The Daily Grind: Content contentment

Content for me is additions to a game that gives the players something new, and hopefully fun, to do while maintaining a reasonable "time spent/reward" ratio.

Good examples:
WoW: Daily quests and their dungeon token system.
AoC: The random caravan encounters in the expansion.. no reward, but they are fun.

Bad examples:
Vanilla-WoW: Raiding....
AoC: The faction system in the expansion.. This gives players something to do, but the time/reward ratio is way off because the repeatable quests have low rewards and low cooldown. This causes the entire system to become a boring and time-consuming grind. Most people I know don't like to do the same quests several times during one play-session.

I want content that feels like the developer was trying to make something fun, and not something time consuming.

There's no simple rubric for it. Copy/paste mobs might be bad, but maybe they're arranged in a new way or given unexpected new abilities that makes it good. A new boss with wacky animations might be good, but if he's just there to effortlessly tank and spank once a day to get a piece of 1% drop rate piece of optimal equipment then that's not really very good.

I just want developers to try to play with the players through the content, not assign the players boring busywork.

-SirNiko

I have to agree with Faryon.
Daily quests gives players a reason to visit different locals and do content they might not have ran into the ground. The raiding system as is promotes running the exact same instance repeatedly (4 times a week with Coliseum), until the location, the boss fights, and all were to be dreaded more than enjoyed.

Basically the long and short of it:
There needs to be something for Elder players to do, that doesn't involve doing 1 thing over and over. Even if it is multiple paths to the same goal.

Most important to me: new lore. Show me that time is passing in the game world, give me something to talk about with other players, give me clues to wonder about as I try to guess what's going to happen next in the game world. (Good example: Star Trek Online's "weekly episodes," if they deliver. No new art promised, no new game play promised, but every week there will be progress in the Undine War. Bad example: City of Heroes, where as soon as you create a level 1 character your contacts tell you that it is still 2003, the First Rikti War has just ended, and the cops have still only barely heard of Superadine.)

Somewhat less important to me: new art. Every now and then, I'd like to see something I haven't seen: new enemies, new places to go. If I've gotten to the point where I remember where every chair and every piece of litter and every mark on the wall is, then I'm bored with that place, and never want to see it again. (Good example: City of Heroes' regular addition of new recurring characters and occasional addition of new enemy groups with their own uniforms and fighting styles. Bad example: City of Heroes, that same expletive-deleted limited selection of warehouse and office and cave instance maps that never, ever change, that still keep getting re-used.)

Not particularly important to me: new game mechanics. Adding new game mechanics to an MMO feels to me like adding new game mechanics to poker or chess. If the existing game play is fun, why add (potentially) less fun game play that I have to put up with until I can get back to the fun stuff? If the existing game play isn't fun, shouldn't you have fixed that before launch? Because if you haven't, odds are I'm not there to see your new content by the time it comes out. Besides, in MMOs, "new game mechanics" usually means some tricky puzzle that you have to fail over and over again, hundreds of times, until somebody figures it out; after that, you just follow the instructions on the forums. (Good example: new puzzles added occasionally to Puzzle Pirates, and the new minigames in Star Trek Online IF and only if they don't suck, which presumably we'll find out in the next few weeks. Bad example: the Reichsman, aka Barracuda, Strike Force in City of Heroes, which depends on each player knowing exactly how when to use certain completely new temporary powers that have little or nothing to do with how they play the game anywhere else, as if they were completely new characters, because their existing powers can't possibly hurt the end boss or keep up with the flood of minions; get it wrong and you can not win, you have to start over at the beginning.)

I usually enjoy two new types of content:

1) Some kind of minigame diversion that you can "work on" when you don't feel like killing things. A collectible card game, for instance, is a fun idea.

2) Anything that makes endgame continue. New raids don't cut it, because after you do those and get the equipment, there's nothing to do again. Some kind of perpetual endgame system is always the way to go. Capturing territories, realm vs realm, something that never ends and is worthwhile.