IF there is group content, I believe it would be in Funcom’s best interest to just blurt that out as loudly as they can in order to generate interest and showing us that they’re serious about this.
That there’s zero mention of a dungeon, lair or raid makes me question that there ever will be.
Instead, they let MOP run an article which plainly states : A lot of points. Which is not flattering. At all.
Indeed.
But the point I suppose you’re missing is that what you think is in their best interest and what they think is in their best interest might be conflicting alongside with what press is allowed to say and not to day.
If there is?
If there isn’t?
That is not up for the press to decide what to write and what not to write, it’s up to Funcom to set our press parameters.
I’d still like to see the other 3 launch dungeons and the Toyko 3 brought back but the lack of Aegis actually hinders the Toyko content (MFA fight 5, MFB fights 1 & 5) the others it seems to be a bit easier (on paper) to fix. Just spitballing here.
PH: Easy, only Aegis mechanic here was flappy’s mark, just make it a dot that if the person with it dies, they explode and wipe the group. Other than that, mobs just had aegis shields.
MFA
Boss 1: The orbs instead apply an amount of damage to the player that picks them up (% of Max hp maybe so they’re not doing $TEXAS damage at higher Elites). If its enough to kill them, boom, wipe.
Boss 2: The tank is protected by 3 100% absorb barriers with a value of $TEXAS until the towers are destroyed.
Boss 3: Nothing Aegis specific here IIRC. The random blast target blasted by purple(?) could just be a fixed amount of damage.
Boss 4: Nothing Aegis specific with these guys
Boss 5: Ok this one I’m guessing. Maybe apply Red/Blue/Purple color buffs randomly when the bomb drones appear. Match your color buff to defuse the drone.
Boss 6: Moves to the door at fixed HP percentages. Potentital to get bugged until you hardcap his HP so you can’t skip “**** off, Chuck” phases. Otherwise you get Eblis situations.
Let’s be realistic here. If they didn’t have the resources to get the existing dungeons and raids updated along with producing new story content, they certainly wouldn’t have been able to produce all-new ones.
I really hope I’m wrong here and Funcom can manage to step up the pace with season 2, but right now (almost exactly a year after the re-launch announcement) it looks to me like we’re back to barebones content produced by a skeleton crew. Three hours of solo content every six months isn’t going to keep anyone hooked.
As for those on the “story-driven, shared-world action RPG” bandwagon – will you be around to answer the daily General chat question of “is this game dead?”
No endgame = no player retention = dead game treading water at best
Dead ? Like a kingsmouth zombie getting pwnd by a lv50 Warcraft or ESO game ?
So, if there actually is endgame content in the form of a dungeon/lair/raid and Funcom is not telling us at this point, would you attribute that to malice or incompetence ?
Asking for more group endgame content is itself endgame group content.
I just cried a bit inside… ;-;
It’s anecdotal from every endgame player I’ve spoken with. We all see friends leaving steadily for the same reasons - there’s not enough to do.
Is this offset by an influx of new players? Possibly - but it’s still bad to have poor retention in your game.
I’ve rebutted that several times, but even calling it a “shared world RPG” still means Massive (or Moderate) Multiplayer Online… something. It’s modeled on an MMO and monetized like an MMO, so despite the hand-flapping protests of those saying otherwise, it’s disingenuous to claim it’s not an MMO at all.
The way people repeat the SWL marketing BS like that’ll somehow turn it into a truism never seizes to amaze me.
Funcom could’ve gone with a gear system that’s actually similar to [insert your favorite single-player RPG here], instead of one that is similar to and only similar to certain obnobnoxiously grindy MMOs.
Funcom could’ve reworked story dungeons to flat-out be a single-payer experience instead of keeping the forced group content integral to seeing the full story like any other MMO.
Funcom could’ve bloody not reworked Agartha into an MMO hub and ruined its atmosphere, but they did. They made it a proper one-stop MM-F’n-O hub.
SWL might actually be a better game if Funcom had fully delivered on what their marketing label promises, instead of relaunching as, factually, a MMO.
I sincerely hope they don’t plan to work on brand new group content. The missing elite dungeons are on the backlog with assets ready to go, so it would be more efficient to work those into SWL rather than creating completely new group content. So many of us miss those dungeons and would appreciate having them back.
For most players, the Manufactories would be completely new, too.
Game genres are entirely whimsical and largely meaningless and who cares what the marketing people decided to classify it as? If they had called it an mmo, we’d be here today with someone arguing that they shouldn’t call it that because a true mmo wouldn’t use instancing or some such. 
Wouldn’t attribute it to anything dear.
I’m not that type of person to think that way.
I’ve been wondering about this statistic, is it looking at characters or highest character on the account? Totally fair if you can’t answer that just wondering =P
I guess the actual statistics and what players see is likely different. The end game portion of players are more likely to be communicating in the global chats i could imagine. Was just curious if you count players or chars (sounds like it is players, and i hope it is).
Personally very excited for the new story, and story is my fav part of the game. New group content in the think tank doesn’t sound bad at all either though xD.
I recently read of the 5-20-80 rule/priciple.
Basically 80% of the playerbase never really interact with the community much and just play the game, 20% read but don’t actively post, 5% are we, people that post in forums, discords, reddits and of those 5% the people that bang there head against the endgame and get bored of repition are an niche…
Satisfying this percentage of the game population is while positive for the game, negative in terms of priorities. You wanna satisfy the big chunks before satisfying the smaller parts of a community. That doesn’t mean not care but care equally to their “weight”/percentage they hold in the community and the avaidable resources and given that since the start of SWL funcom has been tight in it’S dev-resources there is not that much one can do.
It’s at this point not wrong to poll ideas for endgame content but one has to stay realistic and see that some things just won’t happen. As much as it hurts and one would love to rage against the system.
All the above sounds very plausible.
That sounds right. And even amongst the “vocal 5%”…you know what happened when Funcom released an issue entirely dedicated to end game players for TSW? Endless arguing about how it wasn’t catering to the vocal story people. It sold poorly because, partly, many people were convinced it either had no story or didn’t further the story of The Secret World. Which…if one thinks of “advance the story” as purely light blue missions, it didn’t, but by God the Manufactories were packed full of story directly related to the main themes of TSW. It remains one of my disappointments with SWL that all the story people who wouldn’t touch issue 12 don’t have Story Mode Manufactories to see what they were missing, though I understand why those dungeons aren’t in game. The work required to adapt them is, I think rightly, pointed at making new stuff. I do hope they can come back sometime, though.