What kind of endgame do you want?

I want to go back to the Rikti homeworld, kick their science butts from here to kingdom come, rescue Hero 1, punch H'rod'tz and Ukon'grai in the face and tell them to get the hell out of our dimension!

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

I want End Game so leet that not even I can succeed at it.

I want and end-game that isn't a boring grindfest.

I'm happy with whatever we get, because I am happy with the game today, was happy with it this time last year, and will no doubt be happy with it this time next year.

I want the endgame we already have.

I want plot variety. Previously, at level 50 you had a handful of level appropriate task forces with completely different plots. I want to see the same continue with the Incarnate stuff. Have the Praetoria stuff but also have other things as well. Antagonists have always been able to keep up with the protagonists in the comics no matter how powerful the protagonists got, so if you need Super Mega Nemesis in his Atomo-Meteor Powered Battle Suit or something, go for it. Just mix it up a bit.

I'm more or less on the same boat as Ironik.

The only difference being that I like the current end game design from a mechanics point of view. But the storyline could be better. How about a more villainous lean on it for once? Yes yes it's a story of survival as Cole doesn't care whether you're heroic or villainous, but they tend to have an overall heroic theme. Let's say they do 10 co-op SFs, make at least 3 of 'em be more evil than good. Let's call it a necessary action for the greater good, more lives said in whatever way.

Some of my characters

It doesn't have to be end game, but a lot more red side content.

Raid-wise, things we can do with smaller teams (3-8)

Hero: Save the World

Villain: Rule the World

I want new, pretty things. New opponents with new powers that do new things in new places with beautiful effects.

I guess no one's managed to complete it then, as I was still able to log in as a Hero tonight.

Actually, the kind of endgame I was looking for was an unfolding episodic story told Issue by Issue like an overarcing campaign. They would be told with story arcs, that scale to both solo and team sizes, and let us visit all the unexplored interesting bits in the lore, and see wild landscapes – the moon, underwater, Rikti Earth, things like that.

Praetoria for 20-30 or 30-40, or 40-50 would have suited me just fine. Not just Praetoria 1-20 and some shoehorning all our loose unrelated TFs into a gigantic ‘more game than world’ metagame of repeat to get a game currency to unlock more levels of power and here’s two scenario trials that are ostensibly set in Praetoria, but since you zone in, they could be set anywhere really, and given a different skin, no one would know. It just feels disconnected.

Back to endgame. The endgame would involve a lot of choice of preferred difficulty (http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2009/09/...ge-levels.html). Normal (or easy) mode should be soloable by most (or all.) Hard mode would involve greater rewards and provide coordinated teams with commensurate challenges. Mob layout would differ from the norm – perhaps different numbers spawning, or a random team size picked per map, and bosses might use some of the gimmicky tricks of the more standard MMOs. Same story, different levels of challenge, different rewards.

Encouraging players to take up the challenge, meanwhile, I think, boils down to crafty design of certain semantics and interesting or encouraging, not punishing or frustrating, failure states. If I have a 5 stage objective to achieve, and I only complete 2 or 3 stages, it feels like failure, especially if MISSION FAILED is splashed across my screen to reinforce this. If the same 5 stages are positioned as complete stage 1-3 on normal mode, and I get a reward commensurate with my participation, and 4-5 are bonus or hard modes... then if I do not complete 4-5, I still feel all right with a partial success, and hope to strive for the full completion next time. Especially if I will get a shiny bonus, badge, accomplishment, loot drop, reward out of being so leet as to finish it on difficult, hard, expert or nightmare modes.

In another browser game that I won’t mention by name, failure brings on some really interesting states, in which story avenues can develop, even though there is a time delay penalty to reinforce that you don’t want to fail too often. Another MMO allows one to lurk by one’s corpse and self-resurrect the first time very quickly, diminishing the frustration of the failure state. I would not be fond of an endgame that would return a lot of repeated failure states with little feedback and devolve into people playing the blame game with each other.