Guild Wars 2

Clearly I’m not the only one who finds this Anet’s habit of creating crazy grindquests a very bad decision. A lot of people are getting mad about the 10k requirement and they’re absolutely right.
Don’t get me wrong. Difficult and challenging quests are fine. Dropping an item into the game that’s intended for only 1% of the players to get is fine too. What I personally have problem with, is the way how this is handled. Anet usually takes the cheezy approach and makes getting the item challenging to get by artificially setting absurd requirements rather than making it challenging by clever design.
‘How do we make this new fancy item exclusive?’
‘I know, let’s have it require 250 vials of powerful blood, 250 giant eyes, 250 charged lodestones,…’
This is not challenging nor fun!
In my opinion, a good example of fun grind for exclusive items was the luminescent armor collection. It wasn’t particularly difficult (so the set isn’t really all that exclusive), but it was designed so that is still takes a set amount of time player has to invest. It didn’t act as a huge artificial gold sink, but rather a scavenger hunt with lots of fun things to do and cool places to visit. The new legendary collections (both weapons and fractal backpiece) are kind of similar even though they still eat quite a bit of money.
I want more quests like this. Instead of setting an absurdly high price on items, give them to players after going through a long and difficult journey. If you make the quests difficult enough, you can still have an exclusive item that doesn’t cost you a single copper. Perhaps you could have players battle Liadri to progress that journey? Or get through a reasonably challenging JP (winter wonderland was a very good choice IMO, mad king’s clocktower would be another good example).
Throwing 250s of items around doesn’t make things challenging, it only makes them boring and repetitive. Everyone is able to get some amount of gold, it’s just not everyone can be bothered to spend so much time doing brainless repetitive activity. If you want exclusivity (and trust me, I want that too), make things actually difficult by creating fun and complex challenge.

I hope I’m not the only one who feels that quests would be more fun if they didn’t eat crazy amounts of gold and materials but rather require some actual involvement in the game.

I agree, the precursor tier 2 is another example of bad grind and gold sink. Bifrost Tier 1 and 3 so far have been pretty awesome. Collect interesting materials, make paints, and pictures, test a bunch of different beam attacks. These are all VERY good collection based quests. We see time and again ANET can make really good collections, then suddenly they spaz out, and think, WAIT! BUT THE GOLD! and just dump one area into a huge gold sink for really no reason.