I'm describing games like World of Warcraft, where I spent WAY too much time grinding for some elusive drop to get to the next quest in the chain. It's amazing how many wolves you can kill in Azeroth without finding a single paw :D

I would've gladly paid money to skip that bit and get to the fun parts even then and I was a mostly broke student at the time.

Now I play mostly story-driven single player games that don't rely on fetch quests to pad the runtime. Or games that really don't have an ending like Factorio, Dwarf Fortress and the like.