Specifically things like instanced 5 man dungeons (like Ragefire Chasm or the Deadmines in WoW) which are explicitly designed to challenge a full party of a certain level range. Notably, not endgame content. I'm sure the answer changes based on different factors (e.g. how good are the rewards? What are the drop rates like? Are similar rewards available elsewhere? How long is the dungeon? Am I late picking the kids up from soccer practice?), but I'm curious what folks' thoughts are. I'm personally sour on the idea, but I understand that my attitude is "the less MMO an MMORPG can be, the happier I am", so MMO designers should probably disregard my opinion.
Supplementary Context: usually about once a year, I get the bug to hop into an MMO. However, I am not a good MMO player. I tend to flit around my gaming library like an ADHD pixie on cocaine, and there's no telling how long my interest will sustain itself. Therefore, any "meta" choice I make is purely by accident, and I don't spare even a moment of thought on "efficiency". In fact, I've often thought of my dalliances in MMOs as digital tourism. By and large, I'm there to craft, read quest dialogs, and poke around in the weird corners of the map for a couple weeks before logging off for another few years. Anytime I've ever done group content (which is, admittedly, not often), I'm desperately trying to keep up while someone nukes everything in the dungeon as they sprint towards the end. I wind up feeling like my lackadaisical approach is probably fucking up someone else's farming loop. Now, I don't think either the sweatlords or I are playing the game "wrong" so to speak, but our priorities are in conflict. Maybe I'm letting people-pleasing anxiety get the best of me, but I feel like the person that cares enough to grind a dungeon reward as fast as possible should get right of way over my happy ass who will intentionally sandbag my way through a dungeon if the vibes are right. Therefore, I tend not to engage with such content, if it's not possible to solo.
This has all come to a head because my current preoccupation is Star Wars The Old Republic. Given this game's much greater emphasis on story and dialog than a typical MMO, I actually feel like there's RP content that I want to see in the dungeons, irrespective of any item reward. To the game's credit, many of these can be done solo by selecting the "story" difficulty option before loading in, but not all of them. I just don't want to be the asshole holding up the party cause I want to watch the 3 minute into cutscene (or whatever) while everyone else is hammering their skip buttons trying to get to the boss.
Not necessarily asking for advice, as the solution seems obvious to me (it's "talk to your fellow players", like it always is), but I thought this might foster some discussion, especially from old heads who might have lived the raid life back in the day, but now have different priorities.
So im just playing the cryptica mmos and people joke they are one player games. Rewards are gated around events mostly but you can make a powerful endgame build with year around grind items. All of its grind is easy dailies but you get more repeating with alts on some. My main issue is I rarely have all that much time or im playing here and there and going away from the games so I can't really chat all that much. I would like to hang and light rp. mostly joking around with my rp. my time limits and the way the grind takes up time make it kinda hard. Its actually to bad because champions was kinda in a maintenance mode where you could quickly gear up endgame and most rewards were cosmetic but even better you could save event currency so if you did not have time one year but you did it a lot previously you could get what you want. They kinda got it going again and it has more of the grind of the others now though. They are easy games which I like. I often like to say its like playing with dollies. Its tab targeting and you can do some scripting to bind things to hotkeys and such. I have mentioned to places in the past they are nice games if someone had a handicap as you can make builds that just require a few things and following along to contribute. Even now the holloween event you can do the tfo daily which is a team but they have now split the components of the tfo into patrols which are single player.