I think you miss the point that there is a closed economy.

If gold farmers are farming coin drops and vendor trash for example (as in vanilla) more currency enters the system than would normally be expected.

This has the same effect as when in the real world a government prints more money.

So when someone pays them $20 for some of their gold he is becoming significantly richer and everyone else on his server is becoming poorer by a very small amount. This is because the buying power of our money is reduced as more currency enters the system.

More fundamentally it has deep implications for game design. Want to talk to someone when you play a MMO on free trial – it won’t work because of gold sellers. Want a robust economic system? MMOs avoid them because they are so easy to gold farm in. Want to make money raiding instead of having to farm? Designed out of the system to a large extent.

In addition vast amounts of development resources go to fighting them and many players are victimised by hacks, phishing and other malicious behaviour.

I wonder if next time you log in you find your account hacked and your characters stripped whether you will still feel gold buying affects no one else but the buyer.

I believe that every activity, and every minute, spent playing a game should be fun and not a chore.

I don’t buy gold, but no, all your arguments that buying gold conceptually break the game fall as flat as Indy’s scimitar-wielding assailant did when he pulled out his pistol.

I’ll use Test Drive Unlimited as an example, but not having played it myself I could be way off-base. It’s marketed as a MOOR (Massively Open Online Racing) game. My understanding is there’s essentially a persistent world to drive around in. There are various challenges and races to participate in, but is that “grinding?” I also don’t know how many players it supports at any given time for exactly how “massively” it is, but would a game like that go over if it had a world big enough to support 3K+ players per server like the typical MMORPG does?

What about something like GTA4? Let’s pretend there’s a MMOG version of GTA out there (meaning the big seamless world, sandboxy, complex urban areas etc. unlike the extremely simplistic “cities” in our MMORPG’s) but for non-shooting/gang activities there’s also just “stuff” to do (let’s say a marriage of the GTA and The Sims). BUT without any true RPG to it. No leveling, no attributes to improve, etc. Just the game. Would it have staying power to keep players coming back month after month? [Note that I am excluding APB from this since that is a PvP cops and robbers game and its level of "massively multiplayer" is up for debate.]

I know that I do enjoy learning my way around, in order to optimise my own travel, for example. That’s not really a grind … or is it?

By my definition, no it isn’t because you enjoy it. Using LOTRO as an example (though what I remember of vanilla WoW’s Alliance quests fits this bill too) I enjoy exploring the zones, etc. and finding stuff on my own. But when quests have me running from point to point, zone to zone and I feel like I should be getting paid by the Middle Earth (or Azeroth) Postal Service, I’m not having fun anymore.

And it is also a way to add some simulation that an activity is difficult, time consuming or otherwise non trivial (maybe not a great way, I don’t disagree with you there, but it is effective.)

I know that I do enjoy learning my way around, in order to optimise my own travel, for example. That’s not really a grind … or is it?

But really grinds are the result of bad design. It doesn’t matter in MMOs, though, because they are not about good gameplay and game design, they’re about relaxation, socialization, and competition between people who have way too much time to spend.

I could definitely design an MMO that has no real grind (you could chose to repeat certain aspects of the game, but that would be suboptimal). The fact that people are incapable of understanding that grind is unnecessary shows that we’ve become accustomed to bad design, and now it seems like it can’t be avoided.

None of those apply because they are not applied in normal conversation. Normally play implies game. If you want to argue for less-used meanings, go right ahead, but you’re only weakening the meaning of MMO by spreading out the worlds that it describes.

But wasn’t that the point? If we shrink the definition of an MMO to a DikuMUD derivative, then sure, grind is a part of it. But it doesn’t need to be.

Without the grind we’d attach much less value to everything except those rewards which are purely skill-based.

You say it like it’s a bad thing. Why should time spent in MMOs have anything other than entertainment value?

By investing more time we naturally add value.

In the sense that digging a hole for the sake of digging a hole adds value.

IMHO, there has to be some point to the digging. Maybe digging itself is fun (although the grind rarely is). Maybe that hole will be used for a tree, making your community happy and thus making you more popular. Maybe you dig to find a hidden treasure. Maybe the hole will work as a trap against your enemy. Maybe you hope to reveal a hidden cavern to explore.

But there is a difference between mind-numbingly dull and extremely repetitive grind and having options to do different things in different ways. And the worst thing to happen to an MMO is if standing in one spot and killing mob after mob is the most efficient way to play it.

I think this is also why daily quests are so popular – they are grindy and repetitive as hell, but things could even be worse and less inspiring than that.

I wonder how LOTRO’s new “Mirkwood endgame” will play out when it comes to Item XP levelling. The old bounty quests are no more of value to level the legendary weapon, and skirmish marks for item xp runes or doing some dailies around the Gazburg (sp?) outpost near Dol Guldur plus hunting 25 spiders in that cave seem to be way to go.

I would like to promote the idea of the “individual random daily kill quest”. “There is a mob hidden somewhere in the North Downs. Go to find and kill it!” Spawn location and type of mob would be different for every player.

Without the grind we’d attach much less value to everything except those rewards which are purely skill-based. By investing more time we naturally add value.