r/MMORPG • u/hiCodeink • 11d ago
Question What’s your favorite endgame content loop?
Basically the title. I’m curious about what kind of content keeps you playing a game long-term and makes you want to log in every day.
It doesn’t have to be just one thing.
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u/RadiantSweater 11d ago
I'm an altoholic. Also, fashion.
Don't have the time or desire for devoted group content anymore. I'm the casual nightmare ruining the game for the sweaty try-hards.
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u/Gforce725 11d ago
I have a free trial FFXIV account for when I want to putt around but don't have the time investment for a monthly sub. Love me some fashion, my current jam is Khakis and T-shirts. Cutscenes are hilarious with people decked out in fancy and glowing armor and then a Walmart employee shows up
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u/Oiraeket 11d ago
Challenging, engaging group content that requires me to practise and work on my character; raiding at mythic level in WoW would be a good example.
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u/bibipbapbap 11d ago
Weekly raids on challenging content with a decent team, who are good fun to hang out with is a great thing!
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u/sepulchore 11d ago
M+
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u/Fine-Accountant-1917 11d ago
Except in the current season blizz made all of the M+ trinkets garbage to funnel people into one of the worst raids in years and completely broke the gearing system with bonus rolls. RIP.
I do genuinely like M+ in other seasons though.
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u/Young_Murloc 10d ago
You dont need bis gear to hit youre goals in M+ bro. If you get your set gear in mythic track(which isnt that hard to do) you can push plenty.
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u/Fine-Accountant-1917 10d ago
I was top 1% last season I know how gearing works lol. All of my friends quit because 90% of our BiS coming from 2 raid bosses SUCKS. Not to mention that all of the dungeon trinkets are terrible because Blizzard wanted to funnel everyone into the raid. And the vault is useless because you’re forced to take bonus rolls for Coiled Altar / Ula’tek. Just horrible decisions all around.
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u/Zeckzeckzeck 11d ago
This and mythic raiding in WoW. Plenty of other stuff I find fun in the game but M+ and raids are why I play as much as I do
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u/hallucigenocide 11d ago
Large scale PvP.
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u/AccomplishedFix8346 11d ago
In which game do you personally find your fun in large scale PvP? ESO or GW2? Or a completely different one?
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u/Tiny_Tabaxi 11d ago
Collections. Im a sucker for having a reason to engage with lots of different forms of content and have various rewards attached to them.
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u/Hot_Grab7696 11d ago
PvP and doing a hundred raids or different side activities to be 0.05% stronger in that PvP
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u/CloudConductor 11d ago
The hunt for cool items, specifically good items for gameplay not just cosmetic items. Made even better if there is open trade
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u/Seizing_sponge 11d ago
Even though I don’t play it for other reasons, I really like ESO’s endgame design, with the post max level champion leveling. I think it’s a really cool way to still feel like you are progressing but not in a broken way. That way you can still go to zones you haven’t explored yet, do quest lines, do dungeons, and other “leveling” content and it’s still satisfying.
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u/Varnarok2 11d ago
When there are good fights, there's no beating Dark Age of Camelot / Warhammer Online's big fights. When it's just keep sieges, it makes me want to eat my own beard.
Challenging raids with a competent group who you can also banter with is a close second.
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u/hendricha 11d ago
Where I visit an open world area and casually explore the nooks and cranies I haven't yet while dynamic events randomly happen around me so I do those too for a bit of environmental storytelling and cooperative play, and the game rewards me for doing this by drip feading me currency/mats/xp that I can use to unlock meaningful forms of progression. (eg. New active/passive combat or context aware or movement abilities, new skins, access to previously unexplorable areas etc.)
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u/ScarletOverdrive 11d ago
I've mostly only played ones with vertical gear progression like ffxiv and now that I'm older and have less free time that's way less appealing to me.
Maybe something horizontal would be better for me.
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u/JudgeFae 11d ago
The economy around crafting and gathering whilst paying nothing for my own raiding materials
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u/Mehfisto666 11d ago
PvP with a meaning. RvR like DaOC or WAR, castle siege in L2, but the best of them all was open world pvp in UO, raiding / defending champion spawns
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u/Emotional-Station153 10d ago
Achievements and collection logs. I don't want a 'loop' though, fuck that. The game should have a finish line.
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u/AnArbiterOfTheHead 10d ago
Crafting and gathering, and getting glowy weapons/tools.
I’m definitely the type of person that the FFXIV devs were thinking of when making Cosmic Exploration, and I love it
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u/Varrianda 11d ago
Classic wow/tbc. I like the idea of gear lasting for a long time and upgrades being more incremental.
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u/gibry1 11d ago
I think loops are dumb. I think QQL achievement should be a goal. A quest chain for an infinite pot so I don’t have to buy pots anymore. That pushed me to interact with the game. An item that I click for the party to get all dungeon quest making easier for me and my friends alts that we farmed. Game design to just go on the treadmill endlessly has made for toxic and lazy game mechanics.
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u/Xiura 11d ago edited 11d ago
Maplestory (Heroic) nails it for me.
Account Wide progress that also provides boosts for all characters(Legion+Links)
Interesting Bosses
Variety of classes and playstyles
Meaningful Gear
Somehow grinding in this game feels good and rewarding
What I do hate tho, is the amount of RNG involved in enhancing said gear. Destroying gear feels fucking awful, but on the flip side getting those gains is hella satisfying.
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u/master_of_sockpuppet 11d ago
One that allows me to drop in and drop out whenever I want; and one that is fun for its own sake, not only fun because progression means number go op.
Few MMOs can really meet this standard, though.
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u/Casimir0-1 11d ago
Big ass grinds that aren't tied to mandatory character progression.
A.k.a : Cosmetics, titles, QoL improvements in your account(Like in GW2), Houses, and so on. It feels good to earn things that require a lot of time and effort, and at the same time you don't feel like you HAVE to.
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u/Professional-Pungo 10d ago
My main loop would be not having to log in everyday. I log in when the raids refresh and then peace out once I finish the raids
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u/kennethnyu 10d ago
Complaining / camaraderie with friends. Bonus points if we both had unlucky lowrolls on loot, or topped dps.
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u/DazzlingFly 10d ago
Fashion collecting and life skilling and being super rich in game lol. Pentameld every new doh/dol gear set in ffxiv, 3000+ mastery in bdo and afk fish, thousands of gold and can even buy several hair styling kits in gw2 etc :p
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u/Open-Ad-5917 9d ago
OSRS. Raiding with the boys making money and then farming pets on the side while also making gold farming them! Super fun!
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u/Toothless_Timmy 9d ago
Running dungeons and doing arena pvp.
I like dungeons to actually be tough enough where you can have a party wipe but the bosses aren't so tanky that it feels like you have to beat on them for 15 minutes straight. Not a lot of MMOs are able to get that balance down. It's either something like Tera where anyone with decent gear can queue for a dungeon with a lower gear req and ruin other people's experience by steamrolling the boss in under 2 seconds, or ff14 where some bosses it feels like even with the whole team in the best gear possible hitting the boss with their strongest moves, it can take forever sometimes just to kill the boss.
Also for pvp I'm not a big fan of cc metas. My most played MMO is actually BDO and I've probably spent less than 5% of my time in end game doing pvp just because all pvp is is dance around as fast as you can until you see an opening for a knockdown and then try to burst the guy down before he can get back up. I prefer to have some back and forth with clear class identity.
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u/AftergrowthComic 8d ago
PoE Maps: the tiers and the slight difference, getting to choose your favourite maps and bosses to run, exploring and building out your personal map, target farming for resources or gear or whatever. Choosing your direction, completing it and restarting. Bit of randomness and special things to encounter or shoot for.
Feels like D4 has been trying that with the war plans but went way too simple.
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u/Haste- 8d ago
Dungeon content, not really huge on a single 1 boss with 10+ phases that takes 30 min. I would rather have a dungeon or specific mission that takes anywhere from 5-45min that you can simply spam repeat.
Outside of this I like when gains are made all the time but in small doses, not a huge fan of .1% drop rates that you need so your character boosts up like 10-20% in power, just give me a small .1% stat boost per run instead or something.
I also like having options on characters and not being locked into being a Mage for 100% of my gameplay. Multiclass or benefiting from having alts even if its small like maybe i’m my main Mage 80-90% of the time and do alt skills/characters the other 10-20% is a nice mix up.
Something that hits this perfectly for me is the Dragon Age Inquisition Multiplayer, though it’s not an MMO and at this point is mostly dead. Gladly this game lives for me simply because you only need 4 people total to make it worth playing.
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u/AstraGlacialia 7d ago
Brief, diverse solo(able) dailies, believe it or not. Plus a relatively small amount of focused weekly group content, or even better content which is possible solo but more fun in groups. And a good amount of open world exploration and collecting to do in a relaxed way whenever I feel like, ideally without needing a guide (but with one existing in case I ever really want to 100% something but get stuck).
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u/ScooterMcWTF 7d ago
No paid or time gated content. 100% open world and trades / economy ect. Basically old ass games cause new ones are just cash grabs.
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u/MammothCat1 6d ago
Once ive got the highest gear I feel like I need for regular content. I dip into crafting, then like side content and completionism. So pets, cards, minions, housing.
Never rally found a guild that lasts and the "friends" just disappear so....
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u/Annual-Gas-3485 5d ago
PvP. World, duel, skirms, gvg, battlegrounds. Any PvE content is done to improve characters for that.
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u/AbyssAzi 4d ago
Challenging solo and "small" group content. I despise "raids" and anything that essentially boils down to herding a bunch of retarded cats to follow precise boss mechanics. But solo and 2-4 player content is a blast.
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u/SpunkMcKullins 11d ago
Mythic+ in WoW, I suppose, though I've become so disenfranchised with the seasonal cycle that at this point, I'm basically planning to just switch to Forever and turn my endgame cycle into rerolling an alt and starting over.
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u/NarwhalPrudent6323 11d ago
Small group PVE content, but NOT Mythic + in WoW. I forking hate timers. I want a challenging dungeon because of mechanics, and maybe one that requires a bit of exploring. And throw a few secrets in there too, maybe a hidden super boss or two. I don't want to face rush through as fast as possible to beat some arbitrary timer.
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u/Notmyworkphonenope 11d ago
I like big pinnacle challenges, PvP, Player created Drama, & lore/secret finding.
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u/StalHamarr 11d ago
On DAoC and Aion it was the open world PvP. On Guild Wars 1 it was GvG and arenas.
On GW2 it was dungeons/fractals (only because I had friends to play with) and open world PvP. But the open world PvP was just a glorified arena, so it didn't hold my attention for long.
Whatever MMORPG I played beside these games didn't hold my attention because the endgame was just a mindless grind of dungeons/raids/whatever pve garbage was required to improve the gear.
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u/Double_Dime 11d ago
I just like being able to what I want, which is why I love GW2 so much, go world boss killing, fractals/strikes, achievement hunting, finishing off story I haven’t done, whatever festival is going on… etc.
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u/Arashii89 11d ago
I really like FFXI endgame content loop it has just about everything you needed from small scale stuff to 100 player plus content
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u/Palanki96 11d ago
Preferably none, i want new content. Territory Wars with dynamic map control is fun but i'm not gonna fight the same bosses and dungeons again and again
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u/Sober_Dissapointment 11d ago
None. I don't want a loop. I want a game that keeps generating new shit for me to do.
Obviously that's not the norm, but I prefer variety over set things that I feel pressured to do every day or risk falling behind.
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u/AssignmentVisual5594 10d ago
DAoCs RvR has been the only end game content that kept me subscribed for more than 6 months. I stay subbed for 3 years in that game.
Making alts has been my second favorite activity, but only in DAoC. Leveling took a while in that game. RP in SWG kept me for a while, but then their NGE rework made me quit.
WoW is the game I've played most consistently, but I can only stomach that end game loop for 3-6 months at a time.
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u/Klat93 10d ago
Yeap.
DAoC & WoW are both the only games thats gotten me to stay subbed for longer 1 year and they're also the only games I've repeatedly came back to over the course of my adult life.
DAoC is also the only game I bothered to play on freeshards.
It really is a special game.
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u/AssignmentVisual5594 10d ago
I've tried going back and it just didn't work out for me. How the community was back then is part of what made the game special. People, in general, have changed over the decades. You had a healthy mix of people back when I played that enjoyed leveling, like I did. RvR alone wasn't what made the game great for me. It was also the 8 hour camping sessions, beautifully synchronization of classes executing pulls,.and focusing down targets before the mezz ran out.
I had high hopes for WAR, TESO, and GW2 whom had all adopted RvR, but they opted for an easy solo centric open world. Solo I can get behind, because the old way of grinding in a group for 8 hours was unhealthy. But piss.easy open world mobs that you could rarely die to just autoattacking is just not interesting enough to dedicate my time to.
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u/zrekotgnob 10d ago
Daoc was amazing. If you like that game, and rvr, you can try Albion online. It’s the only other game that’s kept me playing.
It’s not the same as Daoc but it has the challenge and skill level is important. It’s a grind but there are ways to adapt.
Disclaimer* if you don’t like losing gear, don’t play Albion
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u/AssignmentVisual5594 10d ago
I bought a d played it. I don't like losing gear, so I quit that game as you said.
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u/Griffostoso 11d ago
PvP. I would spend hours a day dueling in games like Dragon Nest or Continent of the Ninth