@rmt=badgame.

you do have a lot of good points. But at the end I think you pissed most people off by being a dick.

there are fun grinds and there are grinds that make you want to pull your hair out.

grind just means it takes an extended time to do something.

MMOs are becoming more casual, and as such the grinds are becoming less tedious and more engaging (for the successful MMOs at least).

The original ones had things like perma-death, looting other players, etc..

That stuff doesn't fly anymore. I think what rmt=badgame was trying to point out is that unfun grinds are quickly becoming the way of the past.

W. Graves, you point out that w/o grinding unfun things the rewards dont mean as much. I disagree. Can't you still get better rewards simply for playing the game longer even if the game is fun? The value of the reward should be based on how good it is, not how much tedium you can endure to receive it.

An example of gameplay above rewards can be found in the fact that City of Heroes had 25% more players 6 months after it launched than it did after they released inventions/salvage/crafting. Back when everybody just got the same enhancements from the NPC store & could afford to buy them as they leveled up; just through doing the story arcs. No major rewards had a higher subscriber base, it also had zero gold farmers & spammers.

With the introduction of inventions/salvage/crafting came the hordes of gold farmers & spammers. As the game introduced a part of the game players wanted to participate in; but put it at a distance which would make it impossible to w/o repetitive (boring) grinding/farming.