Grinding: your second job except you're paying for it

Do we owe anything to game developers? I was thinking about this the other day when I remembered one blogger saying that he felt it was important to stick with a developer (or in this case a MMO) because in the end it will be rewarding, or something along those lines. It seems people are also doing this with WAR with people barely playing, but still waiting out for some new content to be released, with their monthly sub still ticking away. Why do we feel an obligation to keep on paying, hoping that it will get better? In my view, when a game stops being fun then its time to drop it. Most people have jobs and it hardly seems logical to come home and pay for something that you don't enjoy.

People say that often there are bumps where the game is no fun, but once you get over that the game really shines. This is fair enough; games cannot be perfect the entire time, but its up to the developers to decide how long this period is going to be. In RoM I am really beginning to feel slightly hopeless when a guildie told me that I would need 1.9 million experience to get from 49-50. At the moment I think I need a bit over 300k to get to 37 and its already taking me long enough. I'm sorry, but why is the leveling stage so long? It would be understandable if this was a pay-to-play game as the devs would have wanted subscriptions to run as long as possible. But then, once again, it brings up the issue of these non-fun periods. Seems to me like nearly the entire game is a period which isn't seen as 'fun'.

I think the figure of people who got to the higher-end raiding in WoW before Wrath was something like 1%, I'm guessing that this is probably an accurate figure for the amount of people who will get to 50 in RoM, let alone 50/50. The incentive for powering through all those levels is the end-game raiding, but I've heard from various people that this is just another grind: a gear grind. People see higher lvl toons running around in their shiny gear and wish they could look like them. They just think if they grind for a few months more, then they can get to the top and begin getting that gear. Turns out they have moved from one grinding aspect to another and the end-game is not much different. Hmmm, maybe I need to take a break from MMOs for a while. :P Get back to my roots and play some Baldur's...