I'm not trying to convince you to play it, but this isn't always the case. Final Fantasy XIV is so story-focused it is required to progress through the expansions. To facilitate this anyone can help and after physically running to a dungeon to unlock it you can then queue for it anywhere and higher level people automatically scale to the dungeon level and so people are always encouraged to help with all story content. New people even get a sprout icon to encourage people to mentor them, and dungeon content has multiple difficulty modes. In short not all MMORPGs are as grind intensive as you're thinking. The grind is optional with in-game systems making catching up relatively swift. Pantheon has some incredibly tough competition if it shoots for old-school MMORPG design.
