For the XP example you’ve come up with, I think the more pragmatic reason why people were swarming around Portal XP farms was not that people were particularly

For the XP example you’ve come up with, I think the more pragmatic reason why people were swarming around Portal XP farms was not that people were particularly hungry for just grinding XP, but because grinding them was the only way to gain access to the really important guns and equipment (which you need in order to enjoy the actual base game!) And the XP grind in 2042 is excruciatingly slow (although BF3/BF4 also had this issue and there were many complaints about it). The thing is, most people actually want fun. I’ve never seen BF players play it solely for gaining the highest rank/level, since the real merit for BF is that it’s a sandbox shooter that creates all sorts of complex emergent situations and rewards you for dealing with it both reactively and creatively. But there are so many aspects of 2042 that actively tries to hinder this “fun” and are arbitrarily forced at the players (the XP grind, lack of server browsers, the difficulty of changing squads, squad size limits, no global chat, etc etc.), and players genuinely hate them. So I really don’t believe that “most of these players are mindless consumers who just enjoy skinner boxes, and they demand those type of games”.