased away a lot of the casual playerbase, making that prospect a non-starter.

Given that FFXIV has a larger base of players who consume content at a more leisurely rate than some of us, I hope that problem will be mitigated here... especially since this is four-man content; getting together a light party is much easier than gathering appropriately-sized groups for most of the niche content that SQEX has introduced before.

But even if it isn't and the group activity drops off, they've evidently at least ensured the normal Variants can be done solo, meaning people won't be blocked from experiencing the story even if they can't find a group. And that should help avoid the issues that cropped up with the Bozja duties, where people stopped running CLL in the first zone by the time Zadnor came out, and then the stragglers caught up and had trouble getting enough people together to get through it and get to Delubrum, much less to Zadnor.