Originally Posted by
Alhanelem
I covered this before, with STO and other MMOs actually having a whole system for custom content- but it became too burdensome over time as every time they updated the game, they had to go through all the old stuff as well as the new to make sure it all stayed compatible. It is a big undertaking to allow large scale customization of an MMO, and it's a challenge that has been taken up before, but ultimately was removed from those games because it made updating the game a lot more difficult.
(And those systems were detailed, too, you could set the stage with any area you want, spawn any enemies you want, with scripting and such, and still allow rewards and EXP to be gained, etc. You could place almost any assets from within the game into the area, enable and disable classes, abilities, etc- it was really cool)
To a certain extent, I love grinding too, and if you think there's less grind in the game now, you'd be mistaken. They dramatically accelerated the level up process, yes, but all the grinding for gear, earning job points, etc takes longer than leveling up plus earning all your merit points did before- Reaching lv99 and getting Master status takes longer than 1-75 + merits did.