What I really think needs to be brought back is the ring rewards we saw in TBC. Every raid needs some kind of amazing ring, trinket, or something that says, “complete this instance, at least once”.

There are many people like myself that live on the periphery of MMOs like WoW. We see patch notes full of more goodies for raiders. All we can do is dream. All we get are the crumbs that occasionally fall our way, like a piece of crafted gear unlike the steady stream of gear upgrades that raiders are swamped with.

Due to my play schedule and the fact I play late at night and the ease of soloing which has created a culture of players that have no reason to socialize or group, raiding is something I’m not privileged to be a part of. Being a guildmaster and a hardcore raider almost cost me my marriage years ago.

I live vicariously through the experiences of others. By reading blogs, by reading WoW.com and others. I continually wonder what it’s like to group and raid again — how the other half lives in Azeroth. My angst comes from the fact that I’m a grouper and raider at heart. I love to cooperate and play my characters at the very highest level of skill.

Still, I find myself sympathizing with your concerns. Gear based MMOs are illusions at best.
The formula is simple:

Kill mobs that drop gear that allow you to kill tougher mobs. Rinse and repeat.

Then Blizzard comes along and “resets” everything and lets the mediocre and casuals catch up which has the effect of invalidating the hard work and status of those players who earned their gear.

When players finally confront this, they start questioning their future participation and ask the existential questions that you and your readers are asking.

As you so aptly pointed out, in the final analysis it’s the social game that is the most important. Gear is a means to an end. The end all we are left with is the socialization, bonding and camaraderie that you get by experiencing shared challenges.

i think I’ve found your problem, you’re equating satisfaction in a game with all the hard work you’ve done.

I have three 80s, and they’re all about equally geared (some ulduar, some ToC10 and 25, nothing from ToGC). it doesn’t bother me that my warrior suddenly shot from ‘wishing he could grab a naxx 25 run’ to being the best geared of the three for a short time, I was just happy that I could use his equally, without fearing someone was going to inspect me and bitch about it in raid chat.

I just enjoy playing… it’s the journey, not the destination.

Consider the alternative. I present EQ1 as my case. The first 4 EQ1 expansions were almost purely progressive. Out in front you had the hardcore/long term players. At the back you had the noobs, and somewhere in the middle was everyone else. The problem is that finding a place to raid at the content you were geared and levelled for was horrible.

It’s not about the “noobs” playing catch up. It’s about the noobs having groups to play in. And every MMO needs noobs or the game dies a slow death. To progress thru plains of power you had to be “keyed” to the next zone by beating the boss of the prior. Well, if you didn’t have your key, you had to find a group to help back-key you. Usually a good guild wouldn’t do it for just one person, so you had to wait for “enough” people to need a key to justify a raid.

Everyone’s accomplishments were awesome, but fewer and fewer people could accomplish them at all. In the next few expansions they put in all these alternate quests for getting the keys that just required group grinding. And guess what? Everyone lamented the loss of their acquisition of the keys “the hard way”.

The best you can hope for is an economic reset where Cataclysm actually rebalances the entire game against a new itemization. Then you wont feel bad about old gear obsoleted by new content, since everyone’s old gear will be obsolete.