The Daily Grind: Revitalizing old content

by Krystalle Voecks on Dec 29th 2007 8:15AM

A recent piece on our sister blog WoW Insider (spawned from a couple of great blog posts on the World of Warcraft LiveJournal community) got us to thinking about old endgame raid content. With games like EQ having set a strong pace for ambitious expansion releases and the inevitable raising of level caps, what does one do with the older raiding content once everyone's passed it by 10 or more levels? Sailoreagle and friends seem to have found a lot of value from the old content just from grouping in a small 3-man grouping and taking it on. On the flip side of that, many people may not have the ability to raid extremely high-end and get the uber gear that enables these types of small-group take-downs. Sure, you can expand the group size, but anytime you increase the number of players required to do something, you increase the chances that something, somehow will go awry.

For today, we'd like to ask what you think developers should consider doing with content that is outdated and you've since out-leveled? Should it just be left for smaller groups to run, as Sailoreagle and friends are doing? Should more developers look to the innovative ideas in CoX with the Ouroboros missions that enable players to go back in time and finish up arcs they've skipped, but in such a fashion as to keep it level-appropriate and thus challenging? Should there be another reward instead for higher-level players, such as worthwhile faction rewards, or something along the lines of WoW's Badge (token-based loot) system? How would you revitalize old endgame content after later expansions have left it in the dust? Or would you just leave it be?

Tags: 3-man-molten-core, city-of-heroes, city-of-villains, cox, expansion, featured, old-endgame-content, ouroboros, world-of-warcraft, wow

Reader Comments (3)

I touched on something similar to this a while back on my column as well.

http://www.massively.com/2007/11/07/building-a-better-mmoustrap-can-you-teach-old-content-new-tric/

I think that bringing back old content is something that can be done both smartly and without losing the original feel for the areas.

I know a lot of people are burnt out after two years of motlen core runs and never want to go back, but there are a few people (like myself) who loved the old content. I'd love to see a re-tooling of MC/BWL/AQ/Naxx for smaller groups so that I can take friends new to the game into the zones and show them how great they were.

I think the trick is that some of the boss encounters required a larger number of people for crowd control or tanking (Sulfuron, Four Horsemen, et al) and they would need to be retuned for say a 10 or 25 man group without losing the bulk of the encounters fun and difficulty.

I know that Blizz is already working on doing a 25-man Naxx for Wrath of the Lich King, and I would love to see them continue the trend for other content.

My guild currently is on T5 TBC content, but a group of us have been going back and doing old world raids. For most of them it's old hat, but it's really fun for me since I only hit 60 a few weeks before the expansion hit.

I think the Naxx part deux is a special case, but it would be nice to see Blizz retune old raid zones as new heroics or the like.

add heroic versions designed for smaller groups. 40 mans suck ass

or really, just make a system where you can change the level of the entire dungeon to almost anything you want, and have the loot change accordingly. want to solo scholmance at lvl 70? turn the enemies down to lvl 40 or 30 or whatever, just to experience the content. want to try black temple just to see it, but don't care about the tier 6 loot? change it down to lvl 50, grab a few friends, and 5 man it for reduced rewards.