I can totally relate to this. When I watch boss fights in raids in WoW on Youtube, I cannot quite understand what is the point of this all, if all those circles and helper addons tell you every second what you need to do and where you need to move.
I can totally relate to that.
When I watch people climbing Mount Everest on YouTube I cannot quite understand what is the point of this all, if all those Sherpas and written guides tell you every step of the way what you need to do and where you need to move.
When I watch people in swim meets on YouTube I cannot quite understand what is the point of this all, if all those lanes tell you every second where you need to swim.
When I watch people build model airplanes on YouTube I cannot quite understand what is the point of this all, if the instructions tell you every step of the way what you need to do.
Etc.
There's a massive difference between knowing what you *want* to do and being able to actually do it. And managing to do it while still using your tanking/healing/damaging abilities well enough to beat the output checks. And managing to do all that a high enough percentage of the time (if you can "only" do it correctly 75% of the time (meaning you succeed 3 out of 4 times) then that's a 0.75^20 = 0.3% chance of a 20 person raid succeeding on any given attempt).
Not to mention the "helper addons" are not helping nearly to the degree you think they are. In the vast majority of cases they're telling you *when* stuff is happening (and you have to figure out how to react)...and the bosses are designed with those in mind.
If it was as easy as you seem to think it wouldn't take the best guilds in the world over 500 tries on the hardest bosses.
There was quality work made by other authors that got similarly buried.
One problem you can have especially in something like the Foundry is that it's part of a larger world. If I spend 20 hours doing a campaign in NWN, I don't care if I wind up at level 10 or 20 or 40. I don't care if I have a +2 sword or a +15 sword. Etc. The point is to play and enjoy the campaign -- it has no impact on other campaigns. But if you're trying to level up in an MMO and one questline is terribly designed but takes 20 minutes and another questline is amazing but takes 5 hours for the exact same reward...people are going to gravitate to the path of least resistance because they're viewing that content as part of a larger whole.
I don't know much about Foundry, but I don't think Foundry is the best example, since NWO is an MMO, and MMOs naturally rarely attract people interested in the story or deep gameplay, they are centered around endless and mindless grind. I have played WoW and SWTOR for a couple of months each for the story (KotoR and Warcraft RTS series are among my all time favorites), but the experience was less than satisfactory.
I can't speak for other MMOs, but if you think WoW is centered around endless and mindless grind then either you were playing in Vanilla or weren't actually looking for the deep gameplay. WoW has some of the deepest, if not the deepest, gameplay I've seen. There's a reason there's sites
dedicated to parsing dungeon runs to optimize performance and
fan websites dedicated to theorycrafting about *one* class that are more active than the NWN boards.
Besides myself, I think I've seen like...one...example of someone else writing a simulator to theorycraft in NWN. Most people don't even realize how much of a difference 1 AB or 1 AC even makes.
I'm not very hopeful that we'll ever get another community-based game like NWN again. The industry and the market seem to have changed too much for any companies to believe that the NWN kind of gameplay and toolset will be profitable, and the ones that do try to provide toolsets usually have the "toolsets" wind up being half-arsed, not very good add-ons, released half-finished with promises of patches that never come.
Part of the problem is that companies usually want people to keep buying new stuff...not engage in free community made modules. Look at the money EA prints with its sports game -- hey, a new year, update a few things, replace some old names with new names, and voila, instant money! A company wanting to do another NWN like game would have to have some method of monetizing the community stuf -- hosting services, monthly multiplayer access fees, etc. It's possible to do but I worry that many NWN players would reject such a model...even when it's the only hope of another NWN-like game at this point. And I think companies realize that and thus I'm not hopeful we'll ever seen one either.
Where the dungeon layout has a strategical aspect to it when you enter a combat. Something like darnise keep from BG2 was great level design. How they placed the trolls was awesome and difficult to combat. Interesting in a strategic pov '>
Because i noticed in many rush-through dungeons in ARPGs it´s just a fancy looking dungeon, cave whatever with enemys that dont make any sense why they are there or how they are placed. They just are and wait 1000 years for someone to come by to be attacked lol.
What do those two sections have to do with each other? By your definition, if there's a strategic layout and monsters are placed in awesome locations...then what does it matter if it doesn't really make logical sense for those particular enemies to be in that location?
I think it really depends on what map submission system is used and what kind of community is there. What you described with regards to Neverwinter's Foundry is quite typical for popular multiplayer-focused games, and the same problem exists, for example, in Starcraft 2: submitted maps are thrown somewhere into a huge pile, and, unless they are also actively promoted somewhere, the only real chance to dig them out is to use "Fun or not" system constantly, which selects a random map and lets you evaluate it. Of course, since there are hundreds thousands maps, most of them random works of the kind "I grabbed some beer, opened an editor and messed around a bit", most people give up on the system soon after trying it out (I gave up too).
Yes, I saw/had that problem in SC2 as well. Wound up mostly playing Squadron Tower Defense. I'm sure there were dozens, hundreds, even thousands of other good maps...but most of the ones I tried were just garbage.