[Spoke]

This is an opinion from a player's perspective and I will refer to my own experience in the particular game I spent most of the time at, do not take it as advertising. I played Aardwolf actively for a number of years and in all that time I managed to build myself a reputation as an active player killer and somewhat knowledgeable in matters of exploration and competition. Now, there are a great number of activities that you can perform along the way (a key to prevent grinding from being the sole focus) that do not necessarily translate to getting more levels (the main form of grind in the game), and if you want to attain the full potential of your character you need to go through the grind too; the important thing is, that I never did more than 5-9% of the experience you can obtain in the game, but I dedicated my time at being competitive in player vs player combat. Now, intuition would say that by doing that I always had a disadvantage, but the mere fact that by just carefully planing my game and strategy I could still be competitive against people who had spent years just grinding, and the fact that someone could potentially get to the point where I was (in terms of character development) in relatively short time always struck me as fascinating.

One major tumbling block for many players who complain about grinding, I have noticed, is that they want things to be handed to them or just things to be easy to do/get. Yet when that happens, they just grow bored and move on to the next easy game. I think that is a reason for some sort of underlying grind (time consuming activity) to exist. Maybe with a much bigger staff base you can pull a WoW and make your game such that you do not have to kill the same MOB twice, but in a MUD, where character interaction is important and the number of available players is not boundless as it seems to be WoW's case, I suppose this is not practical. Grinding means you are forced to go to similar places other people have to go to, means that you will have to have character interaction (or competition) and in these types of games I find that to be very important.

To wrap up, here are some things that think are important in a game (on this subject):
- A grinding system that provides the player with slowly growing increase of power but that allows players to compete (if they devote some time to it) from early on, is the best I can think of.
- A number of alternate activities that a player can perform (and be competitive about) that require little to no participation on the main grinding system.
- A balanced game that allows for new and old grinders to share spaces and hence engage in character interaction while doing the grinding.

Them be my two gawld coin matey