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The point, for a lot of players, is to be the best.
They are obsessed with it, often to their detriment.
If there's an boss to kill, they're tracking their DPS and posting the logs to compare against the rest of the world. They sharpen their characters into the finest instruments of damage, or healing, or mitigation, trading off literally everything else that isn't perfectly optimal for their role. They will never be satisfied until they get the #1 "parse". If this results in the raid having 40 characters without a single extra point of health buffer, so be it. If this means any mistake would kill them, or wipe the raid, they would take that trade in a heartbeat. They're always chasing that perfect parse.
If there's a dungeon, they're mentally tracking how long it takes and trying to do it faster. If they can shave 30 seconds by doing a mechanically difficult jump to skip some enemies en route, they will try it every time. If there's an 80% chance a teammate gets the timing wrong, and they all die, and it ends up costing them 5 or even 10 minutes, they will still try it every time. The "best" way to do that dungeon is to skip the trash packs, so they will try and skip.
If they need to farm, they will always go to the "best" farm. That is, the one that theoretically pays the most per hour. If this area is heavily contested, and everyone else is farming it too, they will not adjust their strategy, because farming a less contested zone would not be "the best". If the area is better farmed by one class that is not the one they are playing, they will level an entirely new character of that class from scratch just to farm (taking weeks of effort).
If there is gear that is "BiS" - Best in Slot - they will spend every waking minute trying to get it, until they do, and it's an act of mercy by Blizzard that the raids can only be attempted once per week. In vanilla classic, there was a dagger that dropped from the end boss of a dungeon at a 0.2% rate (not a typo. zero point 2 percent, and later 2% after the devs changed it). Players would solo this dungeon boss 5 times an hour (the limit) nonstop until they got it.
But "best" only has value in a social game. If everyone leaves, they're just playing solitaire on Blizz's servers. They naturally move to the new thing and try to become the best there.
That works well in Retail WoW, where the developers design around it. But what puzzles me the same mindset is found in people who play exclusively play Classic, a game that wasn't designed around this mindset.
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That wouldn't happen to have been a level 19 requirement dagger that therefore made it tremendously popular for alts in low-level PvP, would it? I recall something like that specifically...
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Many MMO players are the kings of optimizing the fun right out of a game. I played both WoW and FF14 for years, and I would see so many people playing in ways they admitted were less fun, just because it was an extra 1% more DPS or whatever. Absolute lunacy.
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