But the current situation doesn’t incentivize, it mandates. There’s nothing wrong with incentive. But we’re not talking about incentive here. We’re talking about forcing people. And forcing people to play in a manner that they don’t want to play in is never good game design. Have heroic and mythic raids, but gear progression shouldn’t run through that. It should be titles and cosmetics.
The problem with retail is it only appeals to a very small percentage of the player base. When you run gear progression through infinitesimally small percentile difficulty, most players aren’t going to be interested, and will just go play another game. That infinitesimally small difficulty percentile should be reserved for novelty achievement, like titles and cosmetics.
But a raid finder should be adequate for a standard gear progression raid in SoD.
That said, gear drop rate should be more rare so the content is expanded. Add a little Diablo spice to it.
Not that I think synchronized whack a mole where the pattern stays the same is that difficult. It’s just tedious learning the patterns with a bunch of other people who also want to do the same thing and have the schedules to do it. I mean whatever floats your boat.