I sure hope HW is not going to be more armor grind treadmill!

[kyuven]

OP

That's just what people do with games. When you rush content and run out of things to do, you get bored and leave.
There's enough to keep people interested, but some people just aren't going to be intrigued by that.
Not everyone cares enough to take advantage of everything a game throws at them. And everyone has different goals.
Me, for example, I like "completing" games, but I also don't necessarily like to rush. "Grinding gear" isn't my concern so much as defeating content. But not everyone thinks like that. Many people don't like raiding, and in big "social" FCs with high turnover, that behavior is to be expected.
And it's already more than armor grinding.
You have: Content to defeat.
Triple Triad
Chocobo breeding/racing
Moogle Mail Quests
Leveling other classes
Decorating your house
And more.

[Lemuria]

That's just what people do with games. When you rush content and run out of things to do, you get bored and leave.

What people seem to constantly misunderstand, or perhaps ignore to suit their arguments, is that you can still design content which is designed to be played over and over while still keeping things fresh. There have been countless examples of this, from City of Heroes' quest creator to randomly generated dungeons.

It's really sad that in this day and age, where we have access to some of the finest examples in games, people still consider this archaic design philosophy acceptable. Or, in the worst case scenario, consider it the norm.

The fact that most of the examples you listed are disincentivized only strengthens the argument.

[kyuven]

What people seem to constantly misunderstand, or perhaps ignore to suit their arguments, is that you can still design content which is designed to be played over and over while still keeping things fresh. There have been countless examples of this, from City of Heroes' quest creator to randomly generated dungeons.

Yyyyyeah um CoH's mission creator was abused by making the exact same types of maps with the exact same enemies and just AOEing them. Some people tried interesting approaches, but they all went out the window when people started using it as a create-a-farm to get more EXP.
And randomly generated dungeons only have so many variations before you get to see them all. SWTOR and GW2 both introduced RNG dungeons, but they were really just little "sequences" that would randomly appear each time you entered.
All of those games eventually ran into the same problem: There was no "meat" to the RNG and "procedurally generated dungeons" as you were still expected to repeat them, and there was only a finite number of "loadouts."
Cryptic, the original creators of CoH, took a stab at it again with Star Trek Online and Neverwinter's custom story creation, with heavy restrictions on rewards (to the point almost EVERY player made quest in Neverwinter featured the creator BEGGING players to not vote them down because of the loot quality, as they had no control over that) but again, there's only so much you can do with that. The rewards became SO piddling that the only incentive is a daily reward or if you just like doing them.
Which created another problem in that many players aren't very...creative...and the systems always had limitations (such as STO's vehement stance that you couldn't use actual Star Trek characters, leading to some of them reading like really bad and really boring fanfics about "Riker's little brother" or "John Luke Pickerd". There was a creative one involving Reg Barclay's daughter and holodeck malfunctions, but that was the exception and not the rule.)
And I don't really see how the things i listed are "disincentivized." If anything there's EXTRA incentive to do them as they all have unique titles, achievements, and rewards.