Quote Originally Posted by Shoko View Post
1) You play an MMO for strong gear, and obtain it.
2) You use strong gear to face a monster or [increasingly] difficult content.
3) You obtain stronger and better gear as your reward(s).
Your missing a step:

4) After you have gotten to wear the best gear for a sufficient amount of time, the developer makes that gear available to everyone and you start back at step 2.

If you add something that average joes can't do, and add awesome gear to it, then the next new event has to be even harder to compensate for the new uber gear that the leet players will be wearing. Then when the leet get their Uber +2 gear from that event, the next event has to be even harder than the second one to compensate for the uber +2 stats. The fourth event harder than the third one. This goes on until you reach a state where 90% of the players get KOed for even mentioning the name of the event, while a few guys are cruising through it with basically the same degree of difficulty that they had with the first event, because they have all the awesome gear (or atmas or temp items or w/e) that makes things easier.