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A dungeon idea
NiKr
Member
With the current dev discussion and a, seemingly, very instanced-directed question in it, I tried to think up of a way to combine the freedom of L2's dungeons with the gameplay of instanced ones. The problem is, I'm not really a pver so I'll rely on @Noaani and @Azherae to tell me if this idea is complete shit and would never work as a good source of pve(x) content.
My paint skills are shit, but here's a top-down view of a floor of a tower dungeon (the same could work with layers of an underground one).
Here's a rough gameplay loop:
With this I tried to combine the endlessness of mob farm of L2 with a more pve content-driven design of "you do this sequence of events and you're done". A group could decide to farm the same room over and over until they drop what they need from its mobs/boss or they can try going to more difficult rooms if they're only interested in the pve fights themselves.
This would allow people to play from just 30min of "fully clear a room or two" up to several hours of "grind several rooms, while you wait for a special boss to respawn".
The flag protection is there to give the defenders some leeway if they get attacked by other players. It'll work even better if there's agro redirecting abilities in the game, so that the defenders could flag up on the newcomers (with no change in mob agro) and if they flag back - the defenders can redirect mobs/boss onto the attackers (with a boost from the anti-flag mechanic). But that move would still be dangerous because the scout mob would notify the nearest rooms about a pvp fight, so any pvpers around might come running in pretty soon.
So what do yall think, would this work as a dungeon design or does it lean way too much to the L2/pvp side of things? Oh, also, the mob lvl ranges can obviously be shifted or increased, same with room positions/amount - this was just a rough example.
My paint skills are shit, but here's a top-down view of a floor of a tower dungeon (the same could work with layers of an underground one).
Here's a rough gameplay loop:
- each room has at least one spawn point of a group of mobs
- different rooms have different gatherables, trap mechanics, quest links
- room difficulty varies between 8-man to 40-man groups
- each room puts a marker on the group farming it
- if marked group stays within one room, the next spawn of the same mobs will have harder mechanics
- if the same group beats the room 3 times (could be more), a mini-boss gets spawned
- outside of the normal loot table, mini-boss drops a tool that lets you go through the hidden paths within that boss' lvl bracket (room type)
- if the mini-boss dies, the cycle gets reset
- hidden paths can be opened with a combo of utility abilities of classes (ideally one of each archetype, but debatable)
- if anyone in the room becomes flagged, a fast scout mob runs out of the room and yells in chat "there's a bloodbath near ___ mobs!" (or room name/location)
- mobs/boss aggro on flagged people first, but keep their anti-zerg mechanics at low strength
- if an 8-man room has more than 8 people in it for more than ~30s w/ 0 flagged people, mobs/boss start increasing the power of anti-zerg mechanics (same applies to 16/24-man rooms)
- the entrance to the next floor is in the Epic boss room
- anyone who beats Special or Epic bosses gets an indefinite pass to the next floor through the green hidden path
- green path can't be unlocked with utility abilities (also debatable, but I'd prefer if it didn't)
- Special bosses would respawn daily (+- a few hours from a preset time), Epic boss would respawn weekly
- final floor would have a Legendary boss with a several week respawn and a full room lock-out mechanic, so that its design could be closer to an instanced boss one
With this I tried to combine the endlessness of mob farm of L2 with a more pve content-driven design of "you do this sequence of events and you're done". A group could decide to farm the same room over and over until they drop what they need from its mobs/boss or they can try going to more difficult rooms if they're only interested in the pve fights themselves.
This would allow people to play from just 30min of "fully clear a room or two" up to several hours of "grind several rooms, while you wait for a special boss to respawn".
The flag protection is there to give the defenders some leeway if they get attacked by other players. It'll work even better if there's agro redirecting abilities in the game, so that the defenders could flag up on the newcomers (with no change in mob agro) and if they flag back - the defenders can redirect mobs/boss onto the attackers (with a boost from the anti-flag mechanic). But that move would still be dangerous because the scout mob would notify the nearest rooms about a pvp fight, so any pvpers around might come running in pretty soon.
So what do yall think, would this work as a dungeon design or does it lean way too much to the L2/pvp side of things? Oh, also, the mob lvl ranges can obviously be shifted or increased, same with room positions/amount - this was just a rough example.
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Comments
Both of these ideas are really good because they allow you to guide your party towards desired content, while also allowing you to bypass undesired content. Plus, they provide opportunities for player interactions, as players can either compete against each other or merge their parties to storm together larger rooms.
A dungeon like this could also be benefited if it has a few keys or heavy items to carry around and open bigger doors and mechanisms. A good example of this are the amazing Guild Wars 2 dungeons, for example, there is a pirate dungeon where you have to find pirate coins around the dungeon and store them in a chest, when the chest received the desired amount of coins, a mechanism bellow the chest opens a door.
Overall I have seem features as you described in other games and they did fine there.
And yeah, mechanisms like that would definitely be interesting.
I believe some classes are already supposed to have the ability to reveal hidden paths. If I recall, mages were supposed to have the ability to sense "hidden terrain." While I agree that keeping stuff like this tied to the main archetype might be harmful from a class diversity perspective, I think it is a good philosophy that main archetypes have these small flavors that make them unique.
I like it a lot in general! Looks like it could be fun!
Obviously that's a super basic surface lvl example, but that would require all archetypes to be present. If Intrepid go deeper with utility abilities and give different ones to all classes, then different dungeons could require different setups. Ideally this would be tied to singular parties, just so that zergs wouldn't trivialize this mechanic, but I guess that could depend on dungeons as well.
What happens if 1 person just follows around an 8 man group to just make things harder? The simple solution is that the 8 man group kills them (which I think is fine), but how does that interact with the corruption system? Would the party/killer be forced to take corruption for killing that 9th player? (sorry if the corruption system already covers this edge case, but I haven't read up on it in a while)
To be clear, I like that this can encourage PvP between groups. But punishing players with corruption in this situation seems a bit cruel.
I'm conflicted on this 1 week spawn timer for each floor's epic boss. On one hand, this makes the epic bosses very exclusive and feel much more "legendary", but on the other; is allowing 1 party to kill it every week a bit TOO exclusive? This might be better suited to bosses not tied to floor progression?
What if each floor epic boss is instanced just like your idea for the final boss? Could have the same weekly respawn, but all players could fight it every week to try and get access to the next floor.
If it's more of a rough ratio with slow buildup then I think the group would be fine if there was 1-2 extra people following them around. The group could still pull the mob onto the followers and try to remove them in that way.
I should've been more clear about this. The entrance to the second floor is open at all times. You just gotta get to it through the Epic boss room. Killing the bosses just allows you to skip the whole floor in the future.
As for letting only one group kill it, that's just how open world bosses work. Their rarity is what's gonna push the PvXness of the game. Also, just to be clear, the Epic boss is definitely a 40-man raid so it'd be 40 people that get the loot from it.
Also also, the room lock-out thing is not an instance in the common meaning of that word. As in, it's still a singular boss that'll only exist until a single kill (and obviously will then go on respawn). The lock-out is just there to let the boss have better pve mechanics, because if we have constant pvp around that boss it'll never die.
L2 had a window of time when the room's "door" would be open and anyone would be able to enter. But once even a single person enters, a timer would start (or in one case, you'd need to wake up the boss yourself). And once that timer ran out, no one would be able to enter the room again until the boss either died or completely wiped the everyone inside the room.
I'd personally want a similar system for the lock-out, but if Intrepid comes up with a better way - great. But this would still be a singular boss whose loot goes only to a single raid group. Which is, again, a way to push the PvX nature of the game. "Not everyone wins in Ashes" and all that jazz.
As for the distribution of loot across the server, I dunno how Intrepid plans to design it, but L2 balanced it in such a way:
- plain mobs have the same loot tables as bosses, but just with way worse drop rates
- epic bosses have a bigger quantity of that same loot and have a unique jewelry piece (one per each epic boss)
In other words, everyone was able to get the same gear, but some would get it faster. The jewelry was the biggest prize from the epic bosses, but, due to everyone being able to get the same gear, there was a rough balance of power in the pvp for the boss. And with long respawn timers on Epic bosses and them dropping only a single jewelry item (with some bosses not even having 100% chance to drop it) the overall impact of that special drop wasn't all that high. A guild would need to exclusively farm that boss for months if they wanted to get a noticeable increase in their overall power.I personally liked this system a lot because it made sense to me. I hope Intrepid can come up with as good of a system as this.
It was named so by players because the first ring event in EQ was something you needed to complete to get a really good ring - original naming, I know. Developers kind of adopted the term.
In EQ, and in part in EQ2, players would actually essentially queue up to participate in ring events, though they were often slow to respawn.
As a basic idea, having a dungeon full of rooms with ring events is actually quite solid. I am less keen on content mixing groups of level 35 players with full top end raids (I dont see this ever working out well for the lower level players - ever), the basic premise is solid af.
If the dungeon was group based and had a level range, of level capped content only and scaled from group to raid, that would be all good. Even better would be if the game had a mixture of both across different dungeons.
How I can see players on most servers eventually organizing this kind of thing is that if you want a specific room for what ever reason and someone is already in it, I can actually see an agreement being made that the existing group complete the cycle of the ring event they are on and then move on so the new group can run that ring event (note; I dont necessarily expect players to call them ring events). If we are talking single groups, it probably isnt worth it to attack a group and kill them if instead you can arrive at a mutually beneficial agreement.
If this becomes the socially accepted norm, that will leave PvP in dungeons as being between actual rivals (sometimes, sometimes it's all good to put that rivalry aside for an hour or two), or against those going against the social norm. You would fight someone unwilling to make an agreement, and it is also fairly likely that groups of players may band together to fight groups that fight without first trying to reach an agreement.
Yeah, I can definitely see that happening. I'd assume that the most pvp will come from guild/node wars, just as it did in L2. There'd be a few skirmishes here and there, but mainly rando groups wouldn't fight each other too much just because it was quite dangers to flag up willy-nilly.
outside of the normal loot table, mini-boss drops a tool that lets you go through the hidden paths within that boss' lvl bracket (room type)
About that tool... Do you envision it having restrictions, such as non-tradable or time related? If not, they could be farmed to be either sold or saved for a later use. Having a dungeon/room specific micro market item could be nice. Something for groups too small, or too weak, for regular bosses but still interested in the dungeon. Saved for later when they are ready to progress or sold as shortcuts (money or bargaining chip in not to be slaughter by a new group).
As for changes that can be made after multiple visits, I think this could be a way for higher level players to run the dungeon at a level where all the bosses are at least their level range to give them more content each visit. Sort of like how mythic keystones work in WoW, if you have any idea about those at all. Basically you get an item drop (usually from inside a dungeon, but could be anywhere in this case, or even crafted) and you use the item at an altar or something at the beginning of the dungeon. In a game like WoW where dungeons are instanced, it just makes your instance (x) degrees of difficulty harder. In an open world setting, I think you'd need to have it apply a debuff to you or something that makes you weaker maybe? And then you'd get access to special loot tables for as long as the debuff is active. You couldn't really have it change the boss mechanics, damage, or health without impacting everyone else's experience and (likely) just making the dungeon almost always tweaked into a higher level setting by max level players.
Alternatively, if this is possible, it could just give you a special status effect that triggers on the boss whenever a player with the status effect gets aggro on it. At that point, the boss could become enraged, get a bigger health pool, deal more damage, use special abilities, etc, and have the loot table swap out unless a group without the status effect wins the looting rights. Or maybe you let the boss give the other players the higher level loot if they actually manage to out-damage you or take you out! Something to experiment with.
I mentioned this in the main thread, but I also think it would be cool to have some items scattered throughout dungeons that give players optional time-based rewards. So a high level gatherer gathers a special herb in a level 30-35 room, but it's useless unless they get it to a level 45-50 room all the way across the dungeon in less than half an hour to use a special processing station that lets them (or maybe a required processing artisan in their group) process it into something valuable. Same could be done for other professions with any manner of lore-based justifications. Could give an optional challenge for higher level players who want to take a stab at speed running.
Yeah, I'd definitely want some deep artisan interactions within dungeons to vary up the gameplay and make the dungeons even more meaningful.
You only mentioned 'harder mechanics' so far.
I doubt it would apply.
This style of thing is very complicated to do and causes the wrong type of soft friction between players in my experiences, but this isn't to say it's impossible.
That said, there are some things that I personally believe would need to change about Ashes itself much 'lower on the pole' for it to work. Maybe not, they may surprise me.
There are four basic problems:
"Harder" mechanics:
This is a balance question and as a result will be very stressful and strict for simply groups who are running the dungeon at the point where the dungeon is challenging for them.
PvX Philosophy:
Players have no reason to 'let the players who spawned the miniboss actually fight it'. Great when two groups are working in tandem, terrible when those who are trying to spawn it are the ones who want to fight it.
DropRate Manipulation:
This would, in a roundabout way, normally lead to players doing their best to manipulate whatever system for droprates exists by being the 'correct' level. In Abyssea this doesn't happen because of many things, but here I definitely feel like it would.
Corruption Manipulation:
Creating any scenario where players are fighting over the rooms/spawns and not fighting over their paths, in a dungeon of this type, amplifies the 'jump people as soon as you think the boss will manage to kill them' effect, which sends us back through the loop of the other three problems.
Ironically, Abyssea works only because of the same reason that my initial impression considered it flawed when Square Enix first released it. The mobs literally level up. So after literally years of analyzing that, I've concluded that 'Mobs spawn at higher levels' is in fact slightly better than 'mobs use harder mechanics' in a game with proper depth.
As a PvE experience this would be great. As a PvX one, terrible, imo. If you change it to 'mobs spawn literally higher level based on your success and speed at killing them' you will get a result that is at least marginally better.
As always, FFXI has it already, you don't need to change anything about the way Abyssea works to add L2 style things/your designs into the gaps.
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by the droprate manipulation, but that's probably due to our difference in experience. If anything, this whole idea would be build upon "rate manipulation" as a mechanic, cause yes, people would definitely min-max the hell out of mob cycles relative to their difficulty. But I'm used to abysmal drop rates, so in that context I'm not too worried about that approach. If Intrepid will go with a way way way less grindy design for loot - yeah, this suggestion would probably not fit that design.
As for the pvx part, I think it comes down to agro manipulation mechanics that I tried to address with the "boss agroes onto flagged people" thing. L2's pve was easy as hell mechanically so you didn't really need to jump through hoops when player attackers would appear. But if Ashes is trying to go for a more complex pve design, I really dunno how they'll make it pvx-viable, other than agro manipulation. But this kinda comes back to our discussions of their overall design directions and the seeming confusion in those. I'm assuming alpha2 will clear up a ton of stuff, so until then we can only hope that Intrepid know what they're doing.
I imagine I am like you in that I dont want the game to force this on players - the freedom to attack others is still key. Rsther, the game needs to foster that attitude in players so that we make the decision that the above is how things will be.
Your suggestion does appear to me as if it could achieve that.
The idea of making the keys to the hidden paths traceable is possibly a good idea. A group not wanting to progress to far could well just sit in that room, knowing that most people coming in will only be after a key in order to carry on. If the group parked up in that room can just hand them one, not only will that eliminate conflict, but it actually has the potential to create a positive situation out of something that otherwise could have been negative for 50% of the players involved.
I don't know how others would feel about it but I can explain further based on it.
Abyssea ends up working like this.
Newbies to the area (level 75) come in and start to fight some level 77-80 enemies until they get that 'down'. The enemies level up to 81-84 and become too hard to fight for [PvE Game Design Reasons]. The response of that group is 'move on to untouched groups that are still only level 78-81 or same level'.
The group has some good synergy going and is warmed up so the very slightly harder enemies are doable. They can choose to push themselves a little, maybe even go back to the first 'camp/room/area' after a while if no higher level people are killing them.
Higher level players benefit because lower level ones roam and raise the mobs to the point of being higher level, thereby giving higher exp. You retain the flexibility for 'no lowbies are around let's just shred them ourselves' but one doesn't want to, it's slightly inefficient. Not so inefficient that it's a pain point, but inefficient enough that you're glad to leave it to them.
The Lowbies keep exploring, moving, learning, and improving, the others benefit from this (the higher levels of the same mob still drop things like the pop items for the minibosses either way, but give better exp).
Competition between low level players for low level camps remains. Competition between high level players for high level camps remains. People adapt by moving, or trying to outfarm each other. In the "Hybrid" game that could exist, they would either get to a point where they have a reason to clash properly for the spot, or merge groups as people leave.
At that point you could make the whole dungeon have a lower 'base level' for mobs, or at least ramp it up much slower, giving players the flexibility to move back or forward based on how well they're doing to optimize their exp.
Bosses/Minibosses are a different issue that would require a better corruption system (The Dv Gauge one) in a dungeon where the challenge part is not 'beating the boss' but instead 'doing well enough to spawn the boss in a somewhat accessible (to higher level players who have a reason to be there) place'.
Ashes' current Corruption system is incompatible with the 'do well to cause a miniboss spawn in an otherwise standard location', so I do not see any good reason they'd use this dungeon design. I'd love this, don't get me wrong, in the abstract, and I'd probably use it in Cardinal, but not in Ashes.
Could you elaborate on this? Is it about the mobs becoming too hard to beat if there's also other people messing you up? Would well-designed location-based anti-zerg mechanics solve that or do you think that'd create other problems?
Ashes' Corruption system is flawed relative to a game that does not intend to treat other players as Random Encounters.
Let's take a single mage using their 'beam' style attack on a tank who is tanking a strong boss. The Mage points the beam at them and moves it off them when they think the target's HP is getting low while their allies protect them. The Mage is just keeping an eye on the mob's mechanics the same way they would for if they were fighting it, but with a different goal, so...
The mage is making a 'Skill Roll' to kill the other tank without corruption. If they fail this skill roll, the party loses Mage temporarily only from the perspective that the Mage is now Corrupted.
For most players this will not encourage any teamwork, it will encourage them to 'steal mobs using their Skill rolls'. This is probably what Steven wants.
If Steven wanted something else, the Corruption system would be different.
If you meant that I should elaborate on 'what a different Corruption system would be', I am only willing to PM that. There's no benefit to sharing my team's designs/ideas openly when there is no chance Intrepid will be able to use them to improve the game without changing the game away from what they want. It's not that I'm super protective of them, it's just annoying to get drawn into discussing designs openly (which I would end up doing) and pointless to give up ideas 'for free' when we don't need feedback on them.
EDIT: Oh, and there is no such thing as a well designed location based Anti-Zerg mechanic. Just try to make one. You'll either be here for years or massively advance the genre.
Yeah, I haven't thought too deeply about it, outside of the obvious "make it positional, with harsher mechanics on the outer rim (in the context of active body collision). That is also what Intrepid is trying to do afaik, so we'll have to see if it works out.
Flagged characters heavily pulling Aggro will lead to mob leash abuses, disruption, and really do very little because if the mob wasn't deleting Tank A, it isn't going to delete Tank B, and we already know that they intend for Tank B to be able to protect Mage B.
Note that I'm in no way saying that Group B would win. I'm saying that it's a skill check.
Like that.
Paragraph 1 and Video are not really related.
I guess all I can really say is that in a design discussion that I'm in charge of I'd probably dismiss 'Flagged Characters pull Aggro' immediately as too simplistic. Though notably, it DID get incorporated into the design I have, it just, again, doesn't work in the Ashes one because... the Ashes one is simplistic.
EQ and EQ2 got around this in a number of ways - as the mechanic at play here was VERY common in those games (I can think of several hundred wrong events in EQ2 off the top of my head).
In some cases, the subsequent waves would simply be more of the same mobs. In some cases, it would be harder, higher rates mobs of the same level. In some cases, it would be higher level mobs. In some cases, it would be just different mobs all together.
It is probably worth pointing out that the bulk of EQ2 specifically is designed around the notion that players will spend 90% of their time in game at the level cap, so if higher level mobs spawn, you cant just walk away amd come back after a few levels. Many ring events in EQ2 were for quests. Your group had to both initiate and complete the event to get credit.
To me, this would translate well to cover the concern you have here. When a new wave of the event spawns, it is automatically aggro to the group that started the ring event. Further, loot rights could well be based on damage done to all mobs in the event, not just the boss.
This would mean that some groups may directly compete against each other in the same room if there is a specific reason to do so, but most groups will simply go to a different room - unless we are talking about troll groups.
If the dungeon is designed around the idea of most mobs having a shared loot table (however loot tables in Ashes look), there is little reason to go head to head against another group for the chance at loot when instead you can go off and have a guarantee of that same loot. In a dungeon with a large range of level, it could happen. However, the assumption should be made that the better drops will be higher level, so if people are manipulating, they are doing so to their own detriment. I feel that making it so loot rights could based on the whole event would stop this.
Sure, a group may come along and kill you then kill the boss, but you've already secured loot rights. By the time it becomes kind of known that this is what will happen, the concept of killing groups that are on the boss will probably die a quick death. It isnt worth it to the would-be attacking group - they are better off going to the next room.
The main concern then becomes the leash abuse in cases where people use flagging as a tool to make their farm easier, but that's exactly why I added the shouting scout mob. Obviously it won't work 100% of the time, but I'd imagine that, if that leash abuse is a well-known thing, some pvp groups would just "patrol" the dungeons to catch these abusers and have some fun with them, cause it'd be free pvp. And at that point it'd become a social interaction and a yet another push for a somewhat consensual pvp.
Treat this as my attempts at pointing out the potential holes in the system for Intrepid
1. Attacking any Green gives you a pre-corruption status with a value based on damage done/CC effectiveness vs target's remaining health (rockets up the lower HP they are when you do it)
2. Bosses react to that value, not to anyone being flagged.
3. Bosses react by unlocking 'Revenge' style mechanics (whatever suits the boss) and 'punishing' the person with the highest number of this type with special attacks or whatever, preferably CC and displaces (toward the boss)
4. Healing a character with a high value gives you some too.
So the boss gets stronger in specific ways only against the people who built up this value. Lore explanations are decently easy (at the time I was asked to come up with an Ashes-compatible one because the teammate who asked me about this wanted to talk about it here) in many settings.
Removes incentive to just skillcheck-murder a bunch of unflagged people fighting a boss unless you can definitely handle the boss' "Honor-Enraged" state or whatever.
The Green that was attacked to give the Attacker this status can now attack without flagging, everyone else, even in their party, must flag up.
Anyone in their party who does any damage or CC to the Attacker lowers the status.
Main differences are minor for most situations (good) and differences only appear in outlier/abuse situations (very good, for the ones it works for). New abuses relative to most models: 1.
If this would somehow cover what you're considering, just extract whatever aspects you think would help without breaking something due to being removed from the 'whole' (there's more to it, but since I don't intend to discuss the 'system', you probably don't need it).
True only if the 'anti zerg mechanics' only punish the 'intruders'.
Wouldn't the strongest/largest PvP group just be the one using the leash abuse?
You think in very 'honorable' terms a lot of the time, but a game conflict system that 'only works when the most honorable are also the strongest' might be relying on an unrealistic situation.
That's going down the rabbit hole of behavioural structures of competitive gamers though, so if you figure it would work, and that's been your experience, then all I'll say is that it isn't mine.
This is why I added the "presence of flagged players puts a dampener on anti-zerg mechanics" point. So the boss would just agro on the flagged attackers, but anti-zerg mechanics wouldn't start up immediately.
I tried explaining my thought process on the "who flags first" part, but I might've failed. I should've written that unmarked flagged players would hard-pull agro, while marked ones would just keep their pre-existent one.
Yeah, my stubbornness and self-imposed rules usually prevent me from wearing pvp-abuser shoes. To me, abusing this kind of system when you're the strongest group around seems wasteful, but I guess you're right, it'd be exactly the abusive kind of players that would become the strongest by abusing this system.
It could maybe be argued that weaker players could disrupt that strong group's farm exactly because there'd always be a flagged player in that group, but even that idea comes from my own bias of going up against stronger foes and bashing my guild's head against them until either we completely despair or we manage to achieve our current goal
INTRODUCTION:
I will address something that is kinda of a good and fun, but also it brings a problem with it
There's circustance when a large amount of players are on the same grid, let's say 140-150 people against a boss, but this boss was planned for 30-40 players
When there's multiple contests in a row through the hour or more, it is very thrilling, just because when there's too many people then speed becomes really fast, it is hard to keep up sometimes. The speed keeps people going and when there is 5-10 minutes pause than people relax and many leave the party, the ones who are tired or have something else to do will leave the party. But when there's no pause, people keep going while the speed is high, if the party starts running slow then people start leaving. I have seen this countless times in multiple games.
So, it's kinda good if there's enough mobs and boss spawning fast and in sequence, because people keep going and ramping up the DPS. But there is a bad effect that comes with this, that is all the content becomes a grindy chore and the value of that content pretty diminishes, additionaly the boss can't fight back and can't come up with any strategy against being overkilled. Bosses get nuked in open world dungeons, my tracker tells me I have done +3000 ow dungeons, but its way more.
These players reinvent what is the game, for them the game is about bringing the community together and crushing bosses, the same bosses are killed multiple times everyday through years by the same people. Then exactly these people will complain that the game doesn't have content, well they are stomping the boss as if it was nothing multiple times a day
It's a double edged sword, the speed keeps people hooked in this style of gameplay, but then in the long run it becomes a tasteless grindy chore, people get burned in dungeon grinding. The speed comes with oversized party dps, it is DPS tanking