You are closing in on one of the spawning spots for the boss carrying the elite skill you want. You went there 5 times alredy only to find that worthless other boss. This time you suddenly see that bright colored aura, your heart beating a little faster... "YES! ITS THE RIGHT ONE!". You kill the boss... activate your signet, and get that warm fuzzy feeling seeing the skill unlocked box with the golden border around the skill.
I think most people experience this, even if you hate the skillgrinding and want UAS. It's human nature, we love getting things. The random spawning of the bosses just makes it feel even more nice when you finally catch them. The more annoying getting that skill is, the better it feels finally getting it.
Now imagine average joe playing GW. He probably dosn't have much of a clue what he's doing so he won't bother with team strategies other then "get a monk", will never win the hall of heroes, if he ever goes tombing at all. He's probably not going to get in a guild that will ever do GvG. He will play in the random arena with his W/MO. He dosn't care about "becoming competitive" (getting all the skills/runes). But he sure as hell can experience that feeling of getting new skills I described. At first he will just get skills from quests, not elite ones, but still the same feeling. Completing a quest and getting 2 new toys. This is what draws in the average casual person the most I think. Of course, people get addicted, want more. They want to experience the feeling of getting something again.
For the hardcore player there's the desire to get to the top, have all skills, finally play the game as it should be played. For example be lvl 60 in WoW so you can't be killed by a higher lvl, but instead have a fair fight. Then you realise you need gear, the carrot is always there in front of you. It's the same in Guildwars, you want all the skills so you can finally play the game as you think it was meant to be played. Changing your build however you want to counter or to make up new strats.
Then you finally get closer to that point, after playing for hundreds of hours doing repetitive crap you don't really enjoy. Getting those little thrills I described helps you through the grindmud. What happens at this point is usually that you realise there is no great awesome gameplay at the end of the grinding threadmill. I played WoW and finally got to lvl 60 with a character and tested out what it was like doing PvP at this point. It was crap simply put, and I just stopped playing. In guildwars, it's the same thing. It's not really as crappy as WoW, but theres still a lot of flaws in the game you will discover. Like Natures Renewal screwing up the game balance. Guild vs Guild and Tombs isn't that great, there's a lot of stuff you wish were different. See what other people covered on this in other threads.
It seems to me like the progress drug and grinding addiction is just taking over the whole game industry. They realised it's so much easier to just cover up your game flaws with huge grinding instead of making a genuine game. It works. People make up expectations while grinding away and hope that they will finally get to play that great game if only they can get through all the grind. I think it's sad, soon we will be seeing RTS games where you have to unlock units, FPS where you grind for guns and extra hp.
I always liked reasonable doses of the drug tough, like the old RTSes and FPS where you played the single player campaign and got more units/guns at about the speed it took to familiarize yourself with them. The pvp (multiplayer) was always seperate from this, all the stuff was available. It was still nice to play the single player campaign (once) before to learn and discover the game. It was your choice to do so, and I always did.
G
