I mentioned this earlier, but essentially what you would have done if you were to make this the best way to achieve anything in LE is reduced the game down to a single mundane task, that would then also require a long (if not extremely long) period of concentration from the player in order to complete. Players would then be wasting their time not to use it by hours and hours, which means people would play it just to see the content in the game sooner, not necessarily because it was enjoyable or fun to play.
Moreover, it’s not easy to vary or make more interesting because it’s a single task, of killing waves of enemies. Think Monolith, but every node is the same and also doesn’t end for 30 plus minutes. If it had any novelty, it would wear off in two to three attempts. In other words, if you’ve done it, you’ve basically seen what it has to offer. So it would be the ultimate repetitive content. To then all but mandate players keep playing it in order to not waste hours of their time trying to get gold, experience and items would be to make the game ultimately repetitive. This is why I think it would be fine as a challenge to do at the end of the game, but probably shouldn’t be the best way to play the game.
In addition to that, over the long term you’d be changing the attitude about what makes a build viable in the game. Only builds that were able to make it to the latest stages where the rewards were the best in this mode would be considered viable. Unless you make the rewards cap out fairly early on to avoid this, players would be stuck considering any spec they wanted to play that couldn’t do this to be not just suboptimal like a lot of them are now, but actually pointless if they were trying to play at any level of efficiency.
This is not just the case in ARPG’s, by the way. The more simplified any type of game becomes, the more the creators must rely on things like loot, luck and peer pressure to keep the audience engaged. Games like Fortnite and Apex actually bypass this long period of concentration problem by giving you a bunch of random upgrades during each match, but also by randomly seeding your opponents by where each of you chooses to start on the map, so that you feel like you have a high chance of winning a match based on the luck around that decision at the start of each match. In other words, you have a huge incentive to start over again immediately every time you die, which makes you feel the time investment you lost playing the previous match less. This is an almost-malevolently genius model these developers have figured out for how to keep people engaged with what is otherwise an extremely simple formula for a game. Apex, Fortnite, PUBG, all these games are markedly less complex than ARPG’s or even competitive shooters that have come before them, and yet people are more obsessed with them than they’ve ever been.
I personally don’t even think the fact that people play them automatically makes them good content, so much as it demonstrates that developers are manipulating those players psychologically to get them to keep playing as long as possible. There’s no evidence than any fighting or interaction they have during those matches is any more fun than the experiences they could have in other games. In fact, a lot of those games involve just running around and hiding until key moments. It’s evident that you could have a lot more fun interactions with other players playing other games for that same amount of play time.
