Hunt system
I've only started playing recently on the OriginsRO server but one thing i couldn't help but notice was the complaint of not enough content for end game - once you are done with your leveling there's not really that much to do besides WoE and the few easy MvPs in the current episode. On the server i used to play before, there was this thing called "hunts". The hunt system would serve for end game progression and many many others things - incentivise grinding even after you hit the maximum level, make you feel a certain sense of progression, bring people together for "guild hunts", somewhat streamline leveling if player decides to engage with it, make you explore the many amazing maps in RO that in my opinion are highly underused, reward you even if you are unlucky with low chance valuable drops ... and much more.
I hope the poeple from my former server forgive me for stealing this idea and posting it here ... :)
So what is it?
It's a very easy concept, somewhat similar to Eden group(? never really played with that so i'm not quite sure, just heard of it) - in every city and next to many dungeon entrances you would have a "hunt board". The hunt board offers you certain missions: kill 40 drainliars, kill 20 zombies, kill 50 Anubis etc., and each of these missions is repeatable certain (fixed) amount of times and once you are done with it you can never do it again.
Let's say you are at the orc dungeon, you see a board near the kafra and choose a hunt of 10 orc zombies. You go in the dungeon, kill them and come back for your reward. This hunt would be repeatable 5 times and every time you complete one you get 20 red potions. Once you complete the last one of them you get a special final reward - old blue box. This would be an example of the most basic of hunts, designed to help new players with leveling and guide them through the good leveling spots. It gives them valuable consumables for early levels and also rewards them greatly if they persist and finish it. It's short and simple without many repetitions.
There would of course be hunts for the more advanced players as well, ranging from long and grindy (killing 100 porcelios, with repetition of 20 times) to just hard to complete (kill 10 Tyrfings with repetition of 3 times).
Now this isn't all yet, for each completed hunt you would get 1 point, for the last mission of a hunt you get 5 points, no matter the difficulty of the hunt. The amount of points would be displayed on a ladder in control panel (allowing the top people to compete for braging rights). There would also be certain milestones with the hunt association, for example - if you reach 1000 points, you receive Old Card Album, reaching 2500 you get a custom costume, for 3000 points you get ... This is very important, as the sense of progression towards the next milestone is something that's sorely lacking in RO, in my opinion. It's also a great way to introduce some very rare and pretty costumes for the most dedicated players.
Also certain hunts would be only for certain jobs (eg Swordsman gets a wolf hunt, Acolyte has zombie hunt instead ..) and level restricted. This is to help new players and let them engage with the hunt system early, lead them through the early dungeons and not flood them with thounsands of different hunts to choose from. After reaching certain point milestone, the player would unlock all class restricted hunts (Swordsman can do zombie hunt etc).
The hunts themselves would have a certain progression to them. Let's say you completed all those orc zombie hunts for measly 20 red points and OBB (and some hunt points). However after you are done with that you unlock a more difficult hunt - Anubis. For this hunt you get way better rewards. After Anubis you get another hunt unlocked and so on. These chains of unlockable hunts are also a great way to itroduce better rewards for dedicated players, starting with something easy.
Some final things - only 1 hunt can be active at a time. You can freely switch between them - abandon your current one if you feel like it's too hard or wanted to do only 3 repetitions out of 10 for wthatever reason. The points, hunts .. the whole system is character bound, not account bound.
Guild Hunts
Just very briefly as this post is already way too long. Long hunts where guild master chooses the hunt for the whole guild and every time a guild member kills that monsters, it gets counted toward progression. Guild hunts would be very long and grindy (20k monsters for 20 people max size guild on my former server). These guild hunts would be similar to personal hunts with progression (public ladder of best guilds, unlockable hunts etc) and would include boss hunts (which personal hunts dont have for obvious reasons) - kill 20k medusas, which unlocks Tao Gunka (kill 20 of them?) guild hunt etc. After finishing the hunt the guild master would receive many great rewards for distribution to the guild members.
Guild hunts help with socializing - you have to gather a party of your guildies to go and hunt the bosses, you are on the same map for the long and grindy (20k) hunts and can talk to each other when resting and waiting for SP .. or your guild master chooses bathory hunt and you finally can grind those witch starsands with much more enthusiasm. It just gives you something to do while waiting for the next WoE.
It may seem very simple and not that exciting but it was EXTREMELY(!!) popular where i used to play and it's something i'm personally greatly missing here. There were hundreds of hunts where i used to play and the list slowly grew over time (it's something that just needs the basic implementation and then can be worked on forever with minimal effort), giving the players almost never ending supply of hunts to do (endless quest), letting them choose the hunts they want to do (do i want to do easy hunts to reach the next milestone very quickly or do a difficult ones for greater immediate reward from it?). The rewards would of course need a consideration and be balanced out with the difficulty of hunts. There's a lot of things that can be done with the system, i just tried to outline most of the basic ideas and concepts but of coruse it can be taken much further depending on the engagement of players and willingness to develop it further.