Quote Originally Posted by Raikki View Post
SE will lose more players than it will retain by focusing on grinding. Grinding is not "cool" anymore in modern MMOs.
Funny thing is, you can't have an MMORPG without grinding, since the only reason MMOs survive is by incoporating a grind of some kind.

Yes MMOs lately also love handing people things on a silver platter for no work, let alone getting a bonus for NOT playing their game, but grinds exist in every MMO, it's simply something you do over and over.

The average casual MMO player doesn't want to wait 2 months to be able to do endgame content
This is the problem with MMOs today because it's double edged -- They want to get to endgame asap then they want a ton of content to do, no developer can please this mentality without adding in a grind, otherwise you blow through content then you have to sit and wait for new content to be released -- This is why they always double/triple up on "go here and kill 10 boars" type quest content, to use as filler till their next Raid/Dungeons/Bosses are released. This is why Rift got popular, no one can deny that rifts aren't basically all the same, therefore you're literally grinding rifts when not doing PvP stuff.

MMO devs these days are better at masking grinds, as they're not longer "hey you need 89,000,000 exp for next level, get to it!" in your face grinds, even EVE has grinds, your MMO can't survive on just "make the content fun" alone, since once you've done it and depleted all of its loot and need to wait for next content to be released...then what? This is why they focus on PvP as well, because people deplete content at astonishing speeds these days.

I'm in the camp of enjoying Exp parties as well, since the journey is just as much fun and rewarding as getting to the end and doing raid content since if your MMO has a good community setup, it's a lot more rewarding overall since the major complaint about gaming today is that there's no longer a journey, it's just start > finish almost instantly.