Looking for grindy MMORPG

[mearo]

(NOTE: By MMORPG I mean an RPG game in which massive amounts of people connect to a single persistent world (or a handful of different ones on official servers).
^ I just wanted to add that so we don't waste our time with "Dota2" or "TF2" type recommendations)


TL;DR
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post got kind of long, so if you just want to read this section and respond that's fine:
Can anyone recommend me a grindy MMORPG with a high playerbase and a cash shop that doesn't allow players to get a big advantage? Also, it would be nice if the game is slightly newish

Also, If possible can you please also include a small description of the 'business model' of the game you recommend? e.g. does it have a cash shop? If it it has a cash shop do the items in there allow players to get an actual game advantage? etc..
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and here's the rest of the post if you don't mind reading.

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I'm not just looking for mindless grinding either.
I'll just give an example of a grindy MMORPG I really liked in the past to help explain.

The first MMORPG I played was 'hero online' and it was extremely grindy.
What I liked about the grind in that game was that it had a good balance between questing and grinding. There was not enough XP to be gained from the quests alone to level you up, so eventually you would have to go into grinding mode too.
This way, I was free to choose how I leveled up. I had areas that I knew I could grind at, but if I felt particularly lucky I might decide to risk some of the more challenging mobs to get very fast XP, but I would just have to be careful all the time because pulling in one too many mobs or other wrong moves can get me killed, and there was a pretty steep XP penalty for dying (de-leveling was very common)

Also I would have to consider the amount of gold I wasted on health/mana-potions vs how much gold I gained grinding. It might be possible to grind a higher lvl area but I would require bigger potions which would make grinding there unprofitable so I would have to stick to lower level areas.


The bottom line is grindy games feel more like I'm actually playing a game. It's possible to have negative gold loss, it's possible to 'bite off more than you can chew' by fighting mobs you're not prepared for and actually have a negative XP gain for that day.
As opposed to modern 'quest based leveling' games in which you almost never actually need to spend any gold at all to fund your leveling, there's very little risk that you will die doing quests because the developers have to balance the difficulty of that quest to the lowest skilled/poorest built/poorest equipped players, and you can't really go on to higher level quests until you finish theres so you can't really seek out a more challenging experience you just have to follow the path the developers decided for you.

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So anyways, that's sort of what I'm looking for, and also my reasons for coming to this conclusion recently that I miss grindy MMOs. If you know of any games that sound like I would enjoy them please let me know.

Thanks.

[ProneToBleed]

PoE. Whole game is a grind basically.

If you don't want it to be mindless, then play on the hardcore leagues. (If you die, you drop to the standard league which is the default league. "Perma-death" because you can't switch characters between leagues.

The "cash shop" is basically cosmetic microtransactions with the exception of extra storage slots (But if you want to be F2P, you can make mule accounts. Multi-client isn't hard to do)

[xDrac]

Could try out Lineage II but you won't have it easy to be "competitive".

[mearo]

Could try out Lineage II but you won't have it easy to be "competitive".

Lineage II is one of the games I was looking into before I made this thread but on their website I saw that players can buy items in their store to give them "hastened progress through the world".
Now I'm not a cheapskate or anything, I don't mind paying for games, but a game that has an option (based on out-of-game factors, i.e. money) which allows me to progress faster than other players, is simply not fun for me at all. I'd rather everyone have to pay or nobody (cosmetic items and such are fine though)

[xDrac]

Lineage II is one of the games I was looking into before I made this thread but on their website I saw that players can buy items in their store to give them "hastened progress through the world".
Now I'm not a cheapskate or anything, I don't mind paying for games, but a game that has an option (based on out-of-game factors, i.e. money) which allows me to progress faster than other players, is simply not fun for me at all. I'd rather everyone have to pay or nobody (cosmetic items and such are fine though)

I understand where you're coming from.
But at this point, I doubt there will be a game where money will not be a factor in hastening your progress in the game's world.
I would definitely give it a try once. There is a reason I have been playing this game for years
But either way, good luck in finding something!