I don't even care about downing the targets per se. I just don't want to be forced to participate in the meta-culture associated with non-instanced raiding. The bat-phones, the parked tracking bots, the drama, and the rules guilds are forced to make to field a competitive force, etc etc. In addition to the punishing time commitments involved, you have to be willing to engage with all this nonsense if you don't want your character's progression effectively locked at 80% of their potential maximum power. In an open world raiding game you have to go through this if you want to see the most impressive zones or consume the world's rarest bits of lore & flavour. You're unable to enjoy a co-ordinated activity with 40 other people, which is what I find so appealing about the MMO raid game in the first place, unless you accept the really negative factors I mention above.
Sure, is the sense of accomplishment & competition greater if there's a constant race where there are clear winners and losers? Yes. However, I'm not willing to engage with the negative aspects of the meta-culture to access that feeling.
There should be enough instanced raid content to keep guilds busy a few nights per week, and enough contested overland bosses to keep the people who enjoy that gameplay satisfied. If the former doesn't exist in Monsters & Memories, I simply won't invest my time there.
So follow two scenarios here in batphone world.
1-
Raid mob spawns.
It's Vox, bat phone goes out.
We bring her down at 4am, sleep deprived with 4 manastone clerics, 2 enchanters, a bard and a handful of melee. People get on the needed classes, sharing each other's accounts if necessary.
Casuals/normal schedule people awake, mob is dead, complaints of never seeing mob.
2-
Raid mob spawns.
It's Sontalak.
Most people roll over and say "no way we are killing that at this hour"
Call is made to keep forming up till we get numbers.
Eventually mob is killed by 7:30AM-8AM.
Know what changes scenario 2? Sontalak having better loot than a sleeper key and assorted "dragon leather" stuff. People will do crazy things for the pixel dopamine.
Know what else changes scenario 2? Prohibited sharing of accounts which means both sides have to wait for the actual people that own the chars to get on.
What would be cool? Some kind of event where you try to break into ToV with waves that have scaling loot. If you bring enough bodies or are especially efficient in your class make up (not a bunch of druids and hybrids), harder things with better rewards happen. Eventually you spawn Sontalak/"Uber Sontalak" and if you kill him as a unified effort, ToV opens for the server for the week (month?) and the bums who ninja logged after a random wipe in the previous cycle can go get their corpses. It creates the "open raid" p99 had but with something that actually requires some kind of massive unified effort, instead of some mob everyone can kill anyways getting dog piled by 500 lazy slobs/killed in 2 seconds with random rolling druids winning rolls and trying to sell the items for more plat than anyone has and quitting with said item(s).
Why Sontalak? He is a fight where sloppy zerg bodies will get tossed and create low hp aggro situations so a tidal wave of total shit balls won't succeed. That's the kind of thinking I'd be going towards in refining these experiences based on past knowledge of what players will do, and then consider what kind of rewards to expect.
Hopefully good food for thought and uses some real examples. Feel free to nitpick, that's the point of the old brain trust here (or it should be).
