Fix pve content.

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What is more/better pve exactly? What do we mean by "not just the grind"? Do we perhaps mean something challenging mechanically, that requires you to stay on your toes and use everything you got in your arsenal effectively?

I'm asking seriously. One of the core issues of game development is that the players do NOT actually want the things they are asking for. Here's an example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/throneandliberty/comments/1jbe65o/umbrakan_is_umbroken/

That particular boss was added recently to TL and it is a salt mine. It offers the players of that game what you seem to be asking for, yet many of the reactions of the playerbase seem to be the type you can preserve foods with.

Also, Ashes styles itself as a shotcaller MMORPG. In other words, decision making, coordination, reaction speed, quick teamwork should all matter significantly more than gear, or at least as much as. In other words, making it easier for more types of players to engage in pvp because of the gear they are supposed to get in pve would not actually have as much of an impact as you expect. Training exercises and friendly war games (once again I have to thank TL for the idea) are way more likely to get pve players into pvp. You gotta remove the jitters before the +5 damage can mean anything.

And on that note, you know who more/better pve is likely to help if not done well? Bots. In every single MMORPG out there, there's an overlap between bots used for RMT and weak pve players who cannot grind the more difficult content for drops. The more accessible you make the good gear, the more you increase that overlap. Your weaker players get it, and the good bots also do. This is an unavoidable challenge for MMO designers and you're basically asking them to make that challenge bigger for themselves for unclear benefits in terms of player enjoyment (once again, I am referring you to the link).


TL;DR: it's exhausting for a game dev to have players ask for things they don't want.

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Lots of dungeons and raids are fine. FFXI and TL show that good dungeons and raids can help carry a lot of water, but they also show that this alone doesn't fix PvE. In a game where the openworld matters at all, then you gotta make the open world be pleasurable content! TL overworld is bland and mindless before Talandre. After Talandre it is fine but it encounters the 'outleveling' and 'out enchanting the complexity' that you mention in your op very quickly. I get we need casuals to enjoy the game and the open world can't be too difficult but danger and difficulty are NOT ACTUALLY THE SAME. Difficulty is a matter of execution, time, and effort. Danger is a matter of strategy, knowledge, and 'fighting the "right" thing in the '"right" place'.

As an example, let's take FFXI which does in fact have a lot of good dungeons/raids and challenging open world stuff. When I'm going through the standard journey to 75 (let's not touch on the modern level cap or we'll lose all details) I have a ton of zones where I'm forced to pick my specialty. Every zone has an ecology and that ecology of enemy type was intended to correlate to what each class was intended to specialize in For example, as a Red Mage I mostly focused on things like plantoids and arcana. This was because I could burst through most of their healing/big dps, but I could also really feel the meaning of my buffs and debuffs. I could fight a morbol, to be more specific, but there was also bigger more complex morbols in the zone (usually an elite mob) that would fucking own me even though I was at level for the content. But fighting the lower morbols DID help me learn how to beat the nm's. And eventually I got 'mastery' to handle any situation like a random social aggro or bad pull where I had multiple morbols. As a puppetmaster, on the other hand these enemies fucking destroyed me and I was 'forced' as a puppet master to learn how to fight birds and beetles. Less complex, but the evasion and defense respectively required a different set of skills that would cause my poor Red Mage to tear her hair out.

That's a lot of words to say that PvE in a good game requires scaling complexity IN ZONE. Not 'by level'. Otherwise everyone, and I mean this with all the respect I can muster, will ignore the mobs you spend a lot of time on to make interesting and cool looking and flavorful for the setting (side eyes are happening here Throne and Liberty, great job with the Black Anvil zone though that was a great example of positive improvement.)

So now that I've established that PvE requires good mob design and different levels of complexity in a zone to truly fix PvE let me now explain why it must be this instead of dungeons and raids (as the sole issue). Tl;dr modern players whine about hard content being too strong and requiring a party. In FFXI this happened too, but for open world areas! So it's not a new problem. But you know what happened once they started designing even more complex zones? The players moved on to new things to whine about! It's a solved problem! Because you know why? And this is entirely speculation on my part. They probably stopped sucking at fighting morbols and got to be in a party to fight the cool morbol bosses in a party because they stopped dragging down the party's they joined you know? In TL they tried to fix this by having a weaker version of their morbol equivalent to 'practice on' but while that works for already established groups it makes for TERRIBLE PUGing. And in fact this was possibly the number one complaint for TL before Talandre. There were too many people struggling with dungeons and getting kicked out of groups and that killing a lot of ability for players to progress. In an open world design the stakes are lower than a dungeon. You just have more freedom to fail and learn. And the developers due to both budget and sensible design, tend to give you a progression of things to fight if the game is good.

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sure, but it's too early for any of that

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PvP balance and grind/farming satisfaction are almost directly opposed, though. It's incredibly difficult to get away from that fact and have it still feel like an MMO at all.

I say this only because sometimes it isn't 'disregarding', it might be 'choosing their poison' or even just 'giving up after a long battle with it'.

Intrepid's philosophy is basically 'fail faster but never the same way twice' (paraphrasing) so, if you had to give up most of one or the other, which is it?

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Why do you think multiple MMORPGs made these mistakes?

Are the entire game industry generally idiots? No. It's simply that whatever you feel best playing seems like the correct answer to you.

So if 300 people leave a game because 'farming regular enemies doesn't feel good and the game feels like it doesn't respect their time', and the remaining players respond with any equivalent of 'their problem'/'players too soft'/'game isn't about that', then the devs have chosen their poison. Will it kill their game? Depends on if they know the correct combination of poisons to drink.

Right now, Ashes feels bad to me and Throne and Liberty felt good, but I know that TL needs to cater to less invested/immersed casual players soon (or technically, already has done so for this update) and will feel worse to me.

Not because 'the game is worse', but because it stops doing the thing I like in order to do something someone else likes.

A sandbox PvP MMORPG is a buffet of 'poisons'. You can't tell the devs 'just make the food good'.

Anyway, I guess I'll assume you 'prefer that progression feels bad to most people' until you clarify otherwise. I too, 'prefer that progression feels worse but Devs focus on enjoyability of the game whole' (ArcheAge) over 'progression feels good but the MMO part falters' (Black Desert).

Ashes is currently on the BDO side, and so far, it seems intentional. I'm just gonna pray that TL works a bit harder and falls on the other side.

"Making common mistakes while innovating/combining things is not a matter of laziness in design."