Bring back massive, contested dungeons that are hard, but certain areas have rare spawns with a chance to drop nice items i.e. lower guk, Karnor’s Castle, Sebilis.
How to solve the appearance armor issue; Change the way weapons and armor are effective. Instead of having stats on the items, the items have slots, the better the item, the more slots. These slots can be segregated a little bit, for example resistance in some, bonus to hit/crit in others, and then base stat improvement. To fill these slots you need gems or what not, the better the gem, the better the stat improvement. Customize the look you want, with the stats you need. Gems can be assigned to clothing locations, helmet, feet, arm so that you can’t just find the best gem dropping mob in the game and farm it.
Speaking of stats; for ****s sake have the right stats mean something to the right class. I have in two games been told that either strength or dexterity is the stat for my class that will improve everything; instead it has been the opposite in each game. So when you build your armor, you build the wrong stats, and then realize you messed up and now have to obtain different gear. It's called math, hire someone to figure it out for you before you code it in.
Balancing PVE vs PVP; I am so sick of having raiders come into PVP contests with their raid gear and be so much better than the top geared PVP players, and vice versa. Neither one should affect the other. If it says PVP in it, it will be almost useless in a PVE environment, if it doesn't say PVP on it; it will be pointless in a PVP environment. Spells and abilities should have two versions, PVE and PVP. Stop nerfing PVE spells because they are too powerful in PVP. I can't believe over the last 10 years that how to solve this issue hasn't been figured out yet.
Launching a new game; Two things on this; First have enough servers to handle the load, you know you're going to be 1.5x - 3.0x your normal running numbers of players for the first 2 weeks to a month, make sure you can handle the load. Second, stop underestimating your players and have a fully developed end game at launch, with more material to be delivered soon after. I have launched EQ2, Vanguard, DDO, and SWTOR, and have played several others. Of the ones I launched, EQ2 was the only one that had some end game content at launch. And while it’s a small percentage of the player base, some will be max level in 1 to 2 weeks, with a bunch more hitting it within a month. Either have a well-defined end game or suffer the fate of SWTOR. Losing a lot of your player base out of boredom.
Keeping the same old dungeons and raids fun to do; Put them on a tier system, like a lot of games have now. Dungeons are easy, medium and hard, same with raids. This idea works best with raids, but could be used on hard mode dungeons, and maybe variation of on easier mode dungeons. For raids, you have “x” amount of bosses, each boss has “y” amount of abilities. Let’s say 5 bosses, with the easiest boss have 6 abilities and the hardest boss having 15. On easy mode, each boss gets 1/3 of the potential abilities assigned by RNG. So easiest boss would have two abilities, hardest would have five. But, you never know what those abilities are until you fight the mob, and they are always different. The harder the mode of the raid/dungeon, the more abilities they bosses end up having. By doing this, you can never just go in and faceroll the encounters, because you will never know the combinations of abilities that you will be facing. Some days, it will be super easy, others it could be incredibly hard, but every time would be different.
