Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
What is GRIND to you?
Jairoe03
Member Posts: 732
So posting around the FFXIV forum on this site, and it reminded me of an interesting word that I just don't quite understand. What exactly is grind? I feel like this can mean different things to different people.
Ultimately I understand its used for something that "forces people to waste their time". Something that people don't want to do but they have to do it for whatever incentive that was provided beyond it. I often see this used for killing monsters over and over again and I feel there has to be a line drawn somewhere. I mean killing monsters have been the core of many MMO's gameplay for so long, how can a fundamental part of an MMO be also considered a "grind"? Is this another term that people just haphazardly throw around to knock around particular MMO's or the whole genre in general?
What constitutes a GRIND in an MMO to you? And then how do you distinguish something that is a GRIND from something that isn't a GRIND?
Comments
Grind, hmm, used to be AION. But hear that is not the case anymore!
3 months to move up 5 levels! That is grind at 4-6 hours a day! AION brought that.
What constitutes a GRIND in an MMO to you?
A routine, laborious task.
And then how do you distinguish something that is a GRIND from something that isn't a GRIND?
When I find it fun, it's not a grind. Obviously, for me at least, the presence of a grind is completely subjective.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
That's a rather interesting post, as NCSoft's big pitch regarding AION early on was that they were removing the grind. I remember them selling that aspect as early as their media presentation at E3 2006. It's interesting that it didn't deliver on that, and I'm curious whether it was due to a lack of sufficient change from the old Lineage-esque level grind or if it's just a perception thing based on how much more MMOs as a whole have removed the grind across the platform over the past five or six years.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
But I mean even by what you described it appears to be fairly flimsy. It could almost be taken on a mood by mood basis. Routine and laborious, what constitutes that? Does the monster have too much health, require too many people to take down? Is it the monsters? Is the exp threshold per level too high? Is it the fact that you feel the "real game" starts at MAX level aka end game? There's so many ways to go about it. Is it because you didn't feel like playing that day? Can the same activity be considered a grind one day and not a grind the next day? There's gotta be something more specific even to you or else what is the criteria that you are judging the MMO and basing this "grind" on?
Responding to the AION statement, didn't AION change itself due to that "grindiness" though or is that the current state its in? I guess I can understand being able to achieve something within a given amount of time. So I guess we can say in a given day, a person should be able to feel like they actually achieved or acquired something with the time they put in.
Grind, interesting subject.
From my experience with a lot of different MMO's Grind is occuring after the pre-determined character growth we get from starter quests. Usually the Grind starts when your character gets to a certain level where it is able to self-support and the developpers had to start to cutback on quests.
Character level/development is about 30 percent of maximum and then BAM the Grind starts. Simply because the developpers have no more ideas, budget or whatever other reasons to add more consistent quests.
But I would like to add another phenomena to the grinding, namely Farming. Mindless Grinding is no fun, but most games require us to Farm materials for creating / upgrading equipments and or characters.
Meh, this was my 2 cents to the subject, Happy Gaming
As I said, it's entirely subjective and based a lot on WHY one is doing the activity.
The same activity in two different situations can take on completely different meanings. For example, let's two people are enjoying killing a field of bears over and over. They find the loot and xp rewarding. so it isn't a grind to them.
Now, one person levels beyond the other and is now killing frogs over and over, having fun doing so. The lower level person wants to play with the other one, so now the reason for killing the bears has changed. The goal is no longer to kill bears with their friend, rather it is now to level up to play with their friend again. In such a scenario, that same activity can now become a grind. Their goal has changed, so instead of bear slaying being what they want to do, it is now the activity that proves to be a barrier to what they want to do, as they cannot move to frogs until they have sufficiently slain enough bears.
There's no magic criteria for what makes something a grind or not other than one's own goals and interests during gameplay, both of which could change weekly, daily, or even hourly.
"It could almost be taken on a mood by mood basis."
That's exactly what it's based on, Jairoe.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
It's anything you work at for a long time to reach a distant goal.
It is often fairly straight forward stuff with low risk or low immediate dificulty, where the challenge lies in staying awake and farming, rather than staying alive.
But it can just as easily be something more dificult; where you really have to stay on your toes, to get the most out of it. But again you arent doing it for the immediate rewards, if there are any. You are doing it to attain some distant goal.
I think Grind just refers to repetition;
You can grind mobs, you can grind quests, you can grind dailies, you can grind for reputation/faction.
Most of the time Grind refers to repetition for experience, but not necessarily. It's similar to "farming", in that farming denotes grinding for specific gain: farming for gold/plat/gil, farming for reputation/faction, farming for tradeskill items, etc.
Some repetition, most people won't mind; they will consider it familiarity. But as it progresses into boredom, tedium, and frustration it starts to take on different connotations.
The threshold for each of those levels is different for everybody, and for every activity.
I can sit in a static camp pulling mobs for hours, I may get bored, but I don't usually progress into tedium. But running daily quests, after about my second or third round I just can't stomach them any longer. I know a lot of friends that are the opposite; they don't mind daily quests so much, but they can't stand sitting in one spot killing the same 30 mobs over and over.
The origin comes from millwork, where you just feed grain into the mill all day long, grinding it into flour/meal/pepper/whatever. The grindstone never stops, the work never changes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMqQA1SUifw
This is about as good of an explanation as you're going to get right here. I always liken a grind to putting your nose to the grindstone and getting something done. In EQ, the game was fun for me to just go out and hunt and get exp with people. That was enough incentive for me to play. There were times though when I wanted to gain a specific level or certain amount of AA, so we'd set a goal and grind that out because the goal has changed. Just put your nose to the grindstone and get it done. That's what it always meant for me. Now it seems doing anything more than once that a certain demographic of players don't want to do.
Played: EQ1 (10 Years), Guild Wars, Rift, TERA
Tried: EQ2, Vanguard, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Runes of Magic and countless others...
Currently Playing: GW2
Nytlok Sylas
80 Sylvari Ranger
Reading another thread about grind?
One mans content is another mans grind, I doubt we will ever have an accepted definition of the term.
I dislike grinding in any game, it's like dailies, once you done at least a week or 2 of dailies in a row, I feel very bored and at times, you don't even want to touch it or move on to something else... if your playing World of Warcraft MoP like me, dailies are tied with rep, and rep is tied to your valor gear which is unlockable though rep. rep is gained by rank, 3000 for friendly, 6000 for honored, 12000 for revered, 21000 for exalted, most of the gear is unlocked on revered and exalted. dailies consisted of gaining an average of 100-400 per certain quest, along with an extra boost if you do a dungeon +300 and a scenario is +200 on the selected faction of your choice. There is about 7 or so major faction to gain rep and unlock valor gear, and sadly the dailies are about 3-8 per faction, so by doing the math, after completing the whole dailies of that faction could only rank you up around 400-600 dailies points...
So yeah, that game get tediously annoying and boring as fuck after doing many dailies after two weeks or so.
Daily Quests is the best example of grinding I can think of.
I can slaughter monsters for hours on end if I am having fun doing it. I can craft for hours on end if I am having fun doing it. I can quest for hours on end if I am having fun doing it.
It is when I find myself constantly looking at my XP bar during an activity that I qualify the activity as a "grind." That indicates to me that I am not enjoying the activity.
[EDIT]
Great example, Loktofeit, in your latter post.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Like many things in games, GRIND is highly subjective and emotional. We all have different thresholds of boredom, some can spend hours harvesting the same circuit of resource nodes, others scream at the thought of harvesting a single node, let alone an entire circuit.
"It's too GRINDY" is very similar to another expression in gaming, the popular "It takes too long"...
Definitely subjective and I doubt there'll ever be a generally agreed upon definition (Hell, there isn't one for 'MMO', 'sandbox', or most of the rest of the terms routinely used in discussions around here, so why should 'grind' be any different?).
While I'd agree with the definition above ("A routine, laborious task"), for me there's almost always one other element involved -- something that was fun the first few times, but, through endless repetition went from fun to a chore to a dread.
Good examples for me are FFVII/VIII and the Pokemon games. While initially enjoyable, in each instance those game eventually devolved down to leveling via running around engaging in random encounters until you quite literally could do them from muscle memory alone.
The problem is even then it's not always that simple, I can think of things I've done in games no less repetitive than leveling my 100th Pokemon that I didn't mind at all.
A good example in BC-era WoW was killing dragonlings. My husband loved dragons, the baby dragons in certain zones had a very small chance of dropping a mini-pet version of themselves -- I think there were three different versions at the time, black, green, and blue. I used to run around the various zones where these mobs spawned, killing them by the thousands.Given the level difference it took no effort at all (there were some elites to be avoided in one zone, that was the extent of it), but I never minded and I always found doing it induced a weird sort of Zen state. I don't know if it was that it was completely optional, that there was a chance of something nice dropping, or what it was exactly, but for whatever reason, even though it was in most ways really no different from many things I've done in games that I'd describe as a 'grind', it was 'fun' to me whereas those things were not.
That does not make it less of a grind, it's still a grind.
No one says that grind cannot be enjoyable and fun.
to me, grind is:
- Never ending mob slaughtering to level up without any purpose other than level up.
- Doing meaningless quests over and over and over from point A to B to C. Never ending quest grind that mean nothing, you just do them to waste time and get levels.
- Spamming the same dungeons / raids over and over and over because theres nothing else you can do to advance your character further.
Some companies already started addressing these problems with dynamic events to reduce the quest grind, but right now they restart too often and still get repetitive (grindy). When they start making dynamic events bigger, broader (area / faction wide) and with more permanent outcomes then the grind will start to disappear for good.
Also, regarding the raid / dungeon grind. Companies and players need to stop thinking of this type of content as the "end-game content". This is why mmos have boring end game because thats all they offer at max level. Keep that content as one of the many options, not as the only option. Any type of content can be part of end-game progression, even crafting, if it is done right and not as a filler like almost every mmo does.
i don't mind grinding but following 2 rules.
1. having many activities to choose from (not only daily quests for example)
2. the gear acquired by those activities, remains for a great amount of time as bis and will not change every couple of months with a patch. they can add more content with every patch or whatever else they want. changing gear is not always necessary.
Actually, the term as used in reference to repetitive work is one that has a negative connotation to it. If someone always replied with "It was a grind" each time you asked them how their work day was, you'd probably ask them why they don't look for another job.
I don't doubt you'll want to argue that, but I rather not sidetrack the thread with grade school level lessons on how words work, so please read this page and catch up.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I thought it was going to be like all the other topics about this subject, but you have some interesting toughts here. There shouldn't be a question what is grind to "me", since it is a specific definition of a type of gameplay, not something abstract that is for you to interpret. Some guy called a certain activity "grinding" and it got spread all over the web and got stuck throughout years.
Grind is killing almost infinite number of monsters in the same spot to level up, nothing more, nothing less. Grind describes activity, not emotional state. Everything you wrote above are just sample reasons, why someone might not like grind. You can be happy grinding, you can say you like to grind, or you can say you hate grinding.
Routine, and laborious task is the feeling that people might get while doing grind, but it is entirely subjective. I love to grind for example, I pick games, where I can just join a party and stick to one spot for hours, playing the lottery of what drop will I get this time. I get entertainment from this, and also satisfaction. So you can't say that grind is bad for everyone, because at least to me it is not.
Everything else wrote here just answers the question "what do I feel when I grind", not what grind is. Grind itself is only activity, nothing more. You can't automatically label activity as unpleasant, since it is always highly subjective.