I agree with you. I don't believe that there is such a thing as "being tricked into thinking you're having fun"; there's still fun there, but it's shallow because it's tied to the virtual reward more than anything else.
 
There are plenty of ways to enjoy an MMO without going down that road but it requires the right mindset.

" There are plenty of ways to enjoy an MMO without going down that road but it requires the right mindset. "

Enjoy the ride. 
 
View your gear as the way to go forward and be able to do more fun stuff, not the other way around (get gear to raid, don't raid to get gear). Look at the new enemies as a challenge and the new dungeons as content you want to experience. 
 
View PvP as the thrill of smashing some cloth-wearer with a giant axe, annoying the hell out of the other team while you keep your team alive, or melting the face of everyone in the room; basically, enjoy whatever your chosen class/specialization does.
 
It's okay to be moderately interested in gear for the sake of gear. But if you don't enjoy the process of getting that gear (at least most of the time), you might want to rethink your priorities.

whenever I try an MMO, I find myself having fun until I reach the mid-tier and then I see the shallowness of the game. 
I've also played WoW alot, but got myself "free" from it, since I saw no purpose of playing it anymore.  
 
But the MMOs overall promise that it's like 1-2-3 level 80 and your gear will be the best of all! But the truth is, that you'll have to grind for it and when you finally reach the final level, finally get the best gear, you see the game for what it is. Blizzard are forced to keep making new content, to keep the subscribers striving for a certain thing and thus keeping them in the addiction of the game. 

RPGs have a lot more variance than they get credit for, I think.  It helps to talk a bit about what sorts of RPGs are being considered.  Some don't even have grinding as part of the gameplay, or level caps (I hear that thrown around way too much), or even levels or other stereotypical advancement features.  It gets into a game of definitions, too, where an RPG can have action elements that are definitely skill-based, but is too much twitch skill just an action game with stats?  
 
The debate kinda goes on forever unless you take a stand, I guess.  One of my favorite RPGs is Darklands. In that, you basically accomplish BY taking out local robber barons, beating up brigands and purging villages of corruption.  This isn't the grinding, although you do get experience and loot, so much as it's the reason you're playing.  As you do this, you gather clues as to when the next infernal gathering is going to be, so you can raid it and disrupt it, to keep evil at bay.  When you feel you're strong enough, you try to take out the major cause of all of this, and then can still run about the countryside righting wrongs and gaining notoriety.  But the difference I think is that it doesn't pretend that these little accomplishments are in lieu of something greater; every achievement feels like it matters.
 
When I look at how many MMO's are structured, how they're designed specifically to hold off on the great things, I'm not sure if it's fair to compare that to the experience in a single-player game, either.  Eventually in the latter, you can achieve some measure of success, and you can even beat the game.  Rewards aren't really deferred indefinitely, especially if there are no artificial mechanics to make advancement a chore, and there is skill involved in some of them, with resource management and tactical movement (Fire Emblem comes to mind).
 
It's easy for some to say "that's not an RPG" to just about anything I mention, but from the perspective of a guy who played the original kind, and still does, many of these video game representations feel like the game you can play if you can't get a group together.  And hell, even pen and paper games could hold off success indefinitely just like MMO's can, except you knew who to blame in that case: your GM :)
 
But my own opinion on the style of game that MMO's often present to me is sort of painful to imagine my playing for long stretches.  I tried the original Everquest for a time, and spent quite a while building up my character.  I felt a connection TO THAT CHARACTER more than I cared about all the little tidbits I was earning through the fetch quests and mindless slaughter of hapless animals.  But beyond that connection I felt like the game itself was sort of irritating distraction at times, and after a while the fetch quests seemed really, really absurd.  So I just set out on my own, into places I shouldn't have gone, and explored the environment.  That was fun, and in a sense even though I wasn't supposed to be doing that, I had a blast because the game was flexible enough to allow me to customize my experience.   Even after I stopped playing a month later, I still had that experience of running my lizard dude through places that were waaay too high level for me and getting away with it; was quite a boost to my imagination.
 
My then girlfriend, now wife, introduced me to the game, and had friends she knew through her guild.  Those social contacts, and her own character customization, were more important to her than the grinding, which was just something to do, an activity, to get the materials she needed to bump up her skills, which she eventually managed to max out.  She had set her goal and achieved it, so once she did that, she didn't feel the need to play anymore.  Remember that a lot of these MMO's were originally just scrolling text, and that a lot of the time fooling around on these things were actually spent chatting with friends or playing roles.  It was like a cafe of sorts, only instead of sipping coffee you were slaying monsters.  The primary activity for many was social.
 
But yeah, when you look at the actual game mechanics themselves, so many of them are so damned similar that it just depresses me.

I was thinking about the grind and things like that, but to be honest with MMO's i enjoy the community side of it allot more, i mean i dont go through hours and hours of forums but i have some good friends on WoW who i speak to regularly, sure there is the grind but i enjoy speaking to those people rather than the actual game. But i had fun getting to 80, there are beautiful environments in WoW, some in credibly fun quests and such. I think after 80 is different, whilst it is still fun to run instances and things like that it does get tedious and this sort of its a job mentality sometimes creeps in to my game time on WoW.

I'm not sure I understand. Is skill required for "true" fun or can fun be had with just eventual success?  Over the last few weeks a lot of conversation has circled around Demon's Souls and its high level of difficulty.  A lot of people claim that the fun is derived from finally beating the game and triumphing over its formidable tasks.  Wouldn't that feeling of satisfaction be similar to the trickery your mention in your original post?  Is success alone not gratifying?  MMOs are a more complex beast in my opinion not because of their design, but because of the social aspect of the games.  People like working together towards a common goal and the sense of belonging that goes alone with it.  Being part of a community creates a shared experience which, by itself alone, might not be as rewarding.  The struggle to earn acceptance among your fellow players may be long and monotonous (the grind) but with that recognition, a player can attain something different than the feelings achieved by finishing Braid (or whatever).  Value from their peers.  I'm not sure what's more worthwhile.  Feeling good about yourself because you skillfully completed a game alone or feeling good about yourself because you are viewed as a dependable and favored member of a team. 

I don't think you can be tricked into having fun. To me you are either having fun or you aren't. I've been playing MMO's since the fall of 2001 and to me they are social games. I don't understand the mindset of people who log into these games and then only want hit max level, get uber lootz, and don't want to form a party or interact with others. When I log into an MMO the primary purpose is to interact with the community and talk with people. It's not to gain levels and epic lootz. That's just something that happens, or doesn't happen, when killing monsters and completing quests with other people. It's not the primary goal or focus for me. "The Grind" as it's called is something that I see is only there to level the playing field for players in the game to make it easier to socialize. Everyone is in it and doing it so everyone automatically has something in common to talk about. It (the grind) serves sort of the same purpose as the drink you have when you go to socialize at the pub.

 One of my favorite recent commentaries on this topic is the recent Sessler's Soapbox (not bothering to try to imbed):
 
 http://g4tv.com/videos/42240/Sesslers-Soapbox-Grinding-is-Good/
 
Progression in games is one of the reasons they are such a great stress relief for me personally.  I'm a professional software engineer and there will be days where I will be fighting with the same bug feeling that I have made no progress whatsoever.  It is extremely nice to be able to come home on those days and drop Borderlands in for 30 minutes or hop on Call of Duty and be able to achieve something.  At their core these micro-accomplishments are no different than many of the stereotypes seen in our fathers.  Examples would be our dads coming home from work only to immediately go work on the car in the garage or finding a new project every weekend to complete.  Games make this satisfaction more available for me.  It is also why MMO's can be dangerous as the constant accomplishment can get its hooks in me.

I'd say that one of the main points that Blow communicates in the interview is that games are more than just escapism, and I think that this is a point we all can agree with.  We need look no further than how different each of our own gaming collections to see that there must be more reason for gaming than simply escapism.  There may be escapist elements in each of those games, but clearly the diversity shows escapism is not the primary motivation of game players otherwise we would all play the one, most escapist game.  Even MMOs have other motivations outside of avoiding our problems.
 
For me a big draw of an MMO is creating a virtual being who gets to experience a enormous, dynamic, highly interactive world and grow from that experience.  The player interacts with a changing world through that character, but also grows with the experience.  A physical universe constraint (at its most basic the flow of electrons through a cable) demands that for a multiple players to be sharing the same experience, something must be sacrificed from the single player experience.  For most MMOs, this comes in the form of reduced character interactivity which some (and I think Blow does) equate to decreased quality of gameplay.  
 
I see this criticism as the big hang up for most people, seeing the decreased inputs per second as poor quality.  But the reality is that it is not the inputs that players are interested in, but the outputs.

No, because usually people actually realize they are having to grind, and not having fun and stop playing. If it was actually fun they'd keep playing.
 
Take my experience with Warhammer Online for example. I got to level 20 and from 0-20 the game was a blast, but once you started doing the level 20 quests it just got "grindy" all the quests were "kill 20 of this, collect 15 of this". 
 I knew I wasn't having fun chasing "false rewards" so I stopped and haven't played since.

I pushed through the grind on wow to get to end game raiding.  it wasn't until 2 years later that I realized that raiding was itself a grind and a job.  MMOs are strange little things, you take 2-3 weeks off or so and when you come back everyone looks at you like you're an alien. 

During the times when I was child, I would carefully use the resources that I had — which was Christmas and Birthdays — to acquire new video games. One thing I valued more than anything was longevity in a game. One genre that particularly met this qualification was RPGs.  You could spend hours and hours and hours putting time in these games, however there was always the quantity vs quality issue. Luckily for me, my childhood was built around the golden age of RPGs and I enjoyed them immensely.

Yeah I sort of agree that mmo's become less and less skill-based as time goes on. Where are the MMOs that require timing and combos instead of spell queues and button spamming?
 
But I can like them just for the social aspect, but that's hard to justify a monthly fee for.

My experiences with MMOs vary, but 99% of the time I've played them I'm not having fun.  Sometimes I force myself to play more to see if it becomes more fun, but most often it does not.  Even in the MMOs I've enjoyed, where I had at least some fun, a large amount of the time wasn't fun.
 
I think it's safe to separate many RPGs from MMOs, and there are some action games that stretch out game content too much as well.

I never really cared about gear when I played WoW to be honest. This is probably why I wasn't much for a raider. Oh, I could spam the heals just fine, but farming all week for new tier pieces didn't interest me at all. 
 
 It actually sort of irritates me when I see people implying that the game would not be enjoyable without the gear. I never cared, I just wanted to run dungeons and kill people. Maybe that's why I liked it for so long.  I feel like MMO's are more about the social experience. The game is really about playing an RPG with your friends. The feeling of accomplishment, at least for me, wasn't about getting that next piece of gear, it was about downing the boss. I really got to know the people in my guild, and it felt like we really did something when we downed someone new. Coordinating 10/25 people to all work together, even if the task was pretty simple (don't stand in shit), was really rewarding. It's all about being a small part of something big. 
  
I can't speak for many other MMO's, but I can confidently say World of Warcraft takes skill. It's just a different kind of skill. To really succeed in that game you have to know a lot about the different stats, there are several equations to memorize. You really need to know the ins and outs of the mechanics. It seems to everyone else that you are just hitting the same 6 buttons over and over, but if you understand how the game works you realize that there is a lot of method to that madness. You aren't just slamming your head on the keyboard, you are using that rotation on purpose, and that rotation required a lot of math to create.  
 
I always kinda figured that math was what separated RPG's from action games. Action games were always the twitch reflexes, the heart beating, still shooting, still getting headshots BOOM HEADSHOT sort of deal. On the flip side RPG's were the thinking man's game. You use math to beat your opponents. Crunching numbers, theorycrafting, min/max ing type of deal. I don't really think of WoW so much as an MMO as just another RPG. It's a RPG that I can play with other people, and multiplayer has always been very important to me.   
 
 I don't know. Maybe I'm weird. 

" For those of you claiming social interaction is the chief motivator to playing MMOs, what do these games provide over other online social outlets to justify the cost? I tried Free Realms for a while and found it to be very much a 3D chat room with mini-games. Do your favorite MMOs feel like this to you or is there some x factor that tweaks that perception?"

" ...do you think MMOs would be more successful in that regard if players could impact the persistent world?..."

Adam Sessler had a talk about this.
 
 http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/700128/sesslers-soapbox-grinding-is-good.html
 
I have to agree with him too. Grinding is often rewarding or fun because it gives you an easy sense of achievement in an often hectic or stressful life. Personally though I'm not so much into the grinding as I am into the whole social aspect of MMOs. I mean if I were to conduct a huge raid in a single player game it just wouldn't be that fun and probably excessively frustrating. While raiding with a bunch of friends is loads of fun because you talk and laugh and fail together.

This article was an inspiration to me in writing this, but I couldn't find the link when the time came to write the post.
http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/11/awesome-by-proxy-addicted-to-fake.html 
 
Thanks to ahoodedfigure for sending it my way.