Expedite or don’t, we can all agree it’s terrible game design

There’s a thousand posts about this right now from both sides of the fence. People who don’t want to commit to the expedition saying it’s optional so what’s the issue. People who have committed a lot already finding out how much more they’ve yet to go.

Looking at it strictly in a game design sense, this only serves to channel players who want the full rewards down a very narrow path. The optimal strategy now is to play solo, sell all your gear, run minimal load outs and just loot goblin to make the 5 million.

That’s 5 million + the roughly 1 million investment already put into the expedition that will never make it into the raids. The same will happen next season but people will be shy with their loot from the start. All of this impacts how dynamic the raids can be. It will be a swarm of free load outs until the end of the season and if Embark don’t right this path, it will bleed into next season too.

Embark should be designing the game to bring the best out of it. We could have the last week of the expedition process be absolutely insane with all the top tier loot dropping into the hands of everyone as there’s a mad dash to just have fun. They could design the expedition to align with killing big arc or many other requirements that are gameplay orientated.

What we have now is a no fun grind that will only serve to burn through the long term players who will help to keep this game in good shape for a long time to come.