Got at least 50 titles of MMOs in my background, seen a lot from all of them. We all know that we won't find the perfect MMO any time soon, that includes an open, immersive world, a story line worth investing time into, combat in both pvp and pve to be balanced and polished, graphics and sounds to be detailed with addition of some cut scenes maybe.
Grinding would always be the base of MMOs, at least that's how I see it. Unless there's no grinding, there's no free way of getting to end game content/equipment, but some companies are taking this to the next level, again this is a personal opinion.
Some the newest and most recent MMOs I've played have tried balancing things out, but failed.
Take Skyforge for example. Graphics are beautiful, although the engine is poorly optimized, cut scenes and voice acting are found quite often. Combat was nice, but not balanced at all. While I was playing we had 2-3 classes out of 13 that were on top of both pvp and pve, the rest were pretty much useless, at least for endgame. (The game lets you switch between all classes you have unlocked at will.) Game is completely free to play, however there's an in-game currency that is bought with irl money and used for buying mainly boosters and clothing. (There are no armors whatsoever, the only equipment that the character has are main and secondary weapon, rings and talismans). So, this sounds nice, yeah, for a while. In the beginning of your play you get 3 days of premium, which just open a whole new world for you, a world where the grinding is made easier. Once those 3 days are over you are back in reality and you just want to spent those 11 euro for a month worth of premium, it is not obligatory to do so, but its hard to come back from premium. So at this point for most players the game becomes a game with monthly fee. This is where the Devs got it all wrong, because the grinding here is to much. There are no levels in this game, you have a huge a** skill tree composed of different nodes offering passive/active skills and stat boosts. Those nodes are opened with sparks, awarded by missions. The amount of sparks you receive depends on the mission difficulty and one of the latest updates lets you chose your reward. There are a few kinds of sparks, but the 3 basics are green, red and blue, those are used for unlocking nodes in the main skill tree, called Atlas, and those same sparks/gems unlock classes, from then on, each class has its own Atlas. This is where the biggest grinding comes. Each class atlas is divided in two parts, beginning part and main part, in the first part all nodes are unlocked with those 3 kinds of sparks I mentioned above, however the main part is unlocked by either class designated sparks or sparks of evolution. All sparks in the game have weekly limits. Sparks of evolution are sort of universal sparks and can unlock nodes in each class atlas, those are obtained only by premium members or in special missions that occur every few days. The grinding here comes from the low weekly limit you have of class sparks, in order to fully unlock a class you would need about 3-4 weeks worth of class sparks, while we have 13 available classes, you can do the math on your own and see how long it takes to have all classes unlocked. Here comes the best part, premium users receive 50% more sparks than regular. How is this not pay to play?
Another grinding fest is the so much apprised Path of Exile, played it for a while and the grind there is just to much, maybe a few times more than in Skyforge and Silkroad. I guess that it is no coincidence that the developing company of the game is called Grinding Gear Games. Economy is ruined, by players monopolizing all rare resources and requesting prices for legendary items that are unbelievable. For those of you who do not know, the game has no real currency, there are certain orbs/gems that are quite rare to come by and those are used in trades.
B&S - Poor optimization in certain areas for no apparent reason. Combat is good, but the game itself is dull due to repetitive and tedious questing. Also, you can reach level cap in 2 days. Haven't jumped in pvp that much and I hope it doesn't get boring as fast as the pve does.
