MMO vs Multiplayer

This is a topic I've been thinking about lately.

In my past mmo's have been a large chunk of my gaming time. I played games such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft, which involve countless hours of "grinding". Grinding for xp to reach max level, doing dailies for money, doing heroics for valor, etc. Then there are the raids which can take hours, with chance you might not get a single drop. All of this is so that I could get a small increase in my characters stats.

Vinzulu - 19 Troll Rogue Twink - World of Warcraft

It seems in mmo's that you have to put in an incredible amount of work to have a little fun. I've read before that mmo's are designed to get you to play as long as possible. This means dragging out everything as far as they can. In 2011 I started slowing my grinding to an eventual halt. I first stopped raiding, then heroics, then dailies. I still enjoyed pvp doing battlegrounds, but since I didn't grind for honor points I didn't fare very well.

Then in 2012 I eventually stopped playing WoW, and pretty much swore off grinding. So what had brought on this change to reduce and eventually remove grinding from my life? I came to a new philosophy. If I am playing a video game, I am playing it to have fun. As such, I am only going to play it if I am having fun. What I realized is that I wasn't really playing at all, I was working. Doing dailies, heroics, etc was work, not play.

Since then I've rarely played an mmo, except for Guild Wars 2. I'm mostly playing single and multiplayer games, such as Skyrim, Tribes Ascend, Farcry 3, and Chivalry. These games can be immensely enjoyable, and have a high fun for your time ratio. Have half an hour to kill? You could do a heroic you've done fifty times before, or you could rack up a great kill count or go on a quest to save a town from pirates.

Zappi - Asura Engineer - Guild Wars 2

Writing this article has brought up a few questions however. Leveling up is found in both an mmo and in multiplayer/single player games. So what is the difference? Why does one seem like a chore while the other is often just a byproduct of having fun? One of the answers I think lies in an earlier statement of mine, that mmo's try to stretch things out. Why are there so many games coming out as mmo's?

Also, what MMO would you like to have been a multiplayer game instead? What would it be like?