You want to breaks quests up properly so things can be done in more bit size chunks?
WHAT THE FUCK happen to you? Can you please just go get brad and give him your job?
What you need to be doing is removing NPC quests. Give players the ability to create the quests. Bring back the marketable skills you had in Everquest 1 (when they were marketable,) allow people to, "sell," their services as if this were the real world. BRING BACK COMMUNITY.
YES, World of Warcraft is dying but that is because it shouldn't have ever existed in the first place. If you guys didn't fuck up Everquest 2 so bad you might have been that market. Instead, a bunch of fucking addicts like me went and made World of Warcraft because your team couldn't see the obvious innovations right in front of your face. Just like today.
You need to get out of this reality you currently have yourself in. You're following trends, these zombie games are fucking typical dude. Dayz innovated there, all you have done with H1Z1 is build on DayZs success, and much like Rocket, you took your money and ran.. thinking YOU did anything. Great.. But that isn't what you did with Verant and Everquest 1.. Admit it. You aren't that man anymore, so stop making blanket statement you can't back up, ever.
You need to look at H1Z1 and understand where you're right and where you are wrong. Where you are right is the Lobbies that you created, with players doing random bullshit.. Saying, "summit summit sumiit.." See that for what it is and advance on that feature. Games like Everquest should be voiced in some way, have a way to type to voice, selection of voices to choose from. Bring back the ROLE PLAY in fucking MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE ROLE PLAYING GAME.
You don't need to create dynamic events like you think you do. What stopped me from playing Everquest was the, "instancing," you initially started bringing into Everquest. When you have multiples of zone, you lose immersion (remember immersion smed?) It is like multiplying something by 0, you get shit all but a bunch of confused people wondering why you couldn't just create some other unique content for us to explore rather than just going through an instanced dungeon. YOU did that, YOU caused this shit with instancing to happen.. World of Warcraft is dead because it copied a stupid idea you guys had. Instancing is lazy and will always be lazy. Instancing is why Everquest was amazing and why Guild Wars should have never been considered a fucking MMORPG.
Oh, and delete that genre completely. Massively, Multiplyer, Online. Those things today mean the exact same thing.. We all know you fake shit with clustered servers to allow you to make it seem like these things are as massive as you sell them as, start calling them Online RPGs. They aren't massive anymore. H1Z1 looks like a washed out template of something I saw in Unity.. Massively original.
I'm just saying. Id bet my entire life that you don't have a single innovative idea left. Sorry.. You weren't playing Everquest like the rest of us were or something, maybe you're under a lot of stress which has lead you down the wrong path. What the fuck happen to Ultima Online smed? When do you plan on bringing some of that game back to the world? Or is that part of, "adapting?" forgetting past innovations that you know damn well could change MMORPGs forever.
I dunno, but I don't play games that just, "adapt," to an audience of idiots. I play games that try something new and innovative to try to bring the older audience back to play with the younger audiences. Teach the younger audience how to communicate with people online.