I've been kicking ideas around my head for the past week, and I think I've come up with something cool. Sadly it's going to take a lot of work, so I need to hear your opinions before starting. Encounters Mobs do not scale with player skill. With max gear, the only challenge is the Sewers or Wither. McMMO only makes this worse, but buffing mobs would hurt newbies. We need to make mobs in the wild work better. Let's make a fight that scales with skill (and multiple players). Our tool: Time limited waves. Each wave is more difficult than the last, and if you run out of time (or die), the fight is over. Player progress depends on skill and gear, and they can run away if unprepared. We'll also add a global time limit to prevent infinite waves. Encounters work like trapped horses. Wild mobs have a chance to be "encounter mobs", which start the event. Rewards are based on completed waves (no waves = no reward). The harder waves give better loot. Some potentials are extra exp, gold, rare/unique armor, and exclusive potions. Encounters make a few more changes possible: Kill quests can be replaced with encounter quests. This would help with their severe lack of balance. Zombie leaders can be de-buffed outside of waves. Their gold reward would also go away. Special mobs (MythicMobs) can be added to waves. If these mobs spawned normally, it would be too much for newbies, but they'd fit in perfectly with late waves. Once again, I really need your feedback on this one, it's not something I can put together in a day and test. I'm guessing I'd need 3-4 solid days working on a test server, which is a lot of time when I'm also needed on Survival.
These sound like decent ideas to me. I know how you feel about grinders too, so finding a compromise is pretty cool.