The queuing times for dungeons are absurd. Either no one is running them because of the time or they’re too busy pressing dailies. If SWL wants to be more than a solo-story game with some random online chat, it’s gotta work a lot harder on making group content more desirable.
Here’s what I’d do the dailies to that end:
- everything regenerates instead of deadline + reset (eg. sides regen @ 1 per 3H)
- main story tiers count as and regenerate 1 main mission
- demand roles (by scarcity @ queue head) regenerate 1 main mission
Regen over deadline has identical limits to the current setup, but removes deadline anxiety and the never-complete issue for peeps logging in near reset-time. Main story really needs to be included as daily progress and strongly incentivized rather than penalized. No more dichotomy between story progress and mof progress. Story is good.
Dungeons are good, but waiting hours for a tank is bad. There obviously aren’t enough tanks to go around. So, incentivize the ones we have to run more than the normal daily quota. Ah, everyone jumping on tank? Queue adapts and rewards heal or even dps. FFXIV uses that kind of dynamic system. It’s still about 70/30 on tank/heal getting an incentive bonus.
Assuming a large budget, I’d also redo the elite tiers – compress it down to 1~3 by mech differences and then scale the players to match the dungeon. Soft-cap/DR on stats, not hard. Better geared should do better, it just shouldn’t be so unfun as it is now to have wildly different gear levels mashed together (no carrying or being carried). Reward goes by personal IP+tier rather than tier alone. The chests are already individual – scaling that would be trivial.
Why compressed and scaled? Broader population for queues; 10 variants of each dungeon means 10 separate queues with everyone only wanting their personal progress maximum. Cross-grouping vets and newbees in such a way that the newbee isn’t carried is great for teaching content, too.