I have always wondered why, no matter what MMOs I tried, I couldn't play them for more than 30 minutes in a row without getting bored. I thought it was because of the grindy quests like "Kill 10 spiders". But today, after playing Guild Wars 2 for 20 minutes (my favorite MMO ATM) and almost falling asleep, I realized the fundamental difference between MMO and single player. I will call it "filler content".
What is "filler content"? It is the content developers put into a game with sole purpose to make it longer. Quest "Kill 10 spiders" is a perfect example: there is no reason to make a player kill more than 1 spider because it is exactly the same experience every time. But without such quests, say, WoW's leveling will become 10 times shorter or so. To grab more money, developers need to make people stay in the game for longer time, so they add a lot of filler content at all stages of a game. "Dailies" that you sometimes need to do for 2 months to get something, trash mobs in dungeons and raids that have no function other than to make them last longer, fishing that is 3000 times doing the same thing - these all are perfect examples of filler content.
Now, what is the difference between single player and MMO RPGs? In single player games there is always some filler content, but it is usually a minority of a game, or, at least, not a very large part of it. For example, in Dragon Age: Origins of course there are some grindy quests like "collect 12 corpse galls and bring them to Chantry Board". But the majority of the quests are related to the main story or are side quests with really some lore behind them (like a task to find a hunter who has gone missing in the wilds, and he proves to have become a werewolf). Doing these quests, I feel being a part of the world, I feel doing something that actually matters, I am rescuing this very werewolf, not some abstract werewolf who has been rescued by millions of levelers already.
In MMO RPGs, however, the vast majority of content is filler content. "Killing 10 spiders", I do not really feel doing anything meaningful lore-wise, I just grind levels. There are some meaningful quests, of course, such as the Sylvanas' quest line in Silverpine Forest, but they usually are just a tiny bit of the whole process of one long grind. Even SWTOR, with its "story-based" leveling, still mostly consists of stupid grindy quests, and they kill for me all the desire to follow the main story.
So, I have said nothing new here, you all guys are familiar with that difference. But, I wonder, am I the only one for whom this difference is so huge that I just cannot stand MMOs at all? Every time I play (or, more accurately, try to play again) a game like WoW (the only MMO in my life in which he filler content doesn't kill the game for me completely since there are also quite a few humorous quests), SWTOR or Guild Wars, I just cannot help but think along the lines, "If I played Mass Effect or Deus Ex at the moment, I would really do something meaningful in the virtual world, while here I feel that I'm wasting my time solely for purpose of leveling, gear grind, etc.". Is anyone of you guys the same?
I am just curious guys, so please leave "OMG NOOB go do raiding" or "Tell me something I don't know" remarks aside.