As many of you probably don't know, I played FFXI for 4 years, and WoW since the Beta Stress Test, and recently just quit. Both were very different games, despite having one thing in common: both took up a lot of my free time. Did I choose for this to happen? Yes. I'm not denying that.

With that said, it seems to be that the current market trend for MMOs is to copy and paste WoW's layout, and fill in your own content so to speak. This includes many things, but it includes one specific thing that I strongly believe doesn't need to exist in future MMOs: The grind.

After playing WoW (hardcore for the first two years, and slowly growing more and more casual until I finally quit), I can tell you some honest things about it.

1.) WoW was best when it was new, and the level cap was lvl60. Why? This is the best time to play any MMO, when it's new, not everyone knows exactly what to do, there's places to explore and people to meet, and server-positions to fill (what I mean by that is there's always the badasses and the casuals and the elitists, and so on, etc).
2.) The Warcraft Story line ended with WC3. If anyone has seen what the WoW lore is for the end of the Lich King, you know what I'm talking about. Nothing in WoW lore was ever as epic as the story in WC1-3.
3.) The original creators of WoW have stopped working on it, and moved on to Blizzard's next MMO team. They have been replaced by a team who's sole purpose is to milk the shit out of the game because a lot of people are still addicted to it's terribleness, providing that steady income of $15/mo.

What do all of these have to do with my point? My point is at a certain point in WoW, you have done it all. No new added bosses are ever going to be drastically different than anything you've ever done before, you're never gonna be done with trying to complete a perfect gear set, etc.

I'm not trying to argue that the point of an MMO is to eventually win, because it's obviously quite the opposite. But there comes a point in every MMO where things become recycled, or popularity dies down after everyone has done almost everything.

With WoW, every quest follows the same format of the base quests. Go talk to an NPC, gain shit exp for it. Go collect these items from the world, run into things to kill, return back for big exp gain. Go kill these things until they drop 15 items, return back. Hop on this flying shit, fly around and drop bombs on stuff. Who. Fuking. Cares?

Anyway, I don't want to run on with this forever, because I want to get to some good discussion.

Do you think an MMO can ever be a game where your character can evolve without you feeling like you have to waste every freaking minute of your life on it?

I mean, they're already getting my 15$/month (or whatever), why not let me casually play and not get too far behind. You're gonna get my money whether I'm logged in 80% of the day, or 10%.

How long will it be before people decide that WoW isn't the MMO to try and be like, and create a >completely< new concept?