I often wonder why I have little to no interest in playing World of Warcraft these days. I was trying to think of examples of content that kept me interested in playing regularly, and I thought of MoP Challenge Modes and things like the Warlock Green Fire quest. Meanwhile in WoD I blazed through the leveling and first round of dungeons + LFR to see the story and never felt compelled to progress much further. Why is this? This is my theory.
WoW's --general-- current model for challenge in relation to group size looks like this:
Solo play: easy
Small group play: easy-medium
Large group play: easy-medium-hard
IMO it should look like this:
Solo play: easy-medium-hard
Small group play: easy-medium
Large group play: easy
Here's why:
When you compound difficulty and challenge ON TOP of social difficulty and challenge like raid schedules and guild stuff, you double up the level of stress tolerance needed for a player to get involved in that content. As it stands now, a player can, totally free of social difficulty participate in the easiest content in the game - they blaze through quests and the normal dungeons effortlessly.
Leveling + normal dungeons:
Content difficulty: 1/3
Social difficulty: 1/3
What's the next step of progression? Dungeons, well you can easily queue for heroics and maybe do some 10man raids, but now you need some sort of guild and might have to participate in schedules and all that.
Content difficulty: 2/3
Social difficulty: 2/3
Last part? Heroics and Mythic raids. A large social difficulty threshold on top of a large content difficulty threshold.
Content difficulty: 3/3
Social difficulty: 3/3
So, at least according to my theory, the reason why there is such a massive drop off here of raiders and people willing to progress beyond a few dungeons and normal raids and stick around, is that those two realms of difficulty in this game work exponentially AGAINST the player.
If the spectrums of difficulty of content and difficulty of social constructs in the game were inversely related, I think that would be more accessible for the player.
To me the perfect setup would be to have things like the Hunter Rhok'delar quest, Warlock Green Fire, Rogue Dagger quest and small group content (like 3 players) reward some of the most powerful items in the game, but to actually require you to progress oppositely through those content areas. Raids would be more fun like getting people together to do a world boss with 2-3 fun mechanics just to get some cool items and stuff once a week. Solo content would have extreme personal challenges that wouldn't require you to be on a schedule and deal with all the social stuff.
But the really money spot would be the small/medium group content. A moderate challenge gradation here where you don't need to necessarily put together a full 20 man raid group, maybe 5-15 players flexible, but would have medium challenges. This would be the "primary" content.