I don't think we are playing a different game, but obviously have different kinds of motivation, or ways to approach certain goals, or maybe just our understanding of success differs. All that is fully OK and I don't totally disagree with your opinion, I even agree with part of them, but I keep reading complaints about how good is has been before and why, while I mostly can't follow those opinions.
I'm not the type for reading and writing walls of text, so I will keep it short. Yali's posts are full of passion and sum up the situation nearly as best as possible i think, e.g. this:
Anyone see the absurdity in this kind of players' opinion?Yaliskah wrote: ↑Sun Jun 03, 2018 9:35 am Some ppl have reached their maximum and dont see the point to play with others cause wont have anything more to win atm. Thats a curious point of view, according they complain it is hard to reach high rank and gear. Personnaly i understand they complain to have everything faster to finally stop playing. Odd.
To sum it up, a game should be fun playing, but without making progress for the effort one puts in, it wouldn't last long and I can honestly confirm that whenever you contribute enough in e.g. RvR - yesterday in Reik was another good example: 2 hours fight, lots of fun, bunch of RR/INF, gold bag - will always get rewarded, last not least with all the RR/INF gained from killing plus 20k RR lord plus 10k RR lock where a mid-tier toon makes 2/3 of full zone INF. And that it just a simple PuG example (organized by leaders tbh), not an exception, at least for EU prime.
I don't know how many ppl just make statistics about their zone participation, but I think if we did, the picture would not look as bad as some people keep saying.