Deep Dungeons & Variants: Making them Evergreen? (beyond just adding more)

[VeyaAkemi]

It's a massive problem, and one that has somehow attached itself to the concept of MMO's. So many are presented as living breathing immersive worlds and then offer amusement park ride content.

It's because MMO players are by their nature motive-driven. The initial Variant Savage were seen as bad content not because of anything they did as instances, but because their rewards were seen as poor, it didn't matter how they actually played, even if they had been the most innovative and fun content in the game, they would still have been seen as failures due to the lack of rewards, and this is what prevents content from ever being evergreen, the moment their rewards fall off, the content falls off.

The only content that has been immune to that effect in the game are Relic grinds, where the main reward is ultimately the look of a flashy weapon, and Ultimates, whose reward is seen more as the prestige and experience... and also a flashy weapon glam, so any time the reward is too material in nature, usually bigger damage number, in any game whatsoever not just limited to MMOs, that content falls off, and other than a handful of evangelists that keep the content some degree of alive, most everyone moves on.

Even I am not immune to that effect, the reason I don't care about most Ultimates is because I think the reward weapons are gaudy and ugly, so they feel like they will be a huge effort for no payoff to me.

[Voidmage]

It's because MMO players are by their nature motive-driven. The initial Variant Savage were seen as bad content not because of anything they did as instances, but because their rewards were seen as poor, it didn't matter how they actually played, even if they had been the most innovative and fun content in the game, they would still have been seen as failures due to the lack of rewards, and this is what prevents content from ever being evergreen, the moment their rewards fall off, the content falls off.

The only content that has been immune to that effect in the game are Relic grinds, where the main reward is ultimately the look of a flashy weapon, and Ultimates, whose reward is seen more as the prestige and experience... and also a flashy weapon glam, so any time the reward is too material in nature, usually bigger damage number, in any game whatsoever not just limited to MMOs, that content falls off, and other than a handful of evangelists that keep the content some degree of alive, most everyone moves on.

Even I am not immune to that effect, the reason I don't care about most Ultimates is because I think the reward weapons are gaudy and ugly, so they feel like they will be a huge effort for no payoff to me.

I mean, Criterion Savage didn't just fail because of the missing rewards but also because it was completely unneeded.
People wanted normal mode -> Hard -> Savage (I still remember the comments before the very first Variant dungeon came out), especially at the time of the EW dungeons, but instead we got Normal -> Savage -> Ultimate.
The missing rewards simply resulted in the extremely small bubble of customers for it shrinking even more, no amount of reward could have saved it to a noticeable extent.
No matter how much some people like to build up Ultimate as that big thing that gets millions to Twitch, the highest difficulty content will always be a niche in any game but somehow the casual MMO had forgotten that until 7.2 (with the stain of Forked Tower) and ignored large part of it's playerbase until then.

Reics were evergreen before EW brought in the anti grinders and changed the usual casual grind content into a semi one, resulting in it's identity crisis it has now.
Unless they accept that Relics by nature were content for those who liked grinds, they will never again be evergreen.

[Valence]

It's ironic, they intend to fix it and give an intermediate hard (advanced) difficulty for criterions, but removed all trash. The only dungeon trash that was remotely interesting in the whole game.

What a sick joke.

[TeresaFortell]

Unsyncing treasure dungeons would make their shelf life worse by devaluing the rewards and allowing people to easily solo them.

As opposed to nobody doing them, I think giving the option would actually be an improvement.