EDIT: After thinking about this revamped my entire post.
I just want apologize as I didn’t mean to make this a heated discussion. I got annoyed over a misconception, partly based on past memories of the Kingdom of Amular thread, that made me see a perspective that probably wasn’t there.
In general it was the idea that because person A likes something that to them seems so obviously likable, then of course person B should also like it. Also that because person A has a personality that can easily ignore X that person B should be able to do the same. It is that type of sentiment that tends to be somewhat annoying, if best ignored I know.
But that is why I used the phrase over-simplifying, because that is what it is when you don’t take into consideration the fact that while one person might be able to easily tune out or tolerate some things in an MMO, another person may not. I went into detail and had to edit my post as I was up to 15 paragraphs. But just think about things like time, tolerance levels for other people’s behavior, money, commercialization, social pressure and aspects … all things that different people handle in different ways. Just telling someone to ignore all that and treat an MMO as an SRPG is a simplification.
When it comes to the grind I was making the mistake of coming from the past. I still remember games like EQ1 where it was a brutal grind to level especially if you got hooked on the whole social aspect and wanted to keep up with your friends. Newer games are much better about disguising the grind aspects. I never felt like I was grinding in RIFT or GW2, as an example. In RIFT I stopped playing as I had done most of the casual solo play and my guild had moved into hard core raiding which I had no time or desire to do. I could have easily grinded dailies (called dailies for a reason – its repetitive content you do every day to get faction, gear, rewards, etc.) to level achievements and faction points but I hate grinding so I stopped.
So yes an MMO has gotten much better about grinds in some ways – although it does have it more clearly, IMO, than an SRPG. Another aspect is that an MMO wants people to keep playing and they can only pump out so much content. Depending on your personality, goals, and play style you may feel you have to grind to keep up with your guild or friends – this is where the social aspect adds a vastly different dimension to games than in an SRPG. What if you want this uber gear you are drooling over but it is in an elite dungeon with rare drops? Just one example of where you might feel pressure to grind that you would not in many SRPGs (not counting a game like Diablo for example).
There are so many different factors that social things bring into a game combined with the desire of developers to find ways to keep people playing and paying (whether monthly or in micro-transactions) that you can’t compare an SRPG to an MMO on an equal level. Some things are the same and other things are different.
Anyhow I didn’t mean to get intense, I was clarifying some misconceptions I thought I saw in posts and should have just ignored them.
