The Reality of our "Content"

In the spirit of this discussion, what possible solutions could you implement to alleviate these problems?

Also as far as I know GMS is the only version with LHC still being a party play area, and in at least JMS they can't decide whether they want Stronghold to be one anymore. One patch half of it is, the next none of it is, then all of a sudden all of it is. They can't make up their mind. Honestly with the concept of Monster Park, that's where Party Play should have been moved to completely. It's a nice instanced area with no possibility of KSing and a lobby for gathering a group, where everyone of a specific level range gets put in the same channel. It's the perfect place for it. There's no reason for Stronghold and LHC to stay Party Play, especially when they have versions of themselves INSIDE Monster Park.

As for the solution: That's really only half the problem. As I mentioned earlier, quests are the other half. The game shouldn't be all grinding. We should care about the questlines, the story, the characters. We should have objectives, especially for a game that has over 9 years of active development. There's really no excuse that there's practically NO questline worth our time. [MENTION=10378]Curtiss[/MENTION]; mentioned a few, but seriously...9 years of content and we have three to six worthwhile questlines? The fuuck is that?

Honestly, just giving players a reason to do things other than grind to power yourself up. In the end, when the max level is 200, people will always do what gets them to 200 faster. I've played a few games that decently do a system of quests being in bulk and monster EXP being crap, to force you to do questlines. That's not a perfect solution, but it certainly is far better than what we have now. I'd much rather do questlines than grind endlessly, but sadly there's really nothing to make that worthy.

Another thing I would do is make events in themselves questlines. Instead of having the same 15 minute dailies for events, having full fledged events where you do multiple things, and have reasons to care about event areas for more than half a day would do wonders. Right now an event comes out, and it's something you do for 15 minutes a day then stop because of either daily limits (like MS HS), or simply finish the entire event in 30 minutes and never touch it again. Both of those things are extremely awful. Heck, some of these events force you to grind, because they only give you drops from monsters your level and special mobs like the ones from MP don't drop said event item.

One more thing: Something they did back when Big Bang launched, but for some reason abandoned in the newer releases was that they made everything of the same level give the same EXP. A lot of people I know complained about this but this is actually one of the best ways to alleviate this problem. Sure, when you get down to it in the terms of pure grinding, some mobs were still way better due to their maps, however if you had quests to do, and they were actually rewarding, then you would have reasons to go to other areas than the "map with the best spawn."

Sure, I keep talking about quests, and there are other things they could do, but honestly, quests are the #1 issue. Every game has them, and in most successful games they are a pivotal part of gameplay. Heck, GW2, a game I've been playing a lot of recently, is essentially made by the unique way the quests are done in the PvE content. I don't ever expect MS to adopt such a system, expecting that is beyond foolish, but that's not the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm trying to make is that the game provides a unique experience by the way it implemented it's quests. MS doesn't even really have quests(that you would go out of your way to do), so it cannot even begin to compete in any way. At the very least giving us something to do that would compare to if we just simply grinded is the main issue that needs to be addressed.