Gear. What is gear, really? You could say that they're things that take up inventory space and can be used, but that's just how it's flavored. Mechanically, what is gear? Gear is simply a stat boost that goes in a slot. It's important to know exactly how gear fits into every game, because it alone can tell you exactly what you can expect from the game.
In the beginning, there was UO. It wasn't the first of its kind, but it was the most popular. In UO, gear was very temporary. You lost it on death, and death was everywhere. UO treated gear as a means to an end. In UO gear wasn't progression. There wasn't a terrible amount of progression in UO. UO was player driven. Gear was something crafters could make to sell to combatants. It was actually a rather happy system, because it allows several different styles of play to flourish and profit off of each other (keep in mind that it was entirely possible to make characters who never fight anything contributing to UO's unique endgame experience). In UO, high end gear was generally considered to be disposable. The real interest in UO wasn't gear, it was rare crafting materials and gold, those two universally sought after things were what drove UO all those pre-trammel years. Though, with the advent of Themepark MMOs, the role of gear would change dramatically.
In themepark MMOs the fact that gear is a stat increase is emphasized greatly. Think about it, after you get to max level, what is there left to do? You grind or raid for gear. Equipment becomes a secondary progression scale after leveling, and gear is no longer a means to the end, it is an end all of its own. Who can honestly say they had fun raiding Molten Core the 20th time, grinding out Geddon and mashing those buttons? Static, mechanic-based content gets stale, so how do you keep players playing? More progression. Make the best gear hard to get, and everyone who wants to have the best stuff will keep playing, and once they've invested so much time, it's hard for the player to stop. It's all done with addiction in mind, and addiction is a powerful thing.
You see, as a player begins to climb up the progression ladder, they inevitably begin comparing themselves to others. They see a stranger run by, and they often become curious as to how they stack up against others. It feels good to see your invested time in a character pay off by controlling a superior character, and it feels bad to see your time belittled and look at a superior character. This sort of thing varies from surface thoughts to subconscious thoughts depending on a player's mental health, but in 99% of the cases, it's there. This is how the addiction starts. Players want to see themselves as superior to others. Players want to feel like the time invested in their character means something, and this is where raids come into play. Frankly, there's nothing wrong with wanting to take pride in something you've poured so much time into, and I'm not going to get onto a soap box and tell you that games are pointless, because that's a fuckin' dumb argument. It's just important to understand the degree in which addiction runs the themepark style of MMOs, because the content is very static.
Progression is a design element used solely to appeal to our base urge to improve, and to get us hooked onto progression-based systems, and it's cheap and effective.
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