I've occasionally been tempted to play Idle Champions which seems similar.
It's difficult to quantify what makes a good one, but my favorite is Universal Paperclips.
It's the only game I've ever played where your damage output is most effectively measured by the size of its exponent
(/s)
You neglected what's by far the funnest and most important and user-retaining aspect of open world MMOs: player-to-player interaction - be it friendly, neutral, or hostile.
The absolute most enjoyable open world MMOs I've played had essentially no content. Players forged their own content in the form of geopolitics, war, economics, and copious communication (propaganda and shittalking, largely). They felt like a completely unplanned, natural simulation of militaristic human societies from hundreds or thousands of years ago. Probably not ideal in real life, but very fun for a game.
I'm convinced the best MMOs to come out over the next 20 years will have very little content and very sparse grinding mechanics. The magic is the emergent game and meta-game that springs forth from the bonding and strife between gargantuan numbers of human agents.
Current open world survival games use grind as a main mechanism for driving emergent game-play and creating player differentiation/conflict, so I don't see it ending completely. Game designers have gotten much better at making grind that isn't actively unfun though.
What MMO was that? This sounds like a MUSH (a kind of text only roleplay server which is a couterpart of the more combat-focused MUDs)
To be clear, I don't think that part is lame at all. That part is great. I'm all for relaxing repetitive games.
But I don't think that is what happens for all of the players in a game with pay-to-skip mechanics, and I think when we talk about the positive aspects of a game like Runescape, we're kind of engaging in a little bit of wishful thinking about how universal that experience was for all of its players. If a game is genuinely optimizing for creating a relaxing repetitive experience, then it (and 3rd parties around it) probably shouldn't also be monetizing getting rid of that experience.
Runescape grinding in theory was a relaxing, great experience for some people. I'm very happy for those people, but in practice, enough people obviously hated the grind enough that they were paying for bots. I am less concerned about the people who genuinely enjoyed chopping down trees, and more concerned about the obvious subset of players who were somehow feeling trapped by the game into spending real-world money to avoid something that was obviously unpleasant for them.
Willing theraputic, relaxing, repetitive grind is great. Hard to monetize with microtransactions though, and when I look at the play-to-earn model more broadly, that model literally doesn't work if people enjoy the grind. The only way the money comes into the game is the grind isn't theraputic or relaxing, a nontrivial chunk of the playerbase has to hate that process or else nobody makes money.
The healthy, relaxing, kind of best-case scenario grind you describe is the opposite of what a play-to-earn game designer wants; those designers have a strong incentive not to allow their games to have enjoyable grinding, because the whole point is that they expect the majority of their players to pay money buying resources from other players. That monetization model only works if people aren't enjoying the grind.
Reuse of content in new context doesn’t have to be a boring clone.
Disney would regularly reuse animations of characters between animated films to save money. It did not necessarily take away from the wrapping content’s best moments or overall entertainment value.
For example dancing reveries and other sequences in Robin Hood used rotoscoping heavily. [1]
There’s no doubt the reuse was cheap but in some ways that allowed the designers to focus on new characters and scenes.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-reuses-animation-2015...
Fishing in Final Fantasy XIV is boring yet strangely relaxing, and in many cases doesn't even require looking at the screen.
We've probably lost some potentially fantastic physicists to MMOs.
We don't all want the same things and people want things we don't want, but this also allows us to trade and have both parties come out ahead from their own perspectives.
So there's always a tension between whether people should even be allowed to want some things or they should be forbidden due to being bad or wasteful in some capacity.
But I do think there's a special kind of irony to be complaining about the BS of someone getting money for moving bits and pixels around in a blog post on the internet frequented by a bunch of people, many of whom move bits and pixels around for a living.
I'd argue that PvP is a third option. Though that does impose its own requirements to do justice and ensure longevity.
There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics.
Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can even reuse sprites and just change names - a lv10 tree, a lv50 tree, a lv100 tree. Real content is hard to do, requires imagination, development, testing.
So most open world games will have a high grinding/content ratio. But, as lame as it sounds, some people do like it. I'm guilty of playing a RuneScape-like game for mobile (Ancients Reborn). Things are slow and you need hours and hours to raise skills but, even though it's arguably boring, I find it relaxing. And there's pvp and talking to fellow players to keep it fun. So, in the end, I agree with you it sucks to have a game some players pay to not play it and others have fun cheating it, and it's a cheap design choice, but there are some people find it relaxing to watch a little toon chop down a magic tree.