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What's the point of grind?
Inzra
Member Posts: 679
I don't get why people love to grind, to me it's just a timesink.
Isn't the truth that grinders a have lack of playerskills so they have to compensate with characterskills instead?
Of course gamecompanies get lots of time to fix errors, make patches and plan expansions while their faithfull moneymakers are grinding their asses off.... in comparison to reaching the endgame fast and getting tons of complaints about lack of content.
...is there any other reason? Why do you love the grind?
Comments
i doubt i would play again a grinding based mmo.... i mean, if you have to grind mobs for a quest is ok (quest driven progression is fine) but grinding hundreds of mobs all day to level up.... i burned my arse out of that so bad i would vomit infront of an mmo grinder......
What is the point in gaming at all?
"It isn't about where you end up, it's how you get there that really counts."
I kind of agree with the posters who state that there is no such thing as a grind and that it is a made-up term by players. To me, grind happens when there are no quests, dungeons, raids, or any real content, but instead you are doing something over and over again. Such as killing a certain beast in a certain area, without any real purpose besides trying to reach end-game. If your only purpose is to reach end-game, everything you do will feel like a grind. In fact, you probably shouldn't be playing MMOs if that's your only purpose.
i doubt it is grinding
1. Timesink.
2. Like it or not part of the remit of mmorpgs is character progression, which necessitates either a shit load of content (which personally as a pvper I see as a grind anyway), or more frequently some form of mob grind.
I think the more pertinent question is, if people really hate 'the grind' that much, why play player character progression based mmos?
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."
this is what i mean with my answer as well... when i said i would vomint in front of a grinder mmo.... i was in love with metin 2, a f2p mmo grind based where you attack freely with space bar and slash everything on your way (no targeting).... lvl cap was 99 and quest progression ended at lvl 61 so after that you hve to enter a dungeon (solo or in party) and grind your arse off killing thousands of mobs all day just to lvl up till end game (lvl 99) and 1 set of mobs (3 elite mobs) gives 0.01 exp so you can imagine how many u need to kill to lvl up....(without spending money in cash shop in exp buffs) ...
same thing happens with games like 12 sky 2 online... same grinder to lvl up, all day the same mobs in a room....... thats what the term "grinder" really means.... awful gaming
Most of us doesn't really love grinding but the machanics of any game you can play hundreds of hours include timesinks.
Grinding is the simplest timesink to implement. If it is XP, money, faction or gear doesn't really matter.
Some games have less grind than others, like Guildwars have less grind than Lineage 2 but no MMO or CORPG have no grind. If such game exist please direct me to it, otherwise you will have to tell me how the devs could make one.
As for the endgame thing, endgame grinding is the most common things in all MMOs. Particularly end game gear grind.
Some people only consider getting XP as grinding but gear is not better at all.
Exactly the reason why I don't play F2P games.
Doing hundreds of rather similar quests is grinding as well.
What is the difference between randomly going out and kill 30 goblins or doing so because some npc gave you a quest to do it?
This. I can think of no better explanation than if you don't like grinding, you're in the wrong genre. If a game had no grind, a game would have no reason for monthly subs since MOST people wouldn't be playing past a month.
Because there is an official end to the quest, unlike randomly killing 30 goblins. And then usually the next quest is to do something different. You usually have to re-visit the NPC. It's not as repetitive as just pure grinding 30 goblins.
yeah ur statement makes sense, i guess i wrote wrong what i really meant.... like questing progression with game lore or something that if you have to kill mobs by doing quests its nothing excesive to become a grinder
Yeah, next time he tells me to kill 30 orcs instead...
Really, bad quests are just a really crappy attempt to hide the grind a little.
I been playing MMOs since Meridian 59 in '96. Quests can really be great fun but most of them is just as bad as any mob grinding I did in games like Lineage. In Lineage there were bountys where you grinded orcs for a while and then returned them for a reward, it was actually less frustrating than rat killing quests.
Every fun quests I seen were different from FEDEX or rat catching quests which seems to be the standard ones (well, there is a flower picking and killing a boss alternative). Fun quests are not grind. But killing 30 goblins is, running to a npc in between helps little.
As I see it is grinding the part of a MMO I repeat a lot without having fun.
If it is killing mobs for XP or faction, doing very similar (or worse daily) quests, grinding crafting skills or running the same instance zillions of times for a drop does not matter, it is all grind and saying one is better than the other is like saying there are layers in hell.
name one OTHER than Second Life, that has no grind (char progression), yet has a virtual world. and its obvious to most people why most people don't play SL.
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Problem is just that MMOs are really too small to be played so much time we do. So grinding is the only way for the devs to solve it without making the content ten times as large.
So we either have to live with some kind of grind, the question is more which one you personally prefer. I try to do a lit of all of them to net get totally bored.
I am hoping in the future that some devs really make a game with well written and very different quests, most MMOs have a few of them but with some more creative people it should be able to take the edge of grinding until you max out at least.
I don't love the grind. It's a bad gme mechanic designed to control your progression. I'm not saying that devs shouldn't do something to control progression in their games there are just other ways to do it that we havent seen in MMORPGs yet. Zelda is a good example of a different type of controled progression.
My theme song.
As someone that grew up with Pong and played the original versions of Space Invaders, Pac Man, Galaga, and Gauntlet, I couldn't disagree more. Passing the time repeating a mundane task for no reward besides completion is exactly what gaming is based on.
Grinding is more than character progression.
In most modern MMOs you spend a month or less leveling up your character. Then you spend 1-2 years until the expansion to get gear and faction. Clearly is that more grind.
If a MMO would start without levels, a game similar to Wow but with only endgame, would that have no grind?
I think not.
We are actually getting there, leveling up in modern MMOs is a lot faster than in older games, sooner or later will someone skip that step alttogether.
This is a role playing genre,so levels are suppose to act like an aging process,but most games do a poor job of that.I find a worse poblem is that msot gamers think a level number "is the game".
I do agree we need a lot more content and tools to recreate a role playing atmosphere,but seems devs are too cheap and lazy to give us a top quality game.So this means we spend most of our time role playing in combat,really there is only one other time sink and that is quests,but imo quests are quite ridiculous,who role plays doing quests?
I would like to hear what people think devs are actually willing to give us aside from combat? I doubt any of those ideas will be met.We are having a hard time just getting housing,something that should really be the FIRST idea put into a game,i mean who is imagining a character that has nowhere to live ...lol.
I really think MOST players want to role play a bad ass combat type character,so i fai lto see the problem with having you spend tons of time in combat?
You really should not be using the term grind,if combat is what you enjoy,and i think 99% enjoy combat.Leveling is just a number,it should mean nothing to players,but seems they are looking for such shallow gaming that a level number is their main focus,i fail to see how a level number is related to role play gaming?So many want fast leveling then some magical end game.Well again this is not role play gaming,this genre is getting all messed up by people that are asking for something that is not a RPG.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
oh, so THAT'S why people don't play Quake/CounterStrike/Call Of Duty longer than a month. that explains it.
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I have always thought that the grind exists only because developers need to keep players engaged and playing for a very long period of time and it is too expensive and time-consuming to create enough engaging content for them to progress through. As a result, most developers default to the grind mechanic which consists of nothing but tedious and repetitive actions and a carrot on a stick.
The traditional MMO grind model is so insanely dated at this point and I simply cannot play games that utilize it anymore. Fortunately there are a bunch of games these days that are releasing with enough content to get you through the progression without relying on mindless grinding. Sure, questing may be repetitive as well, but games that use heavy questing have (at the very least) ATTEMPTED to mask the grind. Some of them do a pretty good job of it too...
What else would there be if you remove all the game mechanics someone would think as grinding?
I mean, we grind many things in MMOs: Exp, gold, skills, reputation, quests, achievements, etc.. If you remove these from an MMO, what's there to play? Sure you can have lots of fun killing mobs or PvPing with your friends, but the whole idea of MMORPGs is the more you play, the better your character becomes.
What most newer MMO gamers don't understand is that some 'grinds' are supposed to take a long time and are not meant to be focused on exclusively. You'll get them sooner or later while playing other content, or they can be totally optional and can be ignored if you don't have time or interest to do them.
So, in my opinion, the problem is not a grind but players' impatience and 'I-want-it-all-and-I-want-it-now' -attitude. Slow paced grinder is actually very relaxing game after a hard day in work or school. You could compare it to playing windows solitaire or the old Bejeweled as a 'time killer', except in an MMO your time spent in-game improves your next playing session.
Developers' attempts to remove all grind in MMOs has only made them worse, or at least taken them closer to an action games where grind factor is zero. You can see it already in games like WoW and Rift (and I'm afraid TERA will follow suit) where levels 1-(max-1) are consumed in few weeks, maybe months.
Endgame in every popular MMOG is still all about character progression. Its just 100 times slower than the leveling up part and has much less story content, forced grouping, and more challenge. Using WoW as an example, you'd essentially just be trading your gear-score for your level.
"Grind" is such a subjective word that trying to talk about it is almost completely pointless. One man's grind is another man's content and vice versa.
everything you mention is related to char progression. getting better gear for your char all the time. getting better items that give you more power.
people can argue all day what grind means, and most of it is pointless semantics that non-argumentative people have no need to discuss endlessly.
grind = work (something not fun) ....... if you don't agree with that sentence there's no common ground for us to base any discussion on.
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Some will enjoy grind, some will not like grind, for some there is no grind, for some every MMO is grind.
What's the point?, each and every person might view/play/experiance games differently thus enjoying different aspects where it comes to what you may enjoy someone else might dislike and the other way around.