I’ve been playing MMORPGs for a long time. I started the year Everquest came out, and save for the occassional break between games, I’ve pretty much always been active on one or another.

In all of these years, I’ve never once hit the level cap.

Oh sure, I came close on World of Warcraft (67 priest I think) and I often wonder why I’ve never once accomplished this dubious honor. Well, after much meditation on this subject (minutes and minutes, in fact) I think I came to the conclusion. Instead of blaming my own resolve, I think I’ll do instead what comes instinctively to humans as a species: I’ll blame someone else. MMORPG developers, all of you, pull the old bait and switch on your consumers. At first you mask grinding with quests and other shit but by the time you’re painfully close to the level cap all pretext of distraction is removed. Fuck you, you’re grinding. I suspect the reason they do this is because they reason they already have you paying, and you’re already that close, so you’ll surely endure those last few levels of pain because the glory of a maxed character is forever.

Well they’d be dead wrong. I can appreciate trying to mask the grind, which all MMORPGs do to at least a degree of success. Games like World of Warcraft mask the grind well in theory, because it takes relatively little time to grind your character from 1-70 and I assume to 80 now, but the fact that with every expansion your previous achievement is immediately negated by the crap you find floating around in the first 5 minutes of the new content pretty much makes all you just did meaningless.

I suppose one might argue  that the point of video games and all games in general is to have fun, but there you’d be dead wrong. Tell me, what was the best part of leveling in World of Warcraft? Final Fantasy XI? Yeah, let’s talk about Final Fantasy XI’s leveling. What was the best part of that? Was it killing the snippers, clippers, or one of their ten thousand reskinned cousins? Or perhaps it was the worker crawlers and their reskinned brethren. I challenge, nay, dare, anyone to name one objectively good thing about grinding in MMORPGs.

At this point some might be wondering why I play these games at all when I clearly don’t have fun with them, and there you have a good point. I suppose what I enjoy most is the odd sense of accomplishment at finally hitting a new level, getting a new piece of equipment, et cetera. Games that convince (lie) most effectively that what I did was indeed challenging and worthwhile I tend to stick with the most. Final Fantasy XI’s tedious grind scheme meant each level actually felt like it had meaning, compared to World of Warcraft’s smooth, easy clip. However, the illusion of progress is shattered in Final Fantasy XI when I’m level 41 and still can’t effectively solo enemies 15 levels below me, and in World of Warcraft it’s shattered when everything I had collected previous is immediately rendered meaningless by Blizzard’s latest expansion.

So, to make an already TL;DR post even more TL;DR: MMORPG developers, please learn how to lie to me better. Blizzard, you don’t have to throw new shit my way the second I step into the new expansion’s first zone. My gear can keep until, say, 73. Square, let me solo the banshee. It’s okay. I guarantee I won’t figure out a totally awesome, game shattering scam by being able to kill it without back up. Trust me, I’m not that smart.