TLDR: When adding content to the game, this should increase the number of things that are worth a player's time to do.
Seems obvious, doesn't it? But there are some really big-name MMOs that don't follow that rule; they're built on a model that makes content obsolete - only the most recent content has rewards that are worthwhile. Which makes for, in the end, a rather boring game - you're running the same instances everyone else is, over and over again, and if you want to go do something different... well, good luck finding people to help you run last patch's instances; they're no longer useful.
CoH got this right for a long time; merit rewards could be tuned so that just about everything in the game was reasonable to do. I could log in, run some paper missions and then go do a mayhem. If I had a bit more time, I could see if I could find a TF group. I could go poking around in low-level zones, to see if there was anyone interesting to help. I could go to Ouro and find something to flashback to that I'd never run before. I could spend some time trying to find a non-farm AE mission. And, while I'm sure some of these activities weren't truly optimal uses of my time, they all had useful rewards, and none of them were clearly suboptimal - I'd have had to set up spreadsheets and keep careful records if I wanted to find out which were less valuable, and that was close enough for me.
And then came the alignment missions. They were great missions... the first time through them. They were pretty good the second time, too. But the flaw - the thing that really reduced how much fun I had playing - was that alignment merits were just that much more valuable. They were so valuable, that anything else I did in-game didn't match up. If I had just a few minutes to play, then the only sensible use of my time was running alignment missions. If I had more time... then the only sensible use was to swap to an alt and play more alignment missions. They stopped being fun within a matter of weeks... and they sucked the fun out of the rest of the game, because I knew I'd be getting better return on my time if I was doing them, instead of whatever-else.
I've seen this same effect in other games that have daily quests, too. They're almost always set up to be more rewarding than anything else you could be doing - because if they weren't, there'd be no need to put a daily limit on them. And they almost always end up sucking the fun out of the game, because the best use of your time is to run those dailies over and over again, across however many characters you've got.
The same sort of thing happened with incarnate trials and Dark Astoria - DA in particular was incredibly well done. I was happy to play through it multiple times. I was much less happy to play through it over and over and over again because there wasn't anything else I could do to progress. That content, despite how well done it was, restricted the options of what made sense to spend my time on.
So this is my request to the CoT devs: when adding content, be it as small as a set of repeatable missions, or as large as a level cap increase... please make sure you're not rendering existing content obsolete. And if something is so good and valuable to the players that you have to put a hard cap on how many times they can do it in a day... that should be a clear sign that it is too rewarding compared to the rest of your content.
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I never felt CoX did this to me, but I respect your argument, because it all comes down to how we define concepts like "value" and "sensible". It seems like numeric measurements equate to value for you, which is a perfectly valid viewpoint. For me, on the other hand, the list that begins your paragraph 2 is a good example of the variety that kept me interested in CoX for 7 years. All of those were always sensible options for me, because I measured value by how much fun I had playing the missions. Heck, I loved mayhem missions so much I would have run them for no reward beyond regular xp.
At first I thought you were going to describe something like SWTOR's first additional content release, where they increased the level cap and made useless all the time I had spent getting purple stuff for my max-lvl characters up to that point. Please, devs, PLEASE...if you are going to give us repeatable missions, don't make them too farmy, but for the love of Pete don't add content later that invalidates any grinding I did do on them.
Spurn all ye kindle.
I like this.
I often did things for fun rather than "value', but I did find often that no one else was interested in that "other stuff." It may have been due to low pop servers (and the hours I played at), but I can recall logging in on a server, creating a new toon, and then finding like 90% of the players sharing the server were all 50s and doing TFs and whatnot, avoiding "the old stuff." I'd imagine that was sometimes just because it was new vs. old, but... Old content doesn't have to be rendered fully obsolete to be effectively obsolete.
Not sure how to avoid that problem though. :/ I guess just by balancing the "value" rewards well?
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I think as long as you make sure that players' time is well spent on what they do, then there shouldn't be too much of optimal content. Some players will calculate the best use of their time per rewards earned, but the vast majority of the player base probably won't notice a huge value difference if it's balanced correctly.
Say content X takes 15 minutes for the average player to do, and rewards 200 coins.
If content Y takes an hour to do but rewards only 600 coins, then there's no reason to do it over X. Even if it rewards 800 coins, players will probably chose X, since it takes less time to do and doesn't require a full hour's commitment.
If the rewards are close, players will do what is most fun. Sure, if one mission or arc drops loads more benefits per hour played then it will get over-played. However if the rewards are close, players will do whatever is fun...at least I will.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...