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

[Asmodaeus]

Community is what you make of it and its got nothing to do with the gear grind. If this was a different type of game, you'd have entirely different people playing it. The ones that stick it out to 50 and finish all the current content do so because they want to, they just apparently don't want to do anything else afterwards.

My 'guild' (I consider the LS as the guild rather than the FC, we were two groups that wanted our own houses so had our own FCs but use the LS to chat and organise events, and its grown from there) consistently has 40-50 active, talkative people on, and we have a high turnover rate too. We're constantly at capacity and end up having to remove people who have been inactive for 30+ days because there's that many people wanting to join and bring friends in. The reason we're so popular is because the people in it get involved with each other. I finished all the content I was motivated to finish long ago, and so have many others, but we still have fun and enjoy the game by playing with other people, helping newer players get their clears, even just hanging out in the goblet and chatting.

Just recently I've been tanking dungeons for 3 members leveling new jobs. My tank was 50 and I got nothing out of it doing brayflox over and over, but I did it just because I enjoy playing the game with friends and it's more than just an 'armor grind treadmill' to me.

Not the gear grind, but the anonymity the game allows you to keep. I don´t want to say you can´t form a nice Guild with friendly people, I just say its much harder here because you can do almost anything on your own (just getting together to finish a dungeon has nothing to do with community or socialising) and that is one of the biggest reasons why people choose to not talk in groups, behave like the biggest muppets and vanish from one day to the other (and might start on another server).