Rubbinns wrote on Jul 19
th, 2017 at 3:10pm:
Who would join? I thought about that, too. Even if it were, say, a "classic" server with only 1-20 quests and raids. Even if they added all the epic raids and adjusted them for level 20. No one would leave the characters they spent thousands of hours and dollars on. There isn't any loot from the S/S/S system that is worth a farm, especially not with the new loot we have from the DoJ update onwards. Oh, and cannith crafting shits on those items as well. And if they made full level ranges then there is even less to do at 30. Slavers and LGS grind, then what? What are you going to do in this game but acquire past lives?
They built the longevity of the game around the TR, not the end game. When cap went to 20, they had the option of freezing the level cap at 20 and building an end game there. They kinda did that for 3 years from 2009-2012. They ended up with about 10-11 end game raids (Reaver, Abbott, Hound, VoD, Shroud, ToD, LoB, MA, E Chrono, E VoN, E DQ) and 30-40 end game quests that were challenging, took time to run, and had strong, but not OP, loot.
They had the heroic TR grind, which, pre-BB was a bit of a slog, especially on the 4.3 mill XP track. They could have stayed there and built the end game further and further and made that viable. Eventually, with gear creep, they would be invalidating older content, but that creates the progression raiding environment. People bringing along alts will be at lower levels of end game vs. higher.
It could have worked. But they moved the level cap 3 more times, each time invalidating all loot and content at the old cap, and thus starting over with a handful of end game quests and a small set of loot to get. And they expanded the TR system 3 more times (Epic, Iconic, and Racial). Which has additively increased "TR content" and added character progression value into the TR activity whereas at cap/end game content and progression value gets reset to 0 every time you move it.
Given the 70 life(ish) weight of the TR content, they need a dozen or more raids and 70-80 quests at cap with cohesive progression systems that build at cap (reaper trees would have been great here. Chance missed. Put that in the TR content pile instead. Cause it wasn't big enough yet...)