Last year I played on a DAOC freeshard and went back to the old npc grind, and I found I enjoyed. Like the OP posted, I got to chose where to grind, to seek out the optimal camps for my level, to move on when the camp/baf bonuses expired, and I didn't really have to run around much so I could just sit back and hammer it out.
Even in a group, was much easier to hit a tough dungeon or high level area and grind it out, more relaxing, more fun, more time to chat etc. I'd like to see games reward either grind style more equally. Right now they tend to favor questing in my experience.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Originally posted by fivoroth Mob grinding gets boring even faster.
This is true for me. It makes one activity available in an MMO: Killing.
Quests alter the activities. You may have a kill quest, a delivery quest, a collect (which may involve killing) quest, a crafting type quest, lore quests, and many other kinds of quests.
Mob grinding's only variations are what and where. The activity stays the same.
- 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
Originally posted by fivoroth Mob grinding gets boring even faster.
This is true for me. It makes one activity available in an MMO: Killing.
Quests alter the activities. You may have a kill quest, a delivery quest, a collect (which may involve killing) quest, a crafting type quest, lore quests, and many other kinds of quests.
Mob grinding's only variations are what and where. The activity stays the same.
Quests or grinding, both are equally boring, (or equally entertaining?) so I opt for the one that is less hassle.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Mob grinding gets boring even faster. I don't understand the argument about freedom though. If your only option is to grind mobs, you don't have any more freedom than in a quest based MMO. You still grind preallocated level appropriate spots.
WoW is a themepark with quest hubs. EQ was a themepark with mob camps. Same thing. They are both on "rails" as some people like to put it. I personally prefer questing. It sure gets boring especially if you don't pay attention to the story. But it is still better. In ESO the quests have interesting back stories.
However, I think WoW did the levelling brilliantly. I have never enjoyed the levelling up process in any other MMO so much. I levelled two heroes to level 60 when the game launched and I was not bored at ANY SINGLE POINT! It was brilliant. Quests were interesting and everything felt rewarding and addictive. Even just killing mobs in WoW felt rewarding. Mobs gave very good experience and a lot of them dropped greens quite often.
For some reason levelling in other MMOs is extremely tedious. I can't even level up one char halfway through to max level without getting extremely bored.
Not exactly. EQ had a number of places and different type of mobs. Depending on your class, group, how you played certain mobs worked better. Cleric could do undead, Druid out doors kiting or a group might go to a dungeon. You also generally had more locations to level because EQ even had mixed zones with high and low level stuff. But I agree that mob grinding probably gets boring faster. I think people are just really burned out on questing after 10 years of nearly 100% of MMORPGs forcing you progress by questing the most idiotic quest in a lot of cases.
True but it is still kind of predetermined. Even in WoW you always had 3-4 completely different zones you could be in. You didn't have to go down a super strict path.
Yes, that's why I advocate neither. Just give me levelless games with horizontal progression
I was just explaining the freedom you generally got. Well at least in Everquest. There were more than 3-4 spots to level which is why people say there was freedom.
I vote for levelless progression too. ESO would be a lot better if it did not have levels but kept the skill progression. So you get to progress for a long time, morphing skills, getting better crafts etc, but you would not be restricted by that little number next to name. So plenty of progression still but no arbitrary levels restricting your freedom where to go.
Ofcourse the whole game should have been designed with no levels in mind because now people could go where ever starting at lvl1, and that would have been great. I really like the game for the questing and the amount of story content in it, but it could have been a lot better.
Originally posted by Gorwe You've been outplayed fiv. See, the WoW's been modelled down to a T like a Skinner's box. And they achieved perfection there(how couldn't they? They had plenty of xp in that field already{Diablo?}...). If you fel for that...don't get involved with feds(or worse). My honest advice.
Imo, a lot of MMO games shouldn't have been MMORPGs, but rather RPGs(or sth else). Let's make a list:
-> What has swtor done to earn its mmorpg title? How about RPG?
-> What has ESO done to earn its mmorpg title? How about RPG?
-> What has LoTRO done to earn its mmorpg title? How about RPG?
-> What has post TBC wow done to earn its mmorpg title? How about RPG?
-> ...
As is visible, almost all of those games should've been either singleplayers with coop mode(TOR, ESO, LoTRO) or singleplayer games with multiplayer based on lobbies(post TBC wow, Rift, ...). The sad truth:
There is VERY few real MMORPGs.
I agree with what you are saying. Most MMO's should never have been MMO's. LotRO doesn't really fit the bill, it was very much group level content in its original form but demand for something less taxing on lifestyle took it away from the quest tree system. It doesn't really take away from what you are saying though. FF14, Tera, TSW, most MMO's out are storyline games done by yourself with end game raids that could be handled by a LAN, node support from the publisher, similar to Freelancer.
I've stated, piracy pushed a lot of PC games developers to go all in for MMO because they were selling subscriptions even through box sales. Using Freelancer as the example again, it was very popular but sales were shit. Everyone stole it. You can't really steal an MMO account the way you could a copy of Freelancer. Every copy of an MMO needs to be purchased to be valid.
Originally posted by Gorwe You've been outplayed fiv. See, the WoW's been modelled down to a T like a Skinner's box. And they achieved perfection there(how couldn't they? They had plenty of xp in that field already{Diablo?}...). If you fel for that...don't get involved with feds(or worse). My honest advice.
Imo, a lot of MMO games shouldn't have been MMORPGs, but rather RPGs(or sth else). Let's make a list:
-> What has swtor done to earn its mmorpg title? How about RPG?
-> What has ESO done to earn its mmorpg title? How about RPG?
-> What has LoTRO done to earn its mmorpg title? How about RPG?
-> What has post TBC wow done to earn its mmorpg title? How about RPG?
-> ...
As is visible, almost all of those games should've been either singleplayers with coop mode(TOR, ESO, LoTRO) or singleplayer games with multiplayer based on lobbies(post TBC wow, Rift, ...). The sad truth:
There is VERY few real MMORPGs.
I agree with what you are saying. Most MMO's should never have been MMO's. LotRO doesn't really fit the bill, it was very much group level content in its original form but demand for something less taxing on lifestyle took it away from the quest tree system. It doesn't really take away from what you are saying though. FF14, Tera, TSW, most MMO's out are storyline games done by yourself with end game raids that could be handled by a LAN, node support from the publisher, similar to Freelancer.
I've stated, piracy pushed a lot of PC games developers to go all in for MMO because they were selling subscriptions even through box sales. Using Freelancer as the example again, it was very popular but sales were shit. Everyone stole it. You can't really steal an MMO account the way you could a copy of Freelancer. Every copy of an MMO needs to be purchased to be valid.
^ and they can ban your account anytime they want , sometime they even change the resign term for they own good.
Describing the act as "grinding" quests implies that you aren't doing said quests for the story, but for the reward. In that case, the steps for completion just become repetitive busywork. That's about as boring as you can get from something that's supposed to provide entertainment and escapism.
At least with mob grinding you could choose to get into groups like in the old eq1 camps and still have an enjoyable, dynamic social experience.
In almost quest-grinding MMO's you can also mob grind with not too great a loss in XP. I often switch between the two in WOW or other "WOW clones" when I get bored of the quests or want to grind gold or mats for crafting.
Personally I prefer any MMO where you can do multiple tasks (quests, mob killing, crafting/gathering, dungeons, PVP) to gain experience. Choice is good. The only advantage to a mob grinder is to force grouping but since most players want to play solo or focus on endgame I don't think it's going to be very popular with the masses.
Originally posted by Gorwe You've been outplayed fiv. See, the WoW's been modelled down to a T like a Skinner's box. And they achieved perfection there(how couldn't they? They had plenty of xp in that field already{Diablo?}...). If you fel for that...don't get involved with feds(or worse). My honest advice.
Imo, a lot of MMO games shouldn't have been MMORPGs, but rather RPGs(or sth else). Let's make a list:
-> What has swtor done to earn its mmorpg title? How about RPG?
-> What has ESO done to earn its mmorpg title? How about RPG?
-> What has LoTRO done to earn its mmorpg title? How about RPG?
-> What has post TBC wow done to earn its mmorpg title? How about RPG?
-> ...
As is visible, almost all of those games should've been either singleplayers with coop mode(TOR, ESO, LoTRO) or singleplayer games with multiplayer based on lobbies(post TBC wow, Rift, ...). The sad truth:
There is VERY few real MMORPGs.
I agree with what you are saying. Most MMO's should never have been MMO's. LotRO doesn't really fit the bill, it was very much group level content in its original form but demand for something less taxing on lifestyle took it away from the quest tree system. It doesn't really take away from what you are saying though. FF14, Tera, TSW, most MMO's out are storyline games done by yourself with end game raids that could be handled by a LAN, node support from the publisher, similar to Freelancer.
I've stated, piracy pushed a lot of PC games developers to go all in for MMO because they were selling subscriptions even through box sales. Using Freelancer as the example again, it was very popular but sales were shit. Everyone stole it. You can't really steal an MMO account the way you could a copy of Freelancer. Every copy of an MMO needs to be purchased to be valid.
^ and they can ban your account anytime they want , sometime they even change the resign term for they own good.
when they close server , the game lost forever.
Pretty underhand tactic.
F2P schemes, always online and cloud gaming will become more common. It all negates piracy to a large degree.
Originally posted by Aparition i played 3 or 4 years of ultima online, there wasnt 1 quest in that game, i think i prefer it that way also, forced exploration and grinding mobs was fun enough not to need any other leveling method back then, but with today's almost forced questing type model, most people who started playing mmo's in the last 10 years dont know anything different.
Sorry to be the one to tell you this BUT UO did have quests even before any expansions. You just had to know where they were.
Originally posted by fivoroth Mob grinding gets boring even faster.
This is true for me. It makes one activity available in an MMO: Killing.
Quests alter the activities. You may have a kill quest, a delivery quest, a collect (which may involve killing) quest, a crafting type quest, lore quests, and many other kinds of quests.
Mob grinding's only variations are what and where. The activity stays the same.
So there was no lore, crafting, or other activities in old MMOs? I seem to remember people in UO and EQ spending tuns of time on crafting and talking to NPCs to see what they said. Most NPCs had something to say even though they didn't have an exclamation mark over their heads. To me it felt like there was a lot more to do then grind mobs. That is usually what I did because I enjoyed running around to the different zones and figuring out what I could handle. In UO I did a fair amount of crafting though.
In terms of variety each race had it's own starting area and lore in EQ. It may have been a themepark, but it had a lot of different options "zones" in which you could go. Progression through zones wasn't always linear like with quests. Sometimes a high level zone might be right next to a low level zone. Misty Thicket "halfling starting area" was right next to one of the highest level zones in vanilla.
I don't think it should be either way. I would prefer a system where you can get quests that do not reward experience but instead reward gear, and I mean really good gear or items, things that could potentially last the lifetime of your character .. like a breath underwater item or see invis item, items that cast spells, etc. Or they could reward things like character enhancements ... things like extra talents or feats .. or character stat increases.
I would like those quests not to be grinds, but be more like long scavenger hunts (it would take a long time to complete and usually require lots of travel with long stops), where you would end up gaining experience while doing the required tasks and acquiring the required quest items through mob grinds (or even some deliveries or other npc interactions). The mobs and npc's would have to be located in different areas around the world so that while doing the quests your are sort of still being led around the game world just not so blatantly.
I would personally prefer mob grinding with a few quests here and there, or just purely grinding mobs. That sort of gameplay isn't very possible in most modern games though.
How I would improve the system would be:
- Make quests less linear, and finding them some sort of a challenge in itself
- If there are a lot of quests in the game, mob grinding should remain the superior way of getting XP in terms of efficiency. If the player wants to be spoonfed, it should at least come at the cost of effciency.
I think killing mobs at camps is better for people with friends. You can just set up at a camp and B.S. in mumble to get to the end game group content.
The flipside is that questing is way better for the solo player, and a lot of people play MMO's solo...which seems completely backwards to me.
Its quite funny. People use to cry over grinding mobs and wanting quests to level them. Now I think people have gotten over it. Most individuals Ill bet would much rather killing mobs over doing a chain of quests if it let you max level just as fast.
That said, a healthy mix of different things you can do for leveling I feel is the best solution. Its just a difficult solution to come up with in a balanced way.
I definately prefer grinding in games that encourage people to party up and play together. Questing just seems inefficient in group enviroments, even while playing over VoIP. This said I think the issue with quests is more in the way they normally function.
With grinding you can vary with builds,comps, locations etc..
Quests on the other hand force you run on a treadmill with little to no variations.
I would really like to see a MMORPG you could level up solely playing PvP because player interaction is what makes MMORPGs different.
I've played a good portion of the big MMORPGs released recently, and it seems like the majority of them implement the WoW "quest hub" model for leveling. Meaning that the leveling experience is primarily going from area to area, picking up the quests, doing them, rinse and repeat.
I know that they are doing this to reduce the "grind" of just killing MOBs for exp, and make the leveling experience more enjoyable. But to tell you the truth...I kind of prefer the old method of just grinding MOBs at this point.
At least when I grinded MOBs I could generally decide where to go, what MOBs to grind, what kind of grinding I would do etc. etc. I was actually driving my experience.
But with quest grinding...it just feels like I am running errands and I have hardly any control whatsoever. The novelty of the quest "story" dies down pretty fast since there are so many of them, and pretty soon it just feels like "go here, kill him." "Okay you're done? Now go here bring this guy this item." "Done that? Okay now go over here, put on this item, and kill this guy."
Over and over and over...
Personally, I would much rather just kill MOBs.
What do you guys think? Has quest grinding gotten to the point where MOB grinding is preferable?
In the most part yes.. quest grinding is worse than Mob grinding. Why?
- With mob grinding you can change the pace, you can bring in some varity and you can do it effectively with any group size, from solo, with a friend or a random number of friends as a group. Not so much with most quest designs
- This also depends heavily on the implementation of the quests.. if they are actually good, with a lot of variation and actually entertaining, quest grinding can be more fun.. but usually they are almost always the same with less or not a lot of variation.
- With quests you are usually bound to a preset path.. you have to go from that quest hub to the next.. you cant roam, you can't find your own way. Though from game to game there are a few options sometimes. With mobs you may be bound to certain areas(depending on the game) but you usually can choose from a wider range, and have more choices where you go or what you exactly do.
But finally.. as more options you have to choose the better it is. With other words the best is not one or the other, but both, mixed with xp from some kind of pvp, crafting and what mmos can offer, too. And all with a similar return of xp/per time so that you actually have the option. Even better would be a system without a heavy vertical progression, where grinding isn't a factor at all.. and you can actually do what you want at any time.
Originally posted by fivoroth Mob grinding gets boring even faster.
This is true for me. It makes one activity available in an MMO: Killing.Quests alter the activities. You may have a kill quest, a delivery quest, a collect (which may involve killing) quest, a crafting type quest, lore quests, and many other kinds of quests.Mob grinding's only variations are what and where. The activity stays the same.
Quests or grinding, both are equally boring, (or equally entertaining?) so I opt for the one that is less hassle.
Understood
And really, the way quests are today, there is very little variety with so many possibilities
- 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
Originally posted by free2play I've stated, piracy pushed a lot of PC games developers to go all in for MMO because they were selling subscriptions even through box sales. Using Freelancer as the example again, it was very popular but sales were shit. Everyone stole it. You can't really steal an MMO account the way you could a copy of Freelancer. Every copy of an MMO needs to be purchased to be valid.
That is really interesting. I had never thought of that before, not being a pirate myself. That is a possible explanation worth considering.
- 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
Originally posted by fivoroth Mob grinding gets boring even faster.
This is true for me. It makes one activity available in an MMO: Killing.Quests alter the activities. You may have a kill quest, a delivery quest, a collect (which may involve killing) quest, a crafting type quest, lore quests, and many other kinds of quests.Mob grinding's only variations are what and where. The activity stays the same.
So there was no lore, crafting, or other activities in old MMOs? I seem to remember people in UO and EQ spending tuns of time on crafting and talking to NPCs to see what they said. Most NPCs had something to say even though they didn't have an exclamation mark over their heads. To me it felt like there was a lot more to do then grind mobs. That is usually what I did because I enjoyed running around to the different zones and figuring out what I could handle. In UO I did a fair amount of crafting though.In terms of variety each race had it's own starting area and lore in EQ. It may have been a themepark, but it had a lot of different options "zones" in which you could go. Progression through zones wasn't always linear like with quests. Sometimes a high level zone might be right next to a low level zone. Misty Thicket "halfling starting area" was right next to one of the highest level zones in vanilla.
Yes, there were other activities. I spent hours on crafting in EQ1. I never leveled through it, though (not that I was looking to level up that way), just improved my crafting skill
EQ had great variety, in both Quests and mob grinding. What is lacking today in mob grinding is variety. They also had lots of mobs of every level that were very different. Instead of 10-15 starting areas and expanding on that, we now have 1-5 starting areas with very small expanding areas until the areas start to overlap. I remember seeing races of all kinds in every zone I went to in EQ1. That was amazing to me.
All in all, variety is the keyword here. Grinding the same mobs is as boring as grinding the same quests
- 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
My opinion is to just get rid of traditional leveling with exp gains . . .There are other means of progression. You can go to time based systems like Age of Wushu.
Age of Wushu was one of the most innovative and exciting MMOs ever. (Its shortcoming was having been made by some obscure company in China and not even implementing SSL at their payment site.) It completely opened my eyes to how lazy and unimaginative modern MMOs are, and how modern MMO gamers have gotten into this rut where we have seen everything and done everything already. With AoW I had to learn how to play a MMO from the ground up, with modern MMOs I already know pretty much 90% of how to play the game out of the box.
Originally posted by ranghar I think killing mobs at camps is better for people with friends. You can just set up at a camp and B.S. in mumble to get to the end game group content.
The flipside is that questing is way better for the solo player, and a lot of people play MMO's solo...which seems completely backwards to me.
That is a great point!
I enjoyed grinding mobs in EQ1 when I had friends grinding with me. The BS we did during the dreaded downtime was what made the grinding fun.
Like you said, grinding quests is usually (with a few exceptions) a solo activity. No friends/help needed, usually.
- 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
Originally posted by ranghar I think killing mobs at camps is better for people with friends. You can just set up at a camp and B.S. in mumble to get to the end game group content.
The flipside is that questing is way better for the solo player, and a lot of people play MMO's solo...which seems completely backwards to me.
That is a great point!
I enjoyed grinding mobs in EQ1 when I had friends grinding with me. The BS we did during the dreaded downtime was made the grinding fun.
Like you said, grinding quests is usually (with a few exceptions) a solo activity. No friends/help needed, usually.
This is a critical point, ultimately connected to the issue of variety and choices many people, including yourself, have talked about. With mob grinding, you had a choice to do it solo, or to do it with a group. With quest grinding, you have no choice, you have to do it solo.
OK . . . you do, technically, have a choice to grind quests with pre-existing friends, but let's face it, it is overkill. You don't have a way of upping the quest difficulty to take into account multiple people. With mob grinding you would just move onto the toughest mobs you could find and handle, the difficulty was always adjustable to group size.
Furthermore, mob grinding made it possible to make new friends, to meet people while you were out adventuring. It made it possible to group up on the fly. With quest grinding, the only role other people serve is to break immersion.
But, in the end, I don't believe in grind. There are ways of implementing progression without grind, but even in a game where progression is tied to xp which is tied to activity, I see no reason a MMO should ever need to feel like grind. When I was playing City of Heroes, I never felt like I was grinding, it was always fun. And the reason it was fun was I always found content that was exciting and relatively challenging and which also awarded good xp. The point is, leveling should be fun, it should involve content that is challenging, and that is entirely doable. (The interesting thing of note was that City of Heroes didn't actually start demonstrating some of the characteristics of a traditional grinder until it implemented PvP and an economy.)
Grinding by definition suggests that you are doing something that you don't enjoy doing.
I wonder what people would think of WoW if all you did was log directly into a raid and nothing more. It seems to be what everyone wants... skip leveling, skip questing, skip exploring, just start out in end game. End game is just an instance, nothing more. You don't need crafting, worlds, mounts, gold, or social interaction. Just a time card to punch in your local group finder assembled instance.
If you don't enjoy MMOs, why do you continue to play them?
Comments
Last year I played on a DAOC freeshard and went back to the old npc grind, and I found I enjoyed. Like the OP posted, I got to chose where to grind, to seek out the optimal camps for my level, to move on when the camp/baf bonuses expired, and I didn't really have to run around much so I could just sit back and hammer it out.
Even in a group, was much easier to hit a tough dungeon or high level area and grind it out, more relaxing, more fun, more time to chat etc. I'd like to see games reward either grind style more equally. Right now they tend to favor questing in my experience.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Quests alter the activities. You may have a kill quest, a delivery quest, a collect (which may involve killing) quest, a crafting type quest, lore quests, and many other kinds of quests.
Mob grinding's only variations are what and where. The activity stays the same.
- 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
Quests or grinding, both are equally boring, (or equally entertaining?) so I opt for the one that is less hassle.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I vote for levelless progression too. ESO would be a lot better if it did not have levels but kept the skill progression. So you get to progress for a long time, morphing skills, getting better crafts etc, but you would not be restricted by that little number next to name. So plenty of progression still but no arbitrary levels restricting your freedom where to go.
Ofcourse the whole game should have been designed with no levels in mind because now people could go where ever starting at lvl1, and that would have been great. I really like the game for the questing and the amount of story content in it, but it could have been a lot better.
I agree with what you are saying. Most MMO's should never have been MMO's. LotRO doesn't really fit the bill, it was very much group level content in its original form but demand for something less taxing on lifestyle took it away from the quest tree system. It doesn't really take away from what you are saying though. FF14, Tera, TSW, most MMO's out are storyline games done by yourself with end game raids that could be handled by a LAN, node support from the publisher, similar to Freelancer.
I've stated, piracy pushed a lot of PC games developers to go all in for MMO because they were selling subscriptions even through box sales. Using Freelancer as the example again, it was very popular but sales were shit. Everyone stole it. You can't really steal an MMO account the way you could a copy of Freelancer. Every copy of an MMO needs to be purchased to be valid.
^ and they can ban your account anytime they want , sometime they even change the resign term for they own good.
when they close server , the game lost forever.
Pretty underhand tactic.
Describing the act as "grinding" quests implies that you aren't doing said quests for the story, but for the reward. In that case, the steps for completion just become repetitive busywork. That's about as boring as you can get from something that's supposed to provide entertainment and escapism.
At least with mob grinding you could choose to get into groups like in the old eq1 camps and still have an enjoyable, dynamic social experience.
In almost quest-grinding MMO's you can also mob grind with not too great a loss in XP. I often switch between the two in WOW or other "WOW clones" when I get bored of the quests or want to grind gold or mats for crafting.
Personally I prefer any MMO where you can do multiple tasks (quests, mob killing, crafting/gathering, dungeons, PVP) to gain experience. Choice is good. The only advantage to a mob grinder is to force grouping but since most players want to play solo or focus on endgame I don't think it's going to be very popular with the masses.
F2P schemes, always online and cloud gaming will become more common. It all negates piracy to a large degree.
Sorry to be the one to tell you this BUT UO did have quests even before any expansions. You just had to know where they were.
For me.. I would like to be able to do both.
So there was no lore, crafting, or other activities in old MMOs? I seem to remember people in UO and EQ spending tuns of time on crafting and talking to NPCs to see what they said. Most NPCs had something to say even though they didn't have an exclamation mark over their heads. To me it felt like there was a lot more to do then grind mobs. That is usually what I did because I enjoyed running around to the different zones and figuring out what I could handle. In UO I did a fair amount of crafting though.
In terms of variety each race had it's own starting area and lore in EQ. It may have been a themepark, but it had a lot of different options "zones" in which you could go. Progression through zones wasn't always linear like with quests. Sometimes a high level zone might be right next to a low level zone. Misty Thicket "halfling starting area" was right next to one of the highest level zones in vanilla.
I would like those quests not to be grinds, but be more like long scavenger hunts (it would take a long time to complete and usually require lots of travel with long stops), where you would end up gaining experience while doing the required tasks and acquiring the required quest items through mob grinds (or even some deliveries or other npc interactions). The mobs and npc's would have to be located in different areas around the world so that while doing the quests your are sort of still being led around the game world just not so blatantly.
I would personally prefer mob grinding with a few quests here and there, or just purely grinding mobs. That sort of gameplay isn't very possible in most modern games though.
How I would improve the system would be:
- Make quests less linear, and finding them some sort of a challenge in itself
- If there are a lot of quests in the game, mob grinding should remain the superior way of getting XP in terms of efficiency. If the player wants to be spoonfed, it should at least come at the cost of effciency.
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I think killing mobs at camps is better for people with friends. You can just set up at a camp and B.S. in mumble to get to the end game group content.
The flipside is that questing is way better for the solo player, and a lot of people play MMO's solo...which seems completely backwards to me.
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Its quite funny. People use to cry over grinding mobs and wanting quests to level them. Now I think people have gotten over it. Most individuals Ill bet would much rather killing mobs over doing a chain of quests if it let you max level just as fast.
That said, a healthy mix of different things you can do for leveling I feel is the best solution. Its just a difficult solution to come up with in a balanced way.
I definately prefer grinding in games that encourage people to party up and play together. Questing just seems inefficient in group enviroments, even while playing over VoIP. This said I think the issue with quests is more in the way they normally function.
With grinding you can vary with builds,comps, locations etc..
Quests on the other hand force you run on a treadmill with little to no variations.
I would really like to see a MMORPG you could level up solely playing PvP because player interaction is what makes MMORPGs different.
In the most part yes.. quest grinding is worse than Mob grinding. Why?
- With mob grinding you can change the pace, you can bring in some varity and you can do it effectively with any group size, from solo, with a friend or a random number of friends as a group. Not so much with most quest designs
- This also depends heavily on the implementation of the quests.. if they are actually good, with a lot of variation and actually entertaining, quest grinding can be more fun.. but usually they are almost always the same with less or not a lot of variation.
- With quests you are usually bound to a preset path.. you have to go from that quest hub to the next.. you cant roam, you can't find your own way. Though from game to game there are a few options sometimes. With mobs you may be bound to certain areas(depending on the game) but you usually can choose from a wider range, and have more choices where you go or what you exactly do.
But finally.. as more options you have to choose the better it is. With other words the best is not one or the other, but both, mixed with xp from some kind of pvp, crafting and what mmos can offer, too. And all with a similar return of xp/per time so that you actually have the option. Even better would be a system without a heavy vertical progression, where grinding isn't a factor at all.. and you can actually do what you want at any time.
And really, the way quests are today, there is very little variety with so many possibilities
- 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
- 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
EQ had great variety, in both Quests and mob grinding. What is lacking today in mob grinding is variety. They also had lots of mobs of every level that were very different. Instead of 10-15 starting areas and expanding on that, we now have 1-5 starting areas with very small expanding areas until the areas start to overlap. I remember seeing races of all kinds in every zone I went to in EQ1. That was amazing to me.
All in all, variety is the keyword here. Grinding the same mobs is as boring as grinding the same quests
- 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
Age of Wushu was one of the most innovative and exciting MMOs ever. (Its shortcoming was having been made by some obscure company in China and not even implementing SSL at their payment site.) It completely opened my eyes to how lazy and unimaginative modern MMOs are, and how modern MMO gamers have gotten into this rut where we have seen everything and done everything already. With AoW I had to learn how to play a MMO from the ground up, with modern MMOs I already know pretty much 90% of how to play the game out of the box.
Age of Wushu had very little to no grind.
I enjoyed grinding mobs in EQ1 when I had friends grinding with me. The BS we did during the dreaded downtime was what made the grinding fun.
Like you said, grinding quests is usually (with a few exceptions) a solo activity. No friends/help needed, usually.
- 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
This is a critical point, ultimately connected to the issue of variety and choices many people, including yourself, have talked about. With mob grinding, you had a choice to do it solo, or to do it with a group. With quest grinding, you have no choice, you have to do it solo.
OK . . . you do, technically, have a choice to grind quests with pre-existing friends, but let's face it, it is overkill. You don't have a way of upping the quest difficulty to take into account multiple people. With mob grinding you would just move onto the toughest mobs you could find and handle, the difficulty was always adjustable to group size.
Furthermore, mob grinding made it possible to make new friends, to meet people while you were out adventuring. It made it possible to group up on the fly. With quest grinding, the only role other people serve is to break immersion.
But, in the end, I don't believe in grind. There are ways of implementing progression without grind, but even in a game where progression is tied to xp which is tied to activity, I see no reason a MMO should ever need to feel like grind. When I was playing City of Heroes, I never felt like I was grinding, it was always fun. And the reason it was fun was I always found content that was exciting and relatively challenging and which also awarded good xp. The point is, leveling should be fun, it should involve content that is challenging, and that is entirely doable. (The interesting thing of note was that City of Heroes didn't actually start demonstrating some of the characteristics of a traditional grinder until it implemented PvP and an economy.)
Grinding by definition suggests that you are doing something that you don't enjoy doing.
I wonder what people would think of WoW if all you did was log directly into a raid and nothing more. It seems to be what everyone wants... skip leveling, skip questing, skip exploring, just start out in end game. End game is just an instance, nothing more. You don't need crafting, worlds, mounts, gold, or social interaction. Just a time card to punch in your local group finder assembled instance.
If you don't enjoy MMOs, why do you continue to play them?