In this post I'm going to compare the gameplay loop between The First Descendent (TFD) and Star Wars The Old Republic (SWTOR), and consider the impact on building player community.
The First Descendent - Lottery
In The First Descendent, players are expected to repeatedly play content ("grind") to get a chance at opening "Amorphous Materials" (AM). Each AM is basically a lottery ticket where you can "win" something, and the most valuable items have the lowest chance.
Because this AM lottery is strictly chance based (RNG or Random Number Generator style), theoretically you might never get that item that has a 3%, 10%, or even 20% chance. Or it might take far more tries than players consider statistically reasonable.
Furthermore, to even use an AM once acquired can require additional resources or completing difficult content each time.
When players group up (because more often than not, the challenges require multiple players) to acquire the same Amorphous Material because they are looking for the same items in that AM, what inevitably happens is some players will get the items first because they got lucky -- the random chance gave it to them first.
Now that player's enthusiasm for helping the rest of the team inevitably wanes because they have gotten what they wanted, so why waste more time and resources when they are "done" with this particular lottery? You cannot also trade items to help other players. So that lucky player who gets several drops of a 3% chance item is stuck with useless duplicates and can't help their friends.
They could stay to help others, but for how long? There is no guarantee that every member of the team will get that item that has a mere 3% chance of appearing. There is no theoretical limit to the number of attempts needed, so this starts to break down team dynamics. The players who are just repeatedly unlucky will have to give up their attempt to stay with the team when it moves on to the next goal, or else find another team.
This can cause teams to "break up" because some players are stuck due to bad luck while others want to move ahead to other things. It causes players to repeatedly ask for help in chat and with the broad array of lottery tickets, it's quite unlikely to find a team you need.
Star Wars The Old Republic - Lottery plus Effort plus Trade
In contrast, SWTOR has a mixed system of both chance-based / lottery as well as effort. When you complete content, you may be happily surprised by a lucky find of a good item. If you don't need it, you can almost always even give it away.
But suppose that you are just not very lucky. In such a case, for most items there is another way to acquire it, through sheer effort. As you complete content in SWTOR you can acquire various currencies and trade them for what you want. It's of course slow compared to getting a lucky drop, but even repeating content to try your luck can steadily increase the currency you accumulate, toward eventually buying what you need.
For example, in Operations (multi-player group content) you can get random pieces of equipment. If it's not what you need, you can break it down into currency and to to a vendor when you have enough currency to buy what you actually want.
So when it comes to grouping up, this helps keep groups together because not only can group members help each other with trade, but unlucky members can still earn currency and get what they need eventually. There can be a limit to how many times a team can stay on one type of content in order to help teammates catch up in their goals.
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