Quote Originally Posted by Enfarious View Post
How long have you been playing RPGs? There isn't one on the market that doesn't have some grind aspects, even the "levelless" "classeless" systems of old MUDs(yeah I go back that far) require grinding. New FPS games require grinding. What you wanna log in on day one and say, "Ok opening CS done, EG CS and gear here I come." Of course you couldn't have to grind for those either, so maybe 100% drop rates?

Games involve grinding, not just MMOs, how that grind is masked is the only difference, in RPGs it's ALWAYS been through killing mass quantities of the same enemies for hours/days/weeks on end to level/get money/get items. That hasn't changed and won't.
A whole slew of recent MMOs (Rift, Aion etc.) as well as some old MMOs (WoW) have shown that an RPG doesn't have to be about grinding the same mob for hours on end. I was okay with this in FFXI but that was then. There's no reason why leveling in FFXIV should feel so sterile and uninvolved. The game became far more mundane than it already was when I ran out of guildleves that I actually wondered how people could play this without botting. Yeah, grinding is a part of games to some degree but the difference between old RPGs and new RPGs is that new RPGs actually try to disguise the fact that you're grinding. Square seems to be rather shameless about it.