Focusing on those 99% story eager people would be fine too 
I seem to recall a lot more “casuals” in TSW nightmare dungeons. Those that primarily were interested in story and RP yet dabbled in dungeons. I knew full cabals with those people who wrote their own fan fiction, hunted down TSW-themed music, yet still did Kaidan, NY and other raids.
If Funcom considers E1 and up as endgame, then endgame could, and should, be design-targeted to more than just the 1% “endgame bros” population. It behooves their bottom line to do so.
Most people aren’t playing SWL specifically for one aspect. It’s not that type of game. Maybe there’s a way for you to see that with your user data, but that’s my anecdotal experience.
Also PS that at least two of the last handful of NM raid leaders in TSW were women…just sayin, bro.
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I watched the latest Funcom quarterly report. The CEO says something like “further development of SWL depends on the success of the Season 2 launch”. So my take is, they probably saved those existing assets to make easy “new content” if Season 2 went well. If so, then they would have enough resources to do a little bit more than maintenance mode.
Thank you very much for the response. Knowing that stuff in the works helps immensely - timelines to perk optimism always are nice, but I know y’all are doing a lot with a little.
(If I could offer any one suggestion to help with SWL, even before my personal lusts, it would be to streamline the cash shop. You have an incredible fashion selection buried away and oddly priced. Remember WalMart; sell for less to more and take over the world. For instance, 10x as many people would buy Bingo Blast at 300au as 1k - or offer real cash deals for fashion packs of outfits, cache key and a couple potions at discount on rotation. It’s miles better already, now that more is visible and tabbed, but I’d seriously suggest keeping it as a focus for resources.)
So basically, the answer is the second Tuesday after Never. That’s when we get more endgame content.
But…this is not nice.
It’s ok to “lol” as Tron.
But, as marked as a developer, it can be questionable. 
It’s like…
It’s fairly reasonable for people to have questions to the statistic data. Thus, by what right does someone like a government officer to “lol” at those people?
[This post is a side effect of my law study and fighting against government power in China. 
]
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These “only x% of people do Z” statements are always bogus, because the numbers can never be interpreted “correctly” (for some definition of “correct”, which I do not even try to attempt).
For example : I have three TSW accounts, so I now have three SWL accounts. On each account, I made 3 characters. There are three level 50s among them, five level 15s and one level mid-30ish.
Out of these nine characters, I only run elite dungeons with one of them. Is this now 1 out of 9 (counting characters) or 1 out of 3 (counting accounts) for Funcom ?
It becomes even more muddier if one tries to take “activity” into account (or not). If 100% of all people who logged in today would have run an elite dungeon, but for each of those accounts there were 99 accounts which did not log in, you could claim “it’s only 1%” too.
Statistics are evil.
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Not really comparable to a government, it’s more like going to a free themepark and having this dialogue:
customer: “you don’t have enough of what I like, all my friends are telling the same thing so we are many”
designer: “we have more data than you and it is indicating otherwise”
customer: “you are dumb, you can’t understand data!”
another customer: “you are lying!”
a third customer: “I have 10 tickets so your data is ****”.
If it was so worthwile to add content that “so much of the -real- playerbase wants”, why would funcom try to work on “less valuable” things?
What do you expect them to say “Wow, you are expert data analysts, we were mistaken, you are so many and we noticed that we owe the financial report to you and your dungeon running friends, adding end-game content will make more money than anything else!” ??
You guys spent too much time reading conspiracy theories…
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Well honestly the “lol” was the best answer Tron could give here. Did you see what was that answer to? To this:
you are completely wrong your statistics are false (give me real data) sorry but you dont know anything about the reality in game.
So it’s not about people having questions about the statistic / data. Here, it’s just a random salty person throwing tantrum directly on a dev.
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Thank you very much about sharing this Tron. While i clearly know i represent a very tiny minority as an avid endgame-consuming person, you can’t believe how happy we will be if we were just to get back the missing dungeons and raids - Facility, Slaughterhouse, Hell Fallen, Penthouse, The Manufactory, Manufactory Breached, the “flappy” raid and Eidolon.
I know the incoming update is focused on story, and i’m also very happy about that. But we’d really love to get the missing content above, especially if we objectively think that you already have all the assets ready and that it is mostly a matter of mechanic tweaks and number crunching. We’re ready to wait for months, and i’d even personally drop lots of cash if we happen to see our old content fully come back. I’d probably say that this would be a not-so-costly release for some potentially good income, even considering it will mostly only affect a tiny playerbase percentage.
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Nope, it’s just about preventing cyber violence, protecting minority, avoiding misunderstanding of official information. 
Laughing at angry people doesn’t make them feel better after all.
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Since the post you replied to didn’t want to initiate civil conversation, I’ll try to do it. Because I like to take this kind of statistic with a sizeable chunk of salt.
An extremely small percentage of our total playerbase is doing significant amounts of endgame content. Or any amount of endgame content.
I don’t have the current numbers in front of me, but there was a point where people were already complaining about endgame repetition and our metrics indicated less than 1% of players had ever been inside of an E1 dungeon. I don’t remember when that was, but yeah.
When you say “our total playerbase” and “less than 1% of players”, does that refer to the active players or total players to ever play the game? If it’s active players, that could be a useful metric. But if it’s total players ever, it can be so misleading. Chances are, the majority of SWL’s total players are not even done with the storyline missions so far, therefore being ineligible to access Season 2. Chances are, the majority of SWL’s total players don’t even play the game anymore.
I’m not pointing this out to demand group content, just as an example for how malleable these statistics can be. I know full well that end-game group players are a minority, but giving a vague figure like “less than 1% of players at some point” may inadvertently marginalize that minority more so than they already are.
I’ll give a different example, to show that active player statistics can also be misleading sometimes. I primarily did PvP in TSW, but I almost did none in SWL because Shambala is frankly the worst PvP mode. If you take a look at PvP statistics in SWL, you will probably see nobody plays Shambala. It’s very likely that there are literally zero Shambala games run each day. So statistically, 0% of players do PvP. However, maybe 1 or 2% of total players actually care about PvP and would like the other modes back, we don’t know. All I know is that I have fully accepted the death of PvP in SWL, but I really wouldn’t want misleading Shambala statistics to salt that wound.
I’m rambling. I just want to say that you don’t need an excuse for any update not catering to a specific group. Let’s keep these vague statistics out of it, or make them not so vague.
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Thank you for the replies and bothering going face to face with the community. Its not a common thing, and in times of “all devs are lazy jerks” shouters takes a lot of courage.
Nethertheless, I completely understand that the “e10 endgame bros” are not the biggest population, but they are the most invested and compassionate ones, who write guides, doing big data research to understand mechanics and help the average Joe through the complexity of the SWL experience.
I know I want them to be part of the community, and most of them are just asking for the missing dungeons and raids. I know its on the menu anytime you could do this - but please consider the importance of that 1% playerbase.
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I was an end-game TSW player who regrets the current (and probably near-future) lack of endgame content in SWL, but a couple of points should be made about TSW’s endgame content, which in my opinion was badly handled.
First off, the difficulty jump between normal and NM raids was excessive, and well beyond the capability and staying power of most players, even keen ones. This explains the near-1% take-up figure, which I’m inclined to believe in. It also became a self-perpetuating problem, inasmuch as NM raids became the almost exclusive preserve of a tiny handful of hard-core cabals and raiding associations; once they were established, acceptance by any one of them was almost impossible for outsiders. It was a classic no-win situation: to become accepted into a NM raid group you needed the experience and practice which you could only achieve by getting accepted… you get the idea. This is a not unusual situation with MMOS, but was exacerbated by the extreme difficulty jump.
Secondly, the usually strict division between plot/story activity and endgame content was massively breached by the Manufactury episodes, whose significant story content was in effect gated. Don’t get me wrong; I still think the Manufactury content was some of TSW’s best, but it was by definition limited to those players competent enough or determined enough to brave the difficulty. This was definitely a poor decision from the point of view of overall player satisfaction.
I believe we are now paying the price of those two errors of judgement, with both Funcom and the broader player base recoiling from end-game content.
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The problem is, the "already complaining about endgame repetition’’ bit from your original posting suggests it was rather early in the SWL life-cycle, possibly at a time when only the more ‘hardcore’ grinders were even E1 ready, while player numbers were still considerably padded by launch frenzy.
That would make the number effectively meaningless in terms of assessing how many retained players actually give ‘endgame stuff’ a shot.
It’s probably better to not post any numbers unless you can give enough context for a meaningful interpretation, and that wasn’t it - that was fodder for conspiracy theories.
This is the kindest appraisal of endgame bros I’ve heard in some time. Thank you; living up to that name.
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On that note, how good are your player metrics? Idle curiousity - I don’t need (do want, ofc) specifics, but I’m very curious as to how y’all engage and analyze your playerbase and the extent to which it’s utilized.
SWL and TSW are hard games to guage.
There was another side to this. When I first tried to make my own NM raiding group with Sturm, it took me, what, two or three weeks to finally scrounge up enough players who played during a time frame everyone was available, and over those few weeks, several changed their minds and we never set foot in a raid. Players willing and able to NM raid in TSW were just straight up thin on the ground, and trying to find them was a pain in the butt.
Sturm was eventually able to get an actual raiding group together, and at least half of it was players who had never been.
This all circles back to what Tron’s data tells him. There just aren’t that many people at the bleeding edge of end game!
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btw I think the lack of new endgame content is just a part of far bigger problem of retention and balance between monetization and fun in game. I understand it may be better to prefer acquisition methods than retention ones if you have a big disproportion between casual story players and endgamers, but in some point you will end in situation when these decisions will backfire and you will loose far more players than you will get.
I would love if they would rethink some design decisions which lead to far bigger fragmentation of players than game can afford (hello 10 tiers), massive disadvantage of solo players in endgame (hello containers nerf), some boss fight mechanics to make stuff more variable and ideally some love to scenarios and pvp.
Well it’s just that they need to make “easy” content compared to the other MMO’s that have larger, younger and more competitive communities.
If they spend 5 months for content that only 18-22 years old tryhards with korean training can complete, it would be quite pointless. I’m pretty sure that if they ever release difficult content, it will be at the reach of the community. And probably more than 20 players.
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