Yeah, I'm back.  First, let's do the apologies.  Apart from what's stored on this site - and hence, not in my home - I have no code, no documentation, no designs, no art.  This was caused by an unfortunate incident involving hell not having such fury, and which saw rather a lot of destruction of hard drives in both my dev box and my backup server, but I look upon this as an opportunity to rationalize and rework.

Second, the formalities.  Hi, people who give a shit and fuck you Prok.  And I will, too.  But you're going to need to wear this bag in case my eyemask slips and I don't know how we're going to cope if my earplugs fall out.  Anyway.  Moving swiftly on.

Now then.  This is inspired by Psychochild, as so many good things are.  Not that this idea is necessarily good but hey, it's mine and it's the first design-related idea in ages so it makes me happy.

Let's talk about WoW.  WoW has this big issue described quite eloquently as "Playing Alone Together".  It also has a big fat issue when it comes to endgame, because players have been effectively taught to solo everything and don't understand, want or see why they should need to group up with others.

Now, here's the cunning plan.

What you do is, you're developing for levels 70-80.  Up to lvl75, you keep the quests exactly as they are now.  Come lvl75, you start introducing parallel quest streams.  The first stream is the basic solo quest.  But there's not enough of them!  Players will whine!  But this is deliberate.

The second stream is harder and will need 2-3 characters to get through it at all.  But the XP/Loot rewards are commensurately better.  And there are less solo-artists getting in your way.  Not instancing, just rely on overcrowding.

For 79-80, I'd put in a third stream and reduce the amoutn fo available first and second-stream quests still further.  These also shouldn't be instanced, but should require 4-5 characters to get through them and be rewarded appropriately.

What does this mean?  It means you can solo, but other people will piss you off while do it.  But those other people could be useful to you because if you team up, you could do the better quest line.  It's training the players to group by annoying them.

And from there, you go to 5-man, 10-man and 25-man raids.  Because they've learned it.

Your decision - smart or stupid?