Quote Originally Posted by afk4life View Post
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.
Perhaps I am weird, but I would honestly go out with a group of people and slaughter monsters by the thousands if it meant I never had to do the quest based levelling from WoW people seem to love so much. People like to say levelling in WoW wasn't a grind because they quested, it's absurd! You just grind quests!

These quest based levelling systems which may hide the fact that you are grinding (which, I mean, do they really? I would think most of us can see through that) don't hide the fact that you are in a game at all. In WoW I never felt like I was a part of Azeroth, I just felt like a piece moving through a predesignated assembly line. It's designed to be a theme-park, it's just a really bad one.