The introduction of scenarios is actually quite a revolutionary thing for WoW: for the first time ever, there is a new size and "stakes" for instances, not to mention the fact that it breaks the need for the dungeoneering trifecta of the tank/healer/dps.
Scenarios were created for the most part to replace the old concept of group quests. Cataclysm famously de-groupified old group quests (the Battle of Darrowshire was actually a "raid" quest back in the day!) and introduced only a single group quest chain in the Crucible of Carnage (as part of the once-an-expansion Ring of Blood quests.)
While it's arguable that the removal of group quests from the game is symptomatic of the oft-bemoaned death of server communities, I would say that they've really just allowed for natural gameplay to occur. We tend to solo through the leveling content. The very nature of leveling up makes playing with a friend at all times unrealistic, unless you have a scheduled time to play together. While I think it could be a lot of fun to have a core group to always quest with (it would make leveling up squishier classes a bit easier, I bet) it just isn't very realistic.
The other major issue of group quests was that they were not repeatable. While you might still be able to help, there was no reward for doing it a second time. If it involved phasing, you would literally be unable to complete it (that said, I don't know if there are a huge number of group quests that did.)
So Scenarios solve a lot of problems. They provide incentives to repeat them - thus vastly increasing the pool of players so that those who have not yet done them do not have a hard time getting a group. They also, obviously, use the same mechanism that the Dungeon and Raid Finder use in order to find your group, and with no role requirements, the queue is nearly always instant.
Not only that, but the objectives of the scenarios are usually a bit more varied than, say, a dungeon. The goal of every dungeon is simply to get to the end - fight your way through trash and defeat the bosses. Scenarios can involve things like searching an island for lost booze (I get Unga Ingoo vastly more often than any other scenarios - I still have never done Greenstone Village) or putting out fires while fighting off saurok.
At the moment, scenarios are all 3-person affairs, but Blizzard has stated that they could be for any number of players from one to forty.
And yet, I don't run a huge number of scenarios. I love them, conceptually, and I think they're good fun. The problem, of course, is that the rewards are quite underwhelming. A random run of a Scenario (which takes about ten to fifteen mintues) will net you a handful of Justice Points (which there are very few compelling things to spend on, especially if you've been running dungeons a lot) and forty Valor Points (which, of course, you'll need to grind rep to spend, and forty isn't a huge amount, considering we're paying 2250 for some of our pieces.) You also do have a chance to get a piece of gear in your little treasure box, but I have only seen such a piece once, and it was a Holy piece - the spec of Paladin I have never, and probably will never play.
Of course, there are some compounding issues: You don't want the rewards to be so compelling that no one ever waits in a dungeon queue again. Scenarios have the potential to be very attractive to DPS players, because their 10-15 minute wait is replaced with at most 30 seconds. Of course, the other issue is that dungeons right now are so quick and easy that it's not really a burden to complete them, and given the far better chance at compelling rewards, it's not really significantly more effort (aside from queue times.)
Now, as I said in my last post, I think there is room for a third progression path - the heroic quester. Scenarios could play a part in that, but of course the problem when you introduce group play as a major thing is that the same group dynamics that appear in dungeons would take hold, and one would be left wondering what the difference was. The heroic quester would have to be a solo affair (or at most, three people, though even there you could have the trifecta.) Granted, Scenarios can handle this, but I don't know that this is where Blizzard would want to take them.
The one scenario that I am always sure to run on each character, practically the moment they hit 90, is Arena of Annihilation. This scenario has a quest inside that, like all the Ring of Blood variants, gets you a very decent weapon with which to start heroic dungeons. As far as I know, this is the only scenario that has a quest inside. Given that scenarios were conceived as an evolution of the concept of group quests, it strikes me as strange that other scenarios do not have quests. While quests would not inspire repeat scenario-ing, they would give us a compelling reason to hit each of them up. If you could get a nice selection of 450-quality gear from these, it would be an excellent stepping stone into heroics and raid finder (admittedly, we don't need much of a stepping stone to get into heroics at this point - heroic dungeons now play much like they did in mid-to-late Wrath of the Lich King, making these the easiest heroic dungeons the game's ever seen.)
Essentially what this all boils down to is that we need to ask ourselves what role Scenarios serve. If they are meant to be something to do quickly and easily instead of heroics, then heroics should probably be tuned a little tighter (too late for that.)
I think what it ties into is the overall question of time budget. Whenever we play the game - whether we have hours and hours to spend on it or just a quick break between work and other things - we try to be efficient in our expenditure of time. For the time we're online, we like to see significant progress made on whichever character we're playing. Scenarios are fun, certainly, but so are dungeons and raids (ok, Raid Finder, at least as a tank, tests that theory.) When you have a choice between two things that are both fun, it's a no-brainer to go with the thing that rewards you better.
Perhaps Scenarios are merely a victim of the fact that dungeons are so easy right now. If they had been introduced with 4.0 or 4.1, for example, we might have been relieved for the opportunity to do something that wasn't Heroic Grim Batol.
Scenarios are still extraordinarily new. I would guess they are still finding their identity. They may remain roughly where they are for the rest of the expansion, but when the next one comes out, I would not be surprised at all to find that Blizzard comes up with something to make them a more compelling gameplay option. Until then, enjoy your tiny trickle of VP.
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