Watching content before actually doing it?

[Dark-Saviour]

Those trash packs before bosses? There's no point. Bad design just to waste people's time. We want only bosses. New content that gives lower item level? There's no point. Devs must be out of their minds to expect us to have fun without rewards!

This is one of the things that kind of irks me.

In my experience, there's always this subset of the community that will point at the hardest content and call it babby-mode while demanding more and more of a 'challenge' since too high a percentage of the player-base has become capable of doing everything.
If you make the claim that they only want something harder with new rewards because they like to ensure that others don't have what they do, they'll repeatedly insist that it's not about the rewards and they solely want something more challenging.
If the developer then puts out harder content without any new reward, the response suddenly becomes, "WTF? That's retarded! Why would I suffer through something so hard if I don't get anything for it?"

:-/

That said, as for the main issue being discussed in this topic, the biggest issue in my eyes is the game design. When you have this whole 'carrot-on-a-stick' style of linear progression with all the rewards back-loaded, and then make the content such that it requires other players to do well, it just invites the mentaility that they're nothing but tools (and a 'necessary evil') for each person to accomplish their goals.
It's partially why I prefer the whole idea of little vertical progression, 'rewards' being distributed throughout the content, and levels/encounters that encourage 'playing alongside others' rather than completely relying on them. :-\

Edit: Also... I'm not fond of how pervasive wikis and video sites have become for these games in general. The fact that devs can now just assume you can just go find the info out of the game tends to lend itself towards lazy design with things being poorly implemented or described in-game. It hasn't been much of an issue here so far, but for other MMOs I've played, it's become a major annoyance...