I’ll preface this by saying that I personally like many things about the night market so far. It’s a refreshingly novel idea and a large amount of content that isn’t paywalled. I think the new mechanics and minigames are great and running through the areas in a big group killing the bosses has been pretty fun.
My biggest issue with it is the dissonant design logic of creating content intended to be run by groups (hard-hitting bosses with lots of health and armor) but making quests and progression hyper-individualized.
You can’t share quests or even progress quests as a group. You receive different daily quests from your factions. You need to individually collect the necessary fragments to unlock the “dungeons”, and eventually the raid, and some of these fragments are RNG drops. You then have to individually recollect the keys each time you complete them.
This conflicting design leads to groups splintering all over the map, each chasing their own quest markers. Once you’ve completed your to dos for an area, there is very little incentive to run it with other players that day. Running the dungeons with your friends or guild mates requires a painful amount of progress coordination. All of this adds friction to the social element the content was designed around.
I hope ZOS reconsiders some of these design choices. Dailies should at least funnel people to the same goals (kill X mobs, kill X brazen bosses, complete a skirmish, etc.). Maybe the keys can be made harder to grind, but only require one member of the group to hold the key to enter the dungeon or raid. And there should be greater incentives for people to repeatedly run areas killing bosses and mobs, and larger instance sizes, to keep the zones well populated.