Originally Posted by
clevin
But people do have skill caps. Pick a world class athlete, musician, actor, whatever. There are lots of lub players, amateur musicians, etc that practice a lot... but the top people are just better. Why? Different skill caps or, if you will, more talent. .
IN games, this is partly based on the person and how they process information and react to it, but it's also partly based on how much any given person cares. I'm very good at playing my hunter in WoW. Could I be better? yes, but the rewards for doing that are minimal... I'm probably at 90-95% of what my toon can do. Familiarity with the game might decrease the time you spend making decisions, but that flattens out at some point. Athletes can practice forever, but some are better than others. Why? Because of innate skill/talent caps. Not everyone is the same. I don't see why the idea of a skill cap per person is shocking. People cap out for various reasons - they're good enough to overcome any in-game obstacle that interests them, they physically are unable to do 'twitch' actions faster than they do, etc.
The OP raises an interesting point - in WoW and most games I gear up my toon partly to make the current level of encounters move from 'just barely able to do' to 'fairly easy'. But once I'm there... why keep playing? For example, both of my WoW toons are geared enough to do any of the heroics easily, do well in LFR and to take on normal DS if I wanted to. So why do I play? Well, partly to hang out with friends, but the fact is that what we do in-game is run the same stuff over and over. Eh. That gets boring.
In GW2, we'll see that same thing - at some point, running the same content over and over gets boring (this is true in WoW too - the upgrade hunt only delays it by giving you a reason to come back). Of course, I can quit until a DLC/xpac, etc... and that's an intriguing idea, because it incentivizes ANet to put out more content so I come back. If a group of players quit and are away for long enough, the odds that are that more and more will not come back as the time to new content increases. This seems, to me, to align the interests of the game developer (we want people to regularly play and thus need to keep them interested with new content) to mine (I'm bored with current stuff and want new stuff).