100843-an-idea-to-help-leveling-through-zones

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I've been thinking on ways to alleviate some of the "quest hub" accusations, and alt leveling grind, especially in different areas. While looking at other games for inspiration, I noticed one of two things. Either its you level at a breakneck pace, making it all but superfluous to go through a zone (WoW), or the zones will be filled with extras, to help you level. These are things such as Rift's rifts, or FFXIV's FATEs, Tera's BAMs, etc. These all offer breaks from the norm, allowing you to go do something 'different' for a brief while, even if they especially are still combat based.
 
Anyhow, I was thinking on whether if such a thing could be connected to something like Wildstar, to break up some of the leveling monotony that people complained about at first (Going from A->B->C quest hub areas, move onto the next zone), as well as giving people a reason to actually party up with other people, and go back to previous zones, so its not just simply all the level 50's clustered in Blighthaven, and Crimson Badlands and the such.
 
The idea I came up with is basically taking "Challenges" and putting them onto a whole new level. Starting from a randomly spawning holographic generator, these would be sort of like "mini-adventures" that were put out by the Caretaker(s) from all the various Exo-Labs, decent sized spheres which instead of the long lengthy ordeals that adventures take, are more specially attuned to various aspects for lower level data gathering across large areas, which I'll call experimentations.
 
These experimentations would be based around each of the paths, Soldier, Explorer, Scientist, and Settler, functioning something like a mix between challenges, and path quests. For example, a soldier could be similar to a soldier holdout, but the waves are of higher density, and have to be done by a certain amount of time in order to get Bronze/Silver/Gold. An explorer, meanwhile, would be similar to things such as the Dominion side quest in Hyrcrest, in which you have to steal Cubig Alpha, Beta and Gamma by dodging between various traps meant to kill you, all while racing a clock. Scientist, the first idea I had is "logic puzzles", based around either regular logic, or based around ones knowledge of certain enemy types (For example, a moody based experiment would place various moodies around you, which while not exceptionally hard to kill, plays into their ability to store up life energy, instead causing you to have to draw them through Aurin roots to siphon their life energy off, else they infinitely regenerate.) However, the flaw of logic puzzles is that once you know how to do them...well, they no longer become hard, so perhaps another thing about them would be best? Settler was difficult to think of, due to its very passive quest types, so I was thinking perhaps something like a "horde mode", similar to the Soldier holdouts, but with an increased emphasis on building objects in order to help survive against more powerful enemies, and killing enemies for supplies to either repair/rebuild, or build new things, with an end goal of gathering enough supplies in order to finish a main thing, which would end the mode. Conversely, the building aspect can just be folded into Soldier holdouts, with an emphasis on waves instead as normal, and the building simply gives bonuses such as auto fire turrets, walls enemies have to break through to get to you, healing/buffing aura things, etc. Of course, one could always combine paths as well, such as races up trap infested mountains explorer style to hold the top of a mountain against waves of enemies soldier holdout style. Or a science mission, ending with a Soldier SWAT style use of special weapons they just developed in order to clear out enemies, etc. 
 
Of course, these things usually fall into a pitfall...namely, zerging. It always becomes a wild rush of people going from one to the next, robbing all but any difficulty from anything, both via sheer numbers, and overleveled members. Thusly, I'd suggest 2 things be put in place for things to stay challenging. First, to make enemies/damage have the varying level damage aspect, that you see on things like the world bosses. This would mean that even if someone were to team up with their level 50 friends, or come back to the zone later on in order to experience these things again. The second, would be that it would make various "instances", set to a set number of players. After activation, it would remain active for a short duration, allowing for people in the near vicinity to come into the area and activate the holographic generator, and at the end of a cooldown pairs them up in groups as the numbers permit. Ideally, this would allow for flexible difficulty, so even if there is only say, 3 players, they'll still get challenging content, without being forced to 3 man 5 man content. Vice versa, it wouldn't be trivial 3 man content for 5 players. Mob density, difficulty, etc., if it could be varied on the number of players would guarantee challenging content whenever, even if the number of players is low.
 
And naturally, whats something like this without rewards? While experience and money is quite obvious, having it be "level dependant" would be good, so that even if a level 50 goes off to help their level 15 buddy work their way up to 20, they'll still be rewarded for it as they would otherwise be, while the level dependent scaling mentioned before would ensure that it doesn't become abusable for farming (Since they can't just utterly steamroll things for good, level based rewards without any actual challenge still). However, for actual item rewards, I would suggest instead of dropping your normal loot you would think (IE, Green/Blue items which you find everywhere anyway), they drop more "specialty" things, such as area specific furniture, area specific crafting materials in bulk, dyes, and that line of things. Sort of like the Crafting Box/Supply bag rewards you get from challenges low level tiers, but as you go into Silver/Gold territory, they become more significant versions of the same things or rarer things without going into the standby of gear you get by doing all the other content. This keeps from making experiments the way to go about collecting mass gear, and instead rewards more unique items you wouldn't normally see dropped, leaving adventures, dungeons, and the quest rewards as more superior ways of still gearing yourself, while the experiments are entirely optional things you do to break things up, for extra boosts of exp, gear, and your optional side items.
 
What I think this adds, is more "wandering" of a zone. As it stands, once you complain any particular part of a zone, you really have no reason to go back. Ever. And once the whole zone is done, nobody will likely ever see any part of said zone again. The only things I see people party up for in zones, is the 2+, 3+ bounties, to which as soon as they're done, people usually just go their own way. While there are zone events, the ones I've seen have been one, maybe two per zone, and their rewards are given somewhat oddly, and are pulled from a specific zone event pool which you very well may outlevel. By adopting an instanced layer, you can preserve both the zone itself for anyone who doesn't want to do the content right now, and preserve the challenge, of you can't simply have groups of 50 run across from event to event, or big monster to big monster. And it would provide a change of pace, for people who don't feel like doing any particular quest chain, or just to do something small and challenging, without going into a full adventure or dungeon, and provides an alternative for people more interested in the "side" stuff, like housing and crafting.
 
Anyhow, thats my base idea. Its not perfect, but thats what a forum is for, discussion and refinement of ideas! Thanks for reading through all this!	
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			ACK! The Wall! The Wall!	
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ACK! The Wall! The Wall!
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			So redesign all of the zones?	
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{| class="blockquote"
So redesign all of the zones?
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