I was talking to a gamer friend about this just a few minutes ago. I've played a ton of GW2 since near-launch, recently got HoT and played through the story a couple times, got a revenant to full herald over the weekend, and realized that I had very little content left to play. Raids, some day, but I'm not interested for now. I found the new content in HoT to be extremely fun, just like back when I started GW2.
Anyway, long story short (too late), I decided to stop playing for now since I had no new content to do. But since, like many of us, I'm literally addicted to GW2 at the moment, I have this nearly unstoppable urge to log on and do the same old daily stuff. Teq. Fractal Champ. PvP Daily. FW2.
The daily system of rewards is very interesting to me. GW2 has about a thousand hours (rough estimate) of real fun in it, the kind where you're actively exploring, making and leveling new characters, trying new classes, playing through all the story modes, discovering jumping puzzles and new world bosses, doing a few achievements that you actually want (before you start doing them because they're there... looking at you, x slayer), and many more. That's all real, true, stimulating fun. But as you play through all of that and you start to add in little aspects of "fake" fun... the things that give you your endorphin fix not because of true excitement, but because of habit or the prospect of something fun happening (doing Tequatl in hopes of getting a Sunless ascended box is a good example of this). Dailies also fall into this category, in that you get a fixed reward (10 AP, 6 PvP reward potions, for example) -- but to get that, you just hopped into a server and mashed 1-5 while making your way off a cliff. That ain't fun. It's a trick of the brain.
I guess the point is that it's really tough to balance true fun, which I find productive, with perceived fun, which I find completely unproductive. And again, this game I believe has literally hundreds or thousands of hours of real fun in it. At some point, the two blur, and you don't see it until you consciously think about it.
I've pretty much lost track of where I was going with this, so I'm just gonna hit 'save' now, because why not?