I'm about to say something controversial—I don't actually think grinds in MMOs are all that bad. There's a bit of a wider resistance to the idea of having to grind for anything in a modern online game, a resistance to the very concept, even. We've all certainly got less time than in the days of attunement questlines.
But that doesn't mean an MMO can be entirely grindless, right? Depending on how you define the term, after all. They're, typically speaking, RPGs—RPGs have levels, slow-burn goals to achieve, and so on. For the sake of ease, let's just define a grind as a repetitive activity you need to do many times in a role to achieve a goal.
Even then, has that sort of thing been entirely stamped out? Not exactly. We aren't quite at EverQuest levels of quests being rare breaks from the eternal mobbing, but those archetypal grinds have morphed into new forms. Battle-pass like reward tracks, seasons, world quests, or, in the case of Final Fantasy 14, relic weapons.
I recently had to...
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