Grinding/Farming for profession and Jobs

I love grinding. Imo there should always be some amount of grinding in mmos, but there should be enough variety to that grinding and enough alternative ways to get what you want, so that you like the grind rather than consider it all boring and pointless.

Any and all games that require you to do any type of activity for longer than an hour or two (though even those can be considered too much) will have grind in them. It's just that some people like that grind so they don't call the activity that.

I don't like the question. Here is why.

Imagine a game where you can do 6 different activities that are all fun and this is really good progress.

Even if each of those activities is 'best done for 20 minutes at a time before shifting to another activity, there's probably a 'most rewarding' way to do that.

Some players will use the most rewarding way so that they can get rewards the fastest. They may start to have less fun because of this, but maybe they are making up for it by enjoying the rewards. They get ahead of other people. Sometimes those other people feel bad that they're not doing the most rewarding thing, so they also do it, but they find it less fun.

Human brains are largely pattern-matching devices if given a reward structure and left to themselves. They will optimize themselves out of having to actually DO any content at all unless the person is paying attention.

Therefore the optimal way to play the game is usually not fun for EVERYONE. To be 'optimal' you must give up some fun, or be one of the lucky few who REALLY REALLY enjoys the optimal playstyle.

These days, even the most basic MMOs don't involve grinding. You could just 'have fun instead of getting rewards' in everything but the absolute worst games. Then again, you mentioned two of them.

Bad games are just bad, they don't imply anything about the rest of the genre, if anything they imply something about PEOPLE.