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.
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“Woah dude, where did you get that cool stuff?” “Oh this? Yeah I bought it from xxxxx.com”. This is a common conversation in MMOs nowadays, the amount of people purchasing online currancy is rising steadily. Often now more than ever, people just go out, spend a few hundred dollars on gold for let’s say World of Warcraft, and are content with themselves. I may be a bit harsh when I say this, but these people are immoral tools, and furthermore, assholes. Why? Let’s look at it from some different perspectives.
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Halo Killer. WoW killer. If you have a First Person Shooter, you want to be a Halo Killer. If you have an MMORPG, you want to be a World of Warcraft Killer. Overtaking these games becomes an end unto itself, but not for the reasons of simple sales. Of course, the games that usually must be “killed” are often not the objectively best games, but are often games that have defined themselves as the standard that all games must measure up to.
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World of Warcraft is one of today’s largest online games, with over 11 million subscribers, each one paying $11 to $15 a month on fees. And yet, the game itself plays like a generic action RPG – You run around, cast spells, and fight the same monsters over and over, with some varying tactics based on whether you get additional creatures attacking you, or if the enemy is resistant to an element. For the most part, you use the same moveset over and over again, repeating a set – For example, a battle in Warcraft can go as such: You run up to an enemy while attacking, cast a beneficial spell which heals you for every swing, then do an offensive move, and then recast the healing spell once it wears off, and then repeat from there – means that for the most part, the game is a monotonous grind of whittling away one monster’s health down to nothing only to go to the next, with the occasional new monster type thrown in.

With such an obvious grind in a game, why does it have so many subscribers?
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Blizzard Entertainment has announced that World of Warcraft, its incredibly popular MMO, is now played by more than 11.5 million subscribers worldwide. The landmark was aided by the November 13 release of WoW’s second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

Apparently, WoTLK sold over 2.8 million copies within 24 hours of launch, making it the fastest-selling PC game of all time. And it has gone from strength to strength, having sold 4 million copies total in its first month.

“We’re pleased to welcome the new and returning players who have helped World of Warcraft reach these new milestones, and we appreciate the enthusiasm and support that the game’s global community has continued to show,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We look forward to providing all of them with an excellent entertainment experience for a long time to come.”