Grinding

Grinding sucks. Why do games have grinding?

Because without it, players would zoom through content. Something has to slow them down! Grinding is one way of doing it. Want that sword of +10 uber? Go kill mobs until you get enough faction with the right people and they'll sell it to you.

If a player could finish the final bossfight with a new, level 1 character -- then what's the point of the intervening content, even if it is fun?

There's a lot of places in WoW where the fun way to get faction requires being in the right guild and clearing the right instance. If you're not in that guild, then you're stuck with the slow way, which is boring. At this point you have two options: give up on your goal, or grind. This is obviously why some of the slow, boring ways don't give rep after a certain point -- the designers want you to go do something else. The designers know their solution sucks, and they're hoping you try some of the other stuff and have more fun along the way.

Now the problem has turned into a group-size constraint. Some content is hidden behind having 24 friends, a competent leader, and a schedule that allows all of you to be online for the same two or three contiguous hours. What if that's not your style?

What if the optimal grind path -- one that asks you to spend no more than an hour a day -- isn't fast enough for you? The presence of a repeatable quest that you can do for the other 23 hours of a day means that some players will feel compelled to do that unfun grinding.

Making everything fun doesn't always work. What's fun in one guise can become unfun in another; removing that mechanic altogether gets rid of some fun. Choosing only perfect fun mechanics isn't really possible in any large game. Lowbies often enjoy their lowbie quests to kill ten wimpy skeletons, but then they're done. They could continue to kill skeletons until they become grey, but they have better options. And yet the game still presents the player with that unfun advancement option; luckily, it's not an efficient or optimal one.

Here's the heart of grinding: when the most efficient path of advancement is doing something repetitive or boring. This phrasing suggests its own solution: provide a more efficient path that is fun. The trick, of course, is content.

MMOs provide thousands of hours of gameplay; the standard console game, ten to twenty. Can you imagine making the content equivalent of a hundred console games? That's a pretty huge budget. Something's gotta repeat.

I think there's two answers: (1) your game should be short enough that there's no boring stretches, and (2) procedural content generation. (Multiplayer often fills in for that second solution.)