It seems like a large part of the point being made is that folks are doing the meta events, including the dragons, to farm them and not to enjoy them.
edit: Also the whole idea of folks just being logged in and not helping with pre-events or camping out a zone is an issue. I don’t really address that with this post, but despite doing that at times myself I do definitely agree that’s ..not really "playing" and further evidence that MMOs are all about how to grind for stuff. I’d never just stand around for anything in GW1, but again, don’t want to derail comparing to a different-style game too much.
Exotic armor and weapon skins from dungeons are only available by running the explorable version of dungeons multiple times for even one piece, let alone a whole set. After the first run, is a player really doing this for fun? Isn’t this also a loot-oriented grind?
That’s more or less the bread and butter of most MMO games -- providing the carrot on the stick to keep players running forward. Well, OK, we really didn’t have it much in GW1, but that’s probably a whole separate discussion. The point is that I think maybe there’s a matter of perspective here: rather than spin it as people who want loot potentially ruining fun events, why not see if we can think of ways (or, ideally, the developers do) to keep making the pursuit of loot more fun and engaging?
World events in a non-instanced game world are going to attract tons of people. But catering to the community at large also means providing a reward for the participation. Look at the giant in Nageling -- he has tons of health and takes a while to whittle down, even with a decent number of folks, while offering nothing more than typical event completion. Hang out in Diessa and count how many times someone notes the giant is up and folks respond with "not worth the effort" and the like. Because it’s not -- the event offers nothing more than other events in the area provide for a reward but takes much longer to complete. (edit: compare to, say, Kol in Harathi -- that is part of a larger chain, and at least you can flow into other events as a result [plus the centuar boss provides a chest] and start a karma train for a bit if you so desire) Removing the loot from the meta events will have the same effect. I won’t ever deny that players will still come and complete them, as they can be fun and are neat, but overall I suspect that wouldn’t be a wise choice for retaining players.
And the fact that the chests were changed to guarantee a means to generate ecto for everyone suggests that the aim is to keep players in the game world doing these events.
So if we assume the loot motivator remains, what can be done to make these more than a giant cluster of auto-attacking? From my perspective, it seems that the large boss fights are where the non-trinity idea has kittens in its armor (edit: Really? That’s a common phrase, word-filter. I am not trying to use a racial slur here. Holy crap.). Fantasticly fun combat, in my opinion, with trash mobs and enemies overall, but once a giant health pool and a pattern of a few attacks come into play it’s kind of eehhh.
I think I am flowing off-topic, though. It’s late, I should stop writing this post.
