Designing an MMOPRG is Easy

The loot design for the Headless Horseman is pretty fascinating to me. The Headless Horseman is part of WoW's "Hallow's End" event (aka Halloween), and most of those events have a boss in an old instance that you go kill.

Anyway, the loot is great -- it's layers upon layers, solving multiple problems.

Problem 1 : How do you get new players to do an instance for possibly the first time?

The Headless Horseman drops several nice rings. They will not replace any raid gear (because that would cause other problems) but they are a nice upgrade for a new player. Now, I'm not saying that a new player would necessarily know about this, but if they did it would encourage them to get out and group.

Problem 2 : How do you get the average player to do the event every day?

You don't want people to do the event just once and then quit -- you want them out there doing the event for most of the two week event.

So you tie an achievement to two semi-rare drops, but do not make them super-rare. You want your achievements to be achievable -- so you give the items a high enough drop rate that pretty much every player should be able to get both over the course of two weeks.

Problem 3 : Once they get the drops for the achievements, how do you get people to come back?

You want people to continute to participate once they have the achievement for two reasons -- first that they are enjoying the event you created, second that you want everybody to get the achievement items, and that's easier if there are more and more people who don't need them.

So you add a sort-of unachievable goal (that is not an achievement) -- a rare mount that most people probably won't even see in two weeks.

Problem 4 : How do you make people do the encounter in a full group?

No sooner would you put this encounter out on the servers than a raid-geared hunter would figure out how to solo the thing. It's nice as an achievement, but you want people to be grouping, both because you want to encourage grouping and because you want the best players in the game in groups with people who aren't, helping and sharing their greatness.

So instead of making the encounter a once-a-day event for all involved (with a 30% chance to drop the achievement items and 1% chance to drop the mount), you make the encounter started-once-a-day-per-character with appropriately lower drop rates, so anybody not going in with a full group is handicapping their drop rate.

Problem solved, right?
There might even be layers that I'm missing here, or maybe I'm overthinking things. Designing a MMOPRG is hard work, though, and you can see how difficult by seeing how much work goes into the loot for a boss that is only in the game two weeks a year.