• PoP planar flags and how they are acquired. We're experimenting with some ideas that let people accompany their raids to the deeper planes without having all previous flags. Our goal is to allow a player to participate in raids and guild events, even if the player wasn't able to acquire a previous flag. This would not grant them a flag for that zone, but would give them access to it while on the raid. We're looking at several options, but our current version in testing allows a raid to bring along a small group of people without the necessary flags, if the raid has most of it's members flagged for an event or plane.
• PoP zone access quests. We're looking at the difficulty of the quests for individual access to the various planes. Our goal is to make it reasonable to gain access to later planes by doing the quests, without making it trivial or unbalancing when compared to the raid-gained planar access methods.

Now, I'm all for challenge. But much of the time I observed spent on flags boils down to waiting in line for a chance at some special mob, or trying to get a group together to go to an otherwise uninteresting locale. Some people who were lucky or had more time to spare got their flags, others didn't. The flagged people could go and bash monsters in "better" areas: the unflagged people couldn't join them. The end result: groups of friends ended up being split up because of this "price of entry". Kind of sad, really.