The E-sport thing is an entirley seperate issue not relevent to this topic but the casual friendly problem is still an obvious affair.
The truth is its clear A-net went into HoT with the same ideas that WoW had with TBC trying to appeal to a minority so that the minority was happy at the expense of the majority. This logic is designed because they think it makes people want to become part of that minority over time.
But I have a rude news flash, people dont care about being on par with the best players out there, they dont even care about the idea of playing the game on their level.
The problem is, most HoT content centers around the idea of cooperative group play and extreme levels of ascended mat farming for the best possible gear when it comes to the end game raid.
This is an immediate problem because it means two things:
1. The game has now chosen to center itself around guild community as opposed to the individual thus forcing people to join guilds or party up with people to even experience most of the content when catching up to those that were there at the inital wave.
2. It also creates the issue of isolating people that like playing smaller content for the same level of reward, the world has moved forwards and the MMO Industry is not as 12+ as it used to be and even then kids have school and adults have jobs. The issue lies in that the content of the old world was never intended to be time consuming save the absoleute trophy point things like legendary weapons.
Ultimatley, the problem is, the old world lacked hard content, now the expansion has too much of it, the entire content shift has fluxed 180 on its audience. The origional game was more centered around less time spent for the same reward, which is why you got stupid amounts of crests per dungeon run to buy gear, and why you got the ability to respawn “in” the dungeon to just overwhelm the boss. The challenge was really about rush-respawning the boss to death as opposed to respawning when everyone else is dead.
Im not necessarily saying that was a good practice, im saying that was “the” intention.
It was designed that way onpurpose, because it was meant to be relaxing, fun, casual friendly.
This isnt, none of the content in the end game right now is even remotley designed like this, if you dont have a group theres a strong chance that unless you farmed ascended, fractals and infusions to the tip your character is never going to solo those elite challenges.
The cost of ascended mats has never been higher and neither in that same context has the cost of gearing in general, getting gear isnt hard, getting “good” gear, best suited to your class “is” considering some of that gear stat is literally behind a wall of farming so some stats are literally impossible without farming them.
This essentially creates the paradox in which gearing becomes a grind wall, and that grind wall, which a-net promised to eliminate is clearly there even if they try to hide it behind an idea like mastery, which is just as grindy.
Grind, is a definition of a Hardcore, having the time to grind something and spend days on days earning a long reward is hardcore, is elite, is what those with the commitment to do it “are” by defitinion. It isnt simply doing something hard, its doing something that takes a long time to do.
And that isnt what the majority of players wanted, or ever did want in the first place.
Thats why HoT feels badly designed, because it appealed to a 1% of people that wanted a wall of content hidden behind a long farm, vs the 99% who hated the idea of such long consuming content that takes forever to do.
Basically, you solve this by simply avoiding it anymore, simply give people what they want and add the “option” of a challenge, maybe a unique head skin for people that farm content enough like Silverwastes was.
Silverwastes, in terms of actual design was perfect, it had just the right level of content to be both grindy, and yet at the same time accessable and dooable in a short span of time.
This isnt the case with HoT, most zones gated content literally restricts some rewards behind tiers which cant even be achieved because of poor coordination or other problems (Verdant Brink is a great example of terrible design, why the hell put a raid portal in a map that requires a 4 tier effort to get the chestpiece?)
Ultimatley, theres just a case of “poor design” in this universal level of map making, game play and general choice focusing too much on the idea that after 2 months people will still be doing the same content.
Which they aernt because they either got what they wanted, or they gave up trying.