Not to mention improving your gathering skill(s) maybe even could let you gather more resources per "node" and perhaps even faster as well.
F.ex.
- Today you spend 6 seconds each Oak you gather. Lets say you instead spend 8 seconds each time when you just learned the process, and can improve your speed gathering as you fulfill certain goals by quests or badges down to f.ex amazingly 4 seconds. Reward players wherever they go!
- Today you use 10% of your selected resource to receive 1 unit of it while gathering. Perhaps it could start at 15%, and get improved by quests and/or badges down to an insane 5%. Don't make it easy though!
- Divide the possibilities to improve your skills by a general and a specialized direction. Where the general gives you a better understanding of all resources, and the specialized give you a better understanding of each resource separately.
- Let all resources start at 100% when you open a new instance. If nobody's been there, starting them all at 0% is simply not very thought through. Its not as if people can exploit it very much. And if they do? Let them... Still takes 2 minutes to reset an instance unless you run to a resurrection pad. Which both would normally be longer than to just run to another resource.
But before i go totally bananas on the resource subject here, these are just possible improvements. They would in my opinion add a huge bonus to each character as well as a better depth to parts of the game. But there are many aspects that could be changed, tweaked and even added to Age of Conan.
As i mentioned earlier, its not what the players want in the endgame that you should focus on if you want more players to come. But rather improve the impression of the game as a whole! (oh this is so important, i don't think any of the devs quite see it)
Now don't get me wrong, adding endgame content is also very important. But thats not where you receive new players! And Age of Conan needs more players..!
Not 10% more.
Not 50% more..
Not twice more...
But 10 times more! At the very, very least.
If you don't see whats wrong. Why more people wont come and stay in the game.
Perhaps it's time to bring in someone new who can think completely out of the box? Because i really believe you have found yourself stuck at the wrong tracks somewhere.
Many improvements to the game are really great! But they might not have been the right strategy always.
The game got potential. (guess you get tired of hearing this) And today its more common for users to have the hardware needed to run the somewhat demanding software Age of Conan at least used to be. The hardware is less and less a hinder for the user.