What could make hazard zones more appealing?

Down with your suggestions!

I am an old timer who has characters that I love to street sweep the hazard zones. Few things in the game are more fun for me than a rough and tumble hour in Crey's Folly carving up all the mobs with there with a Brute or Scrapper that can handle it.

And the BEST part - aside from the stray solo doing a door mission, no other players are there kill stealing and spoiling the fun.

Y'all have plenty of other zones and trials and task forces to do your teaming crap so just leave my hazard zones alone! I am glad you don't like the zones and happy you stay away from them. May it forever be so.

I always thought the best way to revamp the hazard zones would be to add PvP zone style minigames to them, with the potential to get temporary powers and other rewards. Granted for the sake of balance you would have to add some hazard zones redside too.

They can revamp old zones to be as pretty as you please but that won't get players doing anything more than a quick tourist visit. You can add a new story arc ala Faultline, but after going through it once, most players will just file it under "been there, done that" and probably never bother with it again. You can add zone events geared towards large numbers of heroes ala The Banners, but if there aren't enough players in the zone at the time, it will just be ignored.

Generally speaking there is only one thing that brings lots of players to a zone and keeps them coming back for more. Compelling rewards. You make the content in a zone interesting, repeatable, and full of rewards that players want (and need lots of) and it will be swarming with toons. The rewards draw players. Players beget more players. Before you know it, you have a large, relatively stable population of toons in the zone ready to take on whatever zone events might occur. Players have demonstrated a monumental capacity for grinding repeatable content so long as the rewards are appealing enough. The devs need to focus on the rewards.

I like the idea of turning the northern half of Boomtown into a massive 5th Column Operations Base, akin to the Rikti Mothership. Make it the center of a new story arc, a new set of repeatable missions ala radio, ongoing zone events, a TF, and maybe even an Incarnate trial or two. Make alignment merits, rare invention salvage, incarnate threads, astral merits, and R/VR incarnate components standard reward fare and Boomtown would become a thriving zone to a degree it never enjoyed before.

It really seem to me that it ultimately comes down to the rewards (particularly when it comes to repeat play), not the specifics of the content per se.

What the question is really asking is how to make things less instanced. But at this point in the game, it's really all about instances. There used to be a lot more zone hunting and street sweeping, but instances are much more efficient and the difficulty is much more easily adjusted to suit the player. I don't see much other than major revamping the way content is generated and decreasing the total amount of zones.

The population of this game, even with the recent influx of free players, is on a slow decline. And yet the number of zones and servers have increased. There's no way to make zones more populated without decreasing the zones and decreasing the instancing, which isn't going to happen.

I think what they are doing with RWZ and the soon to be released DA are the way to make the hazard zones more appealing. Arcs, repeatable content, and rewards for high level players to play in those zones.

Faultline was awesome when it was put in and it still is awesome as it improves the replay value of early level play. You can do low end content in multiple ways now hero side. DFB, starting contacts.. KR or hollows.. Hollows then Steel/Sky or Hollows/Faultline.. KR/faultline.. and they even get more diverse as you get higher and higher in levels.

The problem with current hazard zones is that they are a hazard for certain ATs and are basically free xp for other ATs which don't require groups to survive inside of them. My controllers can't solo hazard zones but my tanks can easily do so. There is no incentive for my tanker to team and my controller can't find anyone to team with to run around the zone. I do enjoy street sweeping on occasion but its very biased towards melee ATs.

One thing I've often wondered but have not looked into is if rewards are shared across a league outside of a team up teleporter trial.. if it is then it would be interesting to take a league of 48 players into a hazard zone and sweep as the various groups across the entire zone but remain in the league to pile on the rewards. With so many groups and players working towards such a singular goal it may just be faster gains then missions.

I was thinking more of having something similar to the RWZ effect... Have it more spread across levels have like hollows from 8? To 50 boomtown to its min level to 50s and so on with perez, faultline? Maybe.. Then re put galaxy city is as a hazard zone as well and revamp some other ones

And If there was a hazard destroyed galaxy put some new exploration badges and have the enemies go to 50s in the zone to

As well as making some co-op like what they are doing with dark Astoria revamp

I didn't know that's why I put the ? Next to it.. My bad