1. I’m not a fan of “hard” content. I like challenge, but not challenge that assumes that a large number of players will never be able to do it. Challenge should be enough that you have to pay attention, learn certain patterns, and get things right most of the time, but should not require perfection.
2. Having an event in which you need to get something right 12 times in a row, and failing it even once can kill you, is not “hard,” it’s just tedious if your succeed and frustrating if you fail. The best content follows the rule of three, do one activity successfully, then have to do it a second time with slightly more complications, and then do it a third time with even more complications. All three rounds should be forgiving of minor stumbles, and you should never have to repeat the same sequence more than three times in an event (I’m talking broad objectives, I’m not saying each boss should die in three hits).
3. DPS checks are not hard. If content can be done easily when everyone is in full Ascended Zerk, but not when everyone is in full tank greens, then that is not hard content, it’s just gear-check, and nobody should be proud at succeeding in it. You didn’t do well, your shorts did well. Content should scale to the stats of the group, with better stats allowing you to win it faster, but not being necessary to overall success.
4. If content requires large masses of people to succeed, but having a minority of the players fail can cause the entire thing to fail, that is not hard content, it is just frustrating content. If at least half the people know what they’re doing, an event should succeed, the more people that know what they’re doing, the faster it succeeds. In large group events, difficulty should be measured on a personal level, on whether you can survive the action, not on the average skill level of the entire group.
5. Hard content is not “superior” content, it’s just content some people like more. If you are the type that enjoys “hard” content, that does not make you better than those that prefer casual, and you do not deserve better rewards just because you enjoy “hard” content. Anything achievable via “hard” content should be equally as achievable using “casual” content, it just might come to you faster, for example if a “hard” event takes more time and has a greater chance of complete failure, it might reward twice as many tokens towards a cool reward, allowing you to acquire it faster, but there should not be rewards that can ONLY be gained through hard content.
6. If you have to bribe people to do “hard” content with cool rewards, then people don’t want to do “hard” content, they just want cool rewards. If this is the case, then you just shouldn’t have “hard” content because that’s clearly not what the players want. You should reward players adequately for the time spent, they should never say “I would do that but I’d make half as much as if I did this other thing,” but so long as they are adequately rewarded, if they still don’t want to do it, then they don’t want to do it, make it more FUN, not more rewarding.
7. As for breaking up the zerg, this is not hard to do, so long as you force it to happen. So long as everyone can move in a pack, they will move in a pack, because it’s the path of least resistance. The only way to avoid it is to make events in which you MUST engage multiple spread out targets at once, in which even 150 people on one only is impossible to win with, and you also need to convey this information clearly to the players. If they have to bang their heads against the wall or visit an outside blog to figure this out then you’ve failed, the event trackers need to make clear that some people need to go left and some right, and how many are needed at each, so that a totally new player who doesn’t know the event can figure out at a glance where he will be most useful. You have to balance out rewards and difficulty between events, otherwise people will just overload the easiest/more rewarding path.
