Why do we play? Gear vs content

We've cleared EV (Eternity Vault) last weekend. This weekend we went there again. We had 3 players who weren't at the first run. The time it took us to clear it went from 3:30 hours to 2:15. Pretty descent progression, which makes sense considering most of us knew the encounters and we had an extra week of gearing up. When the op was done, an interesting discussion followed. What do we want to do next? There were 2 main points of view voiced by different guild members, with most people belonging to 1 or the other. 1 is to move on to Karagga's Palace, the second is to keep running EV. Obviously we could also do both, scheduling 2 runs next week, but we do have a "main" op night and members who will have to choose one of the other if we had 2 runs.

I'll present the main arguments for both points of view as well how we ended up handling it. I believe most groups running content are finding themselves having the exact same decisions to make. These are inherent to MMO endgame and even pre endgame play and boils down to a simple question: "Why do we play?". I have a very clear personal opinion on the subject which I'll try to leave to the end of the post.

Running EV again, the gear argument: we only ran EV twice, so there are still many drops people need. Why move to the next operation when people can still benefit from this one? Running EV again will be even faster, people know the encounters, have better gear and getting the next drops will be much easier.

Moving on to KP, the content argument: we haven't been there before, this is new content for the entire guild. We definitely have the skill and gear for it. Gear is a means to an end, not a goal. You need gear to move to the next, more challenging content. If you already able to move to the next content challenge, that's all you need to go ahead and do it.

I'm assuming here that you can only choose one or the other, do you prefer to farm content or go for progression ops? Obviously time permitting, you can do both, but I find the discussion interesting even if that's the case.

Personally, I belong to the second group. I'm a content addict, I want to see all the different encounters, the plot, the different challenges. If I work on gearing up my character, it's only because I think it's needed to make me ready for the next challenge. I think that gearing up just for the sake of gearing up is just to give people the ability to say: "look at me, my average gear level is 136!!!", the odds of the 1-2 extra pieces upgrade from 126 to 136 actually making or breaking an encounter are negligible at best, these translate to less than 1% performance gain. To me, the game is about the plot, the group challenges, the encounter design. The only possible reasons to work on gearing up is if you try to get accepted by your peers, which can only happen if you don't have a guild who trusts you and need to convince people you are capable, or because the gear is really needed to move up the content ladder which can not be completed with what you currently have. As far as I'm concerned, "Farming" is just another way for spending the player's time without any additional content, you may as well replace "Farming" with "Grinding", it should be avoided when possible.

As for my guild's decision, we scheduled KP for our next main raid night and added an extra, shorter night for EV farm for whoever want to and able to make it.