Much as I enjoy the company of some of the PvErs some of the time, I think PvE players are wholly blind to the tedium and boredom that area exploration is.

Whether it's for wands or other things, improving the difficulty scaling of PvE is not the thing that will save this game.

Making Hell playable for a group of 3 would be good news, in that I might actually be willing to learn a thing or two/help with exploration as long as there was a guaranteed tangible rewards (that a limited item some other explorefag might have gotten first already and is now illusionary is not a tangible reward, and the knowledge that the item potentially exists there is not a substitute if it's unreasonable to obtain solo without about 20k worth of preps)

But there's a large chunk of the playerbase that just doesn't give a #### about whether Hell takes 7 hours to get through, or that ST requires a freaking PHD degree in philosophy and a hobby for crossword puzzles and optical illusion books. Or worse, these things turn them off of the game further when the explorefags come out of the areas with items that make them unkillable (cheating to get them or not is irrelevant) and increasing the amount of people in a gang to kill the explorefags for them only makes them even harder to obtain for themselves while avoiding the exploration that is either boring or perceived to be impossible.

Making explore areas reasonable is not something that will save this game, unless it's part of scaling back the timesink dramatically and the pre-conceived notion that if you're not sitting down to roll a character and invest at least 300 hours into it, you don't deserve a reward, attention or to even exist. It's got to stop.

Game design, as a general rule, is an agreement with the player that a given task is not only possible, but reasonably challenging. You can tack on 'and not all-consuming in terms of time and effort' on the end of that as the CF playerbase ages. The standards of play in this game just don't work anymore and this giant ass thread is a big honking warning sign that this is the case as well as shining light on the bad parts of both the players and immstaff of the game as a whole.

CF is pretty crappy at advertising "If this guy can do it, it's possible you can too." because it's usually not true for any number of reasons regardless of what you pick out in the realms of RP, PK or exploration.