Greetings,
I am sure many people agree with me that few people hunt outside. This is bad news for the games future. Most missions 100+ are being held only in one zone BS. (yawn) The game world is beautiful and travel is part of the adventuring in RPG. I know funcom has decided to increase the exp for hunting outside. However, there is two problems with this idea as far as I can see it.
1. Travel time + hunting time has to be factored into experience accumulation. In a similar way when figuring out the damage of a gun you need to consider attack time and recharge time when evaluating. So, it may be faster still when it comes to experience to do indoor missions then going outside (except may be for solo, but travel back to mission after death is still faster indoors then outdoors - I think?).
2. If the experience and loot in hunting outside so much outweighs indoor hunting to make it very appealing then people will abandon indoor altogether for outdoors.
There has to be a balance. Here is my proposal. A dynamic outworld mission. Let us take Tir for example. There is an area called Greater Tir county. Change the name into Greater Tir (boundary) or such thing. Then create some sorts of portal (canyon entrance, mountain entrance, etc...) or just a whoompa like travel machine that acts as mission door. When you enter it you enter into a generic 'Somewhere in Greater Tir county' and you have an automatic generated landscape with scaled monsters and loot just like in indoor missions. The boss only appears when 90% for example are cleared, etc... so people can't just go for boss directly. This resolve camping, makes the world size almost infinite, and makes it very exciting! So, why do outdoor versus indoors or vice versa? Well, create certain monster loot that drops from outdoor missions that can be used in specific tradeskills, etc... So, for gun loot I would do indoor mission for bronto patch, as an example, I would do outdoor missions. that way people, depending on need, keep shifting between indoor and outdoor. You can put certain camps, as you are already doing, in static world landscape that require large groups for static hunting outdoors.
AO needs to find a balance between outdoor, indoor, and static dungeon crawl or it will run into difficulties. Just my thoughts..take it or leave it :-)
