Quote Originally Posted by Kalocin View Post
Also I think the "cycle of loot" is a pretty dated concept of how to have fun in a game. While I don't play it as often as FFXIV, I like that in GW2 there's a ton of "fun" achievements and non-instanced content to do. There's such an immense focus on "the gear grind" instead of "the content" which is kind of odd in my opinion. The only gil sinks seem to be toward housing and crafting gear/food and materia for... more gear.

Tons of games out there managed to nail the repetitive gameplay loop but MMOs never seem to get there. In general this game could use more recyclable content and little things outside of gear. Minions/Mounts are lazy rewards too, tack on RNG for infinite runs of boring grind.
The problem is you're looking at it as "how to have fun" and not "how to get a certain pattern of behavior". "Notice his article does not contain the words 'fun' or 'enjoyment.' That's not his field. Instead it's 'the pattern of activity you want.'" As far as I'm concerned, the weekly tomestone lockout is there so people sub longer, not necessarily so they have fun longer.

Well, the problem there is that ideally a MMO would have vast amounts of content that you could never fully get through, but it takes lots of resources to develop that. Which is why there's a necessary grind and repetition.