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Why grind?
shukes33
Member Posts: 1,051
Why do we hear so much recently about the grind in games? is it game design or just a lack of imagination by us the players?
I have grown up reading fantasy lit and playing RPG's. from shining force on the mega drive through to my first MMO, Everquest until recently WAR. the last 2 years i have been active of various forums and most threads i read always come back to "same old, same old" GRIND! But i ask myself..do i ever grind? i supose yes when i am alone. but generally i play with friends, friends who like the same things i do. We go to soloseks eye and work our way as deep as we can..is that grind? No, a little bit of imagination and were an adventure band happening on a recently discovered dungeon. My point is simple....i like rpg's i also like mmo's...put the two together and we get mmorpg's! now if i wanted to just level..then why play a rpg? where does roleplaying come into levelling?
It's simply a mechanic of a game style that i like! it should never be something that i scutinise. So is it the games or is it us? what makes us grind in a game? surely if the games boring and that is all there is to do, then shouldnt we be questioning ourselves and asking why were still here?
Comments
Did you ever play war as a kid? Probably kids don't do that any more, but in my day, we'd run around with toy guns pretending to shoot each other.
While fun, part of the trouble with the game was saying "I got ya" (saying you shot your friend), and your friend say "No, you missed".
Basically any sort of role-playing with any sort of conflict needs rules. Which is why role-playing (as a game) actually evolved from wargames, and why there is leveling (since it was in the first role-playing game, D&D).
As to your point about playing with friends, there are several problems. FIrst off, not everyone has friends in the games they play. Secondly, if they do, they might not always be around. Thirdly, their friends might not be particularly creative. Fourthly, being creative takes work and effort, something not many people want to do after a long day of work.
Grinding is something that people can do without much thought or effort. Leveling provides some sort of reward stimulus for that little effort, so you feel like you've accomplished something, as opposed to if you had just been playing solitaire.
Fifthly, from a companies point of view, grinding is one of the easiest things to do. The early computer RPGs were nothing but grinding, fighting monsters over and over leveling up. It wasn't until the cd-rom, really, that RPGs had a lot of storytelling, because it was hard to fit even a lot of text on one floppy.
But anyway, designing quests and such and NPC dialogue takes effort from a game designer. Which costs money. Just populating an area full of monsters and handing out XP per kill doesn't take any effort really. So you see a lot of it in games, sometimes as filler in places designers haven't gotten to, sometimes it's just the whole game.
R.I.P. City of Heroes and my 17 characters there
There's a difference between levelling in a PnP RPG and levelling in an MMO. In both, the purpose is to progress your character to learn bigger and better skills and spells, so as to be able to face new challenges.
But in a PnP RPG, the effect of levelling is that the GM will create (or buy) new adventure content, story and all, to fit your character/party level. Levelling up is not a goal unto itself. You would never have a GM tell you "hey guys, I didn't feel like preparing a new adventure for today, so we're just going to have you kill giant rats for a few hours so you can get your characters up to the next commercial module that I bought". If you did, you'd quickly have a new GM.
In some MMOs, on the other hand, levelling IS the main point of the game, and there is not enough content to get you from one level to the next. Therefore, you grind (i.e. going out into the wild and killing MOBs over and over again for no particular reason other than to collect xp). More recent MMOs have eliminated the need for this by providing enough quests and dungeons that you can get from one level to the next without grinding (e.g. WoW).
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im to lazy too use grammar or punctuation good
An MMO with a "grind" isn't incidental, they're all designed to be grinds. The whole challenge of development is masking the grind as much as possible. Different zones, different mobs, different quests; all dressing ontop of math equations in your character stat panel. It's all about how to make the next numbers increment as fun and not-obvious as possible.
So the developers are responsible for it. Their job is increasingly tougher due to the fact that similarity between each lessens any tricks that get us to think we're not grinding. Quests for example, they used to be a reprieve from "grinding" no matter how straight-forward they were, now "quest-grind" is a whole different matter of its own.
Which brings me to what I believe is the root of the matter, we as players built a culture where MMOs aren't worth paying for every month 'less it draws upon nigh-every waking hour of our time.
10-15 bucks isn't a whole lot of money, a lot of us pay that for Showtime or Starz but spend no time or just a couple of hours a month watching them. We never call our cable companies and "quit" over a bad show, but we cancel our MMO subscriptions over patch notes.
So if we create a precedent where we'll only pay a subscription fee if an MMO is worthy of 8 hours of our day, everyday, even if we don't devote that much time, then I think developers feel the pressure of developing grinds. It's all they can do to make their content last longer.
i did
i was a little geek.
i had a badly painted army of blood angels. (40k)
wow. i remember playing shining force when i got my sega-drive...
in 1999
it was a bargin purchase my dad got me :P
March on! - Lets Invade Pekopon
You're someone sat in front of a keyboard grinding on mobs roleplaying someone having fun sat in front of a keyboard grinding mobs.
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Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL
Sorry, but does that make sense to anyone else?
As to the OP, I also think "Grind" is another one of these overused gaming terms that people use when they are either bored with a game, or haven't played it and for any number of reasons don't want others to. There are games where it's appropriate, but in a lot of cases, I seem to think the person is complaining about playing the game!
An abscence of plot or logical drive (other than leveling) behind the specific actions you are taking is a good way to classify grind, and repetative plot is abscent plot! So, stories with better plots may feel less grindy is one solution. Can anyone tell me what WAR feels like with it's widely touted Tome of Knowledge?
I never understood why people would grind either. Let me give you the three examples from WOW (the game I play and love).
1. You grind honor for pvp gear - Makes no sense to me.. the way you GET honor is by pvping. If you dont' like pvping.. then why do you care about getting pvp gear? To me, honor gear is just a bonus for doing something I enjoy. I enjoy AV and EoTS ( AB and WSG to a lesser degree). To me, it is like an oxymoron to say you are 'grinding' honor to get a piece of pvp gear. What do you plan on doing once you get that pvp gear? yes, you will be a little more effective, but basically you'll be doing bgs some more.
2. Grinding reputations - In Vanilla wow this was applicable, but since BC, this doesn't apply. The way you get past honored is to run instances.. the only real rewards you get from higher reputations is pve gear that you use to run instances. In other words, if you don't run instances, you dont' need to get rep past honored...and if you do enjoy running instances, then you get the gear upgrades by running instances.
3. Nothing else to do - This is a common endgame complaint.. there just is nothing else to do that you haven't done 10,000 times before. Thus, all endgame becomes a grind. this is just a problem with all MMORPGs. For a single player game, you pay $50 and hope to get 30-40 hours of playtime out of it... with a MMORPG.. it's pretty typical for players to play 20 hours a week. That is just too much time for there to be a reasonable chance for developers to keep the game fresh. Devs must rely on tricks and grinds to keep players replaying the same content. The real secret here is the rewards.. players not only have to feel something 'fresh' about replaying old material, but they also have to feel like they are getting stronger. Heroic instances are a good example of this. You run regular instances a bunch of times to get gear, then you run the heroics a bunch of times, getting better gear from drops, and then the whole time you are building up badges to get even better gear. While reusing dungeons and making them heroic saves a lot of dev time, it also very cheaply gives players a lot of progression for the buck. Much better than Vanilla (or other games) where you run the same 5man instances over and over and really don't progress since you have all the drops from there anyway.
Because I do it better than most.
An mmo without grind is like a single player game..that has 12 hours gameplay then its over...
The grind makes the game..lots of grind..different type of grind makes an mmo live for years..even iff you play 10 hours a day...
So yes..an mmo must have grind..if it has no grind nobody will play them for more then a couple of hours...
When I first came to the MMORPG scene, it was by watching trailers of EQ2, and thinking I had found my Holy Grail of gaming. I have always loved rpg's, and I thought that EQ2 was going to be this vast ,beautiful land (which it is) with epic plots, and stories for you to get involved in. I thought that by doing the quests, then the real game would eventually be revealed. I kept asking people (much to their bemusement) 'when does the actual story-lines begin?', I was really enjoying the game (it is still one of my favourites), but I was beginning to wonder at what point I would stumble upon some kind of on-going narrative, with dynamic quest lines, choices that meant things when you spoke to people. I tried to see if the quests themselves would lead me to the story, as they were all hinting at this grand, back story. But it never really happened. There was a story of sorts, but you did not really take part in it. There was no plot. No narrative. So that was not my Holy Grail.
I went from game to game. I then discovered Lineage 2. This was the first true asian-style grinder I had come across. I was not even aware of this phenomenon. I could not understand what all these supposed players with wierd garbled names were. I wondered why someone would call themself something like; 'ljksfdkajba' I knew it was no proper language. Then I started playing, and it was quite fun for a couple of hours, but then I wondered why there were hardly any quests. By this time, I had given up on MMO's having a proper storyline like a single player rpg. But this one did not even have any quests. only a couple, and not even much of an attempt of any story. What was this all about?
I started to kill creatures, until I got to a level where I went on to tougher creatures. When was there going to be something happening?
Then I learned the awful truth. That this was it! This was what the game was about, until you got to high level to pvp. This blew my mind. The amount of time people put in, just doing the same thing over and over, like robots! What the helll was that all about?
Then I learnt about free2play games, and they were nearly all the same as L2. Why? I still want to know why this is meant to be fun. I understand that the bulk of Chinese players, are doing it to sell in game money for real money - another apect I could not get my head around. That the Koreans were mostly the people who played these monotonous games. Why though? Someone told me it was a cultural thing, and that they did it with friends. So are these games just glorified chat-rooms? That is surely all they must be.
Please can someone tell me why they enjoy this kind of grinding game? I won't be rude, as I genuinely would like to understand why people like them so much that they spend so much time (and in some cases money) to do so.
As for the grind in western games? I am pretty sure that it is deliberate to make the make take thousands of hours of gameplay to pretty much see everything, and get everything, simply to keep people paying, and the subscriptions up. That is all. I would not mind so much, but why can't they do something innovative?
That is why I think combat in these games is the way it is as well. It is not like a single player, where you hachnslash, or shoot your enemy, in a second or two. Even simple combat takes around 10-20 seconds, often even more, depending on the game. And the simple hot-key, button pressing. It is all designed to slow the game down, to stretch it out, make it longer for you to level. These games are all pretty simple really. There are no real tough bits in most of them. If you are the appropriate level, and know what you are doing, there is little skill required, Just time. So I am not impressed by a max level player, it only means that he or she has spent more time playing the game than I have.
I am currently trying Tabula Rasa, which has a great combat system. It plays like a fps, and more action paced. I've only just begun, and I'm wondering why this game is not more popular, as so far, it is great.
I also sub with Lotro and WoW (Lotro is the closest I have came to my Holy Grail, and I love the story-lines, but even that is not what I truly want. Cannot wait for Moria though)
Sorry again for the long post, I have been doing that a lot today. In case you missed my earleir question (and to save me starting a new thread), here it is again;
Please can someone tell me why they enjoy this kind of grinding game? I won't be rude, as I genuinely would like to understand why people like them so much that they spend so much time (and in some cases money) to do so.
Thanks to anyone who answers.
I personally love Guild wars because its a online RPG with Massive numbers of players so then I guess it is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role playing game, Because it has lots of players, its multiplayer compatible its online and you role play more in that game than in every mmorpg out there put together, The story in Guild wars is a REAL story with real voice work and cinematics, Guild wars also has a very small level grind only 20 levels which can usually be got in 2 or 3 days. After that the game does plenty to keep you busy with a story that is really deep and missions that take a lot of team work and strategy to finish. However once you finish the story of all 3 games, There is really nothing left to do but PvP, Thats fine with me though, I had more fun in my 120 hours of playing and beating all 3 Guild wars games than in my 3000+ hours of WoW. I think the level of fun is what matters not how long it makes you grind for it. Guild wars is an mmo Done right imo, an mmo with no grind, a REAL story and no filler content, It is what it is and when ur done ur done, and look at what a big success it was!
There are two types of grind:
The Theraputic Grind
The Quest Grind
I cannot stand the quest grind, ESPECIALLY on crap games. Warhammer is crap because it involves such a stale fruitless quest grind that sucks the joy in life from your very soul. If you're conscious of the fact that you're grinding then epic fail!
RF-Online was fun because you could put on your favourite music, turn on the tv and after 3 hours you'd have dinged a few times and caught up wth the world news.
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Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL
We hear more and more about grind because ,i have said this already>>>>the new wave of gamers care nothing of the game content.They are only there to see how fast they can level up.So now you have a whole pile of gamers that just want instant end game levels for god knows what ever reason?
IDK maybe they want to brag to there friends,or there in some PVP MMO where being a higher level means you need little skill and effort to do anything in combat.The other reason is that players do NOT want to work for anything,they want everything looked up on websites or some high level holding there hand through everything.It all spells immature and childish players.
An MMORPG is NOT a single player game,where the goal is to complete it as fast you can by whipping through each level to defeat the final boss.MMORPG's are about longevity and creating long standing communities.You should not be there for selfish reasons and should not be there to BRAG about your heroics.The idea of a MMORPG community is helping each other and getting along,looking for content to enjoy that doesn't have to give you l33t gear or some magical 10 million XP on completion.
The basic fact is that the majority are playing MMORPG's that should not be and are trying to change the whole foundation that MMORPG's were built around.The good games try to design there games with a lot of GRIND because it might succeed in keeping you at a level so that you actually enjoy the content each level brings.Everquest sort of tried to keep grips on things by greying out mobs ,so you couldn't whip through levels then go back for an easy no effort reward.Either way games are designed to make you work at least a bit for everything at each level,it toally ruins content if you hit level 75 then go back and do level 20 quests,it is just dumb to even think that way or want to break content that way.
You will no doubt see quite a few that don't mind grind but the majority want it all with no time spent.They want to become real life millionaire's by buying lotto tickets instead of working for it,it just isn't a realistic ideal,in gaming or real life.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
What the heck are you talking about? I don't have a problem "earning" stuff, I have a problem because most games want mindnumbing repetition rather than any kind of actual skill involved. I play games to challenge myself, and once I master the starting skillset an MMO offers at low levels, I get bored. I like levels and progression and all of that, but they should supplement the game, not be the goal of the game.
When it feels like a monkey could push the right buttons and get a level up, I'm not "earning" anything, I'm just wasting my time. That's why people want to skip ahead to the end game, because that's where most of the content is and features advertised on the box.
Actually, and yes I think I may be "odd" in this, but I kind of enjoy grinding. I see a set goal and a path to get to it. While grinding I text chat or VON chat with friends. In SWG grinding didn't bother me, whether it was grinding skills or grinding Jedi (not the Ryatt Trail, tried that and it sucked).
During BC while others quest ground for mount gold or mob ground, I chose to instance grind, Scholomance or Stratholme, for DE mats or twink gear to sell. Paid for my mounts and for grinding out JC since I had given up mining. I then did the AH grind buying mass volumes of ore to prospect, cut, post, guard from undercutters, repost it if undercut. It was a grind every bit as much as mob or instance grinding. I could not arena or bg grind as it bored me, so left PvP for open world PvP.
In WoW I found I could instance grind and level faster than others could quest or mob grind. Whether it was for levels in BC or faction when Sunwell came out. I was able to grind out the BC levels in a few days by repeatedly grinding Hellfire Pen instances up to 67 then moving to other instance. Faction grinding in Sunwell only one weekend to max out, plus grab the chocobo mount and all the 5 man heroic drop gear and regular gear.
I guess I have gotten used to the grinds that MMO's spew out and have found ways to maximize my productivity at grinding levels or faction in games. I can see where many hate to grind and cannot nor will not argue it. But to me, it is more filler content in a game to make the developed content last longer.
SWG Scylla- Tomrin Alindale, Kraig Tarlson
WoW Thunderlord- Tomrin
Sorry, but does that make sense to anyone else?
Just barely, but this is what he's talking about:
www.youtube.com/watch
I have to apologise about my English. I’m not a native English speaker and I know that probably I’m not going to be enough clear and understandable to answer your question properly but anyway I’ll take the risk and go ahead. I know it is going to be a long text wall.
I played Lineage2 for 3 years and a half. I left it because at one moment I realized I was too addicted and it was influencing in a negative way my RL. I not left L2 because I got bored or tired to play it. Easily you can deduct that I was enjoying it and having fun playing L2 may be too much. I cannot talk about other Korean grinding feasts. But as far as I know L2 is modelled in that style of games.
Let me start with the, in my opinion, the negative parts of this game as it was (probably as still it is).
Bots: I think they are not included in your question but just saying it in advance before someone talk about. Bots ruined the game to a lot of people and at least made it a lot less enjoyable for the rest of “legal” players. It has a lot to do with important aspects of the game. Economy, power and sense of achievement.
The too hard grinding: from your post I understand than you were playing it not so many time, then probably the real grinding advancing in the game is a lot harder (you need to kill more mobs) than you experienced.
Just to put an example (it’s not exact but sure very close to reality). At some point in the high 60s (Cap I think was 78 when I left) you don’t see any progression killing one solo mob of your level, 0.00% advancing. It is the same that to say you need to kill more than 10,000 (yes ten thousand) mobs of same level to advance to the next level.
It’s just an example, because you normally grind in party killing group mobs of higher level and get may be something like a 1or 2 % per hour at those levels. It depends a lot on how good your party is. Its not just level grinding its materials grinding too, all the equipment need to be crafted, NPCs drops very few usable items, I got just one weapon drop in all this time and it was of not use to my char. People that e-buy in game money or powerlevel are just trying to avoid this, changing real money for time and effort in game.
Quests almost don’t exist and the rewards you get are ridiculous both in terms of experience and money or materials.
Things have changed since I left and the developers have softened the grinding a lot for the low/medium levels.
Anyway I put in the negative part the grinding just because I think it is really too hard, in terms of the time you need to advance. But being hard is a must for the good of the game. I will be back on this later.
The difficulty to start for new players: To put it simple, you need to be above some level according to the average level of the population in one server. While you are under this level the game is a pain. With almost all the western servers really matured, you need friends there or be ready to a long path till you get really in game. As far as I know things have changed after the last update making a lot easier for the beginners to get there. But I guess still the effort could be too hard for the average let me say with all respect WoW or similar player. It was totally different when the game started because at that time was easy to keep you in an acceptable level to participate in the full activity/drama. Of course if you were able to play like 3-4 hours a day. If you start alone and it was not at the beginning I can understand very well your feelings about the game.
Now starts the difficult part. How people can play this game more than two weeks?
Lineage 2 is about power and sense of achievement. But not about individual power it is about guild/alliance power, the game was build around this concept. You can’t play it solo, there is no sense to do it and probably you get tired a lot before you understand the game.
The goal in Lineage 2 is to control as much of the world as you can. The fun comes reaching and defending this control, this power against the other clans in the server. And the success is not coming just from the PvP itself (It’s just an important part) its coming from the politics, from the ability to manage your resources, the economy. That’s the reason bots and e-bayers are so bad to the game. Anyway there are guilds that can fight successfully against this. Just more challenge!
All of these create a “real” world, with friends, allies, enemies, wars, battles for the grinding fields, drama. Of course you don’t get the freedom that is supposed to a sandbox, especially about your individual development, but because you can kill anyone and everywhere (but towns) the sense of freedom about your acts is not a small thing there. Of course you have to evaluate the consequences of your acts, not just in the terms of game mechanics (Penalties, Karma,..). Political consequences of your acts could be important. Really clans establish rules about what you can do and what not.
Guilds are the core of the game, a good guild in Lineage is the aim of any player. And a good guild is not just a big one. Cooperation, organization, help, friendly people to play and talk during the long grinding sessions,… that’s most important than the size. A clan doesn’t need to be big to be in the drama of the world, politics and relations do a lot about it. A small clan could be really fun if leaders know how to get it in the general action and you are not desperate to own a castle.
The ambience in the clans I have been (not alls but most of them) in Lineage are by far better than any other clans I have been in the other games I played.
Individually talking the game is hard in terms of effort and time (too much for my taste). And full of difficulties, Xp loss and a small drop possibility in some situations when get killed both PvP and PvE. Crafting failures,…
You don’t need to be a “FPS pro” to be good at game fight mechanics, of course more skill the better. But you need to be good planning your play time, you will need to be good with strategy, you will need to be a good group player both PvE and PvP. You will get fun trading; the economy is a very important part of the game and your skills on it are very important if you play “legal”. Ebayers and bot farmers have totally unbalanced the economy but anyway you always need to go to the market.
What you get from the game apart of the community aspects and the fun in PvP, raid bosses and so… is the feeling of achievement, it is not comparable to any other game I have played. Levels, items, victories all is hard to get, you feel so well when you got them. And more over you always know that any success is coming from your brain and your effort and the brain and effort of your friends in game.
Eh! And I know it is just a game. But like when I climb mountains I’m with these ones that prefer to go to the highest ones, no matter the walks are a lot longer and painful, than to go to the more difficult in terms of technique but not as higher.
I hope this text wall could serve you a bit to understand why some people play Lineage 2.
The grind is there to delay you as long as possible from reaching end game and realizing there really isn't an end game and you may as well quit. The end game to a lot of modern MMORPGs is more grinding - you grind to level up your character or skills then you grind to level up your weapons and armor.
If these games had better end game content you could do away with most of the grind and lock players into a fun series of perpetual group/solo cycles. RvR is a nice example of this. Turning players into content (like EvE or the SWG jedi bounty hunter systems) are a nice example of it. Granting players meaningful professions when they login. Tools in place to make player generated quests. Tools in place to make player generated events. Allowing players to alter the world they play in. In addition to the usual MMORPG dungeon crawling and monster slaying for Macguffins that everyone loves.
"The liberties and resulting economic prosperity that YOU take for granted were granted by those "dead guys"
I have to agree that the grind, is used to keep players in game = paying month after month.
And i agree with you too that grinding is hidden behind the repetitive quests or raiding. WoW model is a perfect example of it. There is a lot of supposed "end game" content, when the reality is that you need to farm one instance to get the equipment that allow you to go to next one, you get your level progression grinding equipment instead of grinding level experience and it is with less freedom than in a classic "grinding feast" . Similar mechanism is involving the PvP. Getting better items is the way to advance and millions of players love it. It is as old as Diablo.
In this model end-game is a mirage.
I never played a MMORPG where there is no grind in some way. I never have played a real sandbox. I tried EVE just few hours but i dont like sci-fi environments. It was fun to me to see how i was instructed in the tutorial to grind mineral and also hunt NPCs to get resources to progress. I didnt need long time to see that there is grinding in one sandbox too. Hey don't get me wrong i don't feel it as a bad thing.
I'm waiting for Darkfall with some excitement, because i'm courious about how a game like this can avoid any form of grind and still give you some sense of advancement and achievement, that i think is one of the fundamentals for the most part of people currently playing MMORPGs ... well better i say MMOGs.