Guild Wars 2

TL;DR: Introduce instanced events a-la challenge missions from GW1 to create replayable, competitive PvE for a (relatively) small amount of work.

First let it be known that I am not clamoring for raids, they personally are not for me but I think that this system could make for easy to implement content and would help create the friendly PvE rivalries you see in Raid-based games when large guilds are competing for progression.

Proposition: Add an interactive object (NPC, Wanted Poster, etc) at various places where Dynamic events happen. When a member of a party interacts with this object it presents a confirmation dialog to enter the Event Challenge with the current party. If they accept the party (or customizable roster if a larger group is desired) will enter a Personal story style instanced version of the area where the event will trigger. There can be minor changes to the event to either increase difficulty or to make the experience more distinguishable from an ordinary event.

Balance: You already have a very simple way of increasing the balance for mechanic of this kind. When the event starts you set the difficulty scale equal to the number of members attempting the event. Then after each wave or objective (or periodically throughout) you scale the event as though more people were involved. This method could also be used to calculate the resulting score (since it would be score oriented rather than completion oriented) by utilizing the groups effective number when they succumb to the challenge.

This would allow you to add repeatable, challenging content on a synchronous schedule with regular content releases. It would also add additional content that has a very low barrier of entry (players will see Event Challenges as extentions of events, which they will already be very familiar with) and offers a form of content presentation that would increase gameplay variety by featuring a “Daily” event challenge similiar to the Zaishen quests of old.

The natural evolution of event -> event challenge would prevent this being seen as a transition to an “endgame” and would be made even more subtle if used the same gear normalization as sPvP (though with a seperate build).

I don’t think this would disrupt the feel of the game and it would give “raiders” something familiar to them to do.