If WOW never came out and all those MMOs after it kept doing the mob grinding thing, I would probably have not evn given MMOs a chance. EQ was the most boring game on this planet. So was Lineage 2. How can people mindless grind for hours on end is beyond me. All that stuff about community and talknig to people, sure you did that cause the game was so fucking boring.
WoW was the first MMO to adopt the quest based approach. All MMOs before it were what we refer to as korean style grinders. WoW had so many quests, it's ridiculous. I can't think of a single game at the time, both MMO and non-MMO games,that had so many quests. I personally think that that was one of the main reasons for WoW's success. People couldn't stop playing the game even when the servers were down most of the time for the first 3 years. Because levelling was actually enjoyable and varied. Something which was unheard of in MMOs. MMOs were not fun, were time consuming and were a glorifed Korean grinder before that.
Too bad that all MMOs decided to copy the way WoW did it and now most MMOs are WoW clones.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
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."
Wow. Let's not think for one second that poorly developed quests are a good feature. Of course if you compare mob grinding to crappy quests then you may have an actual argument for mob grinding (although quest grinding still wins by a landslide... but not by an avalanche).
Quests allow the developer to flesh out the gameworld and the lore by an immense amount. Monster grinding is simply contextless, and does not allow for any kind of lore development. Of course everyone can think of crappy band-aids to make it seem like mob grinding has this great purpose but that's just talk. But obviously if the gameworld sucks and the devs don't give a damn about it and the lore there won't be any good stuff in the quests either. They will be poorly written and contain no valuable story tidbits to the player. The dev must have his priorities set straight first before quest based grinding can truly blossom. Though even then the critics and the players can trash on the game by simply assuming that it contains no good writing and script (e.g. what happened with FFXIV:ARR).
A massive fallacy in your argument is that *you* get to decide what to kill and where. Unless the monsters are carbon copies of one another, meaning there are no differences among them, the community will find the best spots to mob grind and that's where you will go. Especially if there is any type of grouping involved.
Unless you want to artificially slow down the grind just for yourself. Said no MMO player ever.
This has been proven time and time again. A massive downside to this is, of course, that the devs have no control over what the playerbase ends up doing. They can guess what happens if they modify the popular monsters somehow - although the end result is yet another Monster of the Month everyone grinds 100% of the time. For a developer this is silly, because they have no control over what the players do in their game, and they have to guess all the time what might happen if they adjust a parameter. When the developer has control over their game, they can do much better things with it.
I don't know why I bothered to even make this post. You people are hopeless. I hope y'all don't become too cynical in your quest for the return of the poopy MMO game design.
Using LOL is like saying "my argument sucks but I still want to disagree".
if my opinion counts i would say that Quests have to exist in order to support the lore, the history of the world, which the player is going to habitat ...
grinding mobs i can only imagine it would work better if the mobs are offering something special, f.e. if you want to make a special leather armor with critical dmg you had to get leather from wolfs etc, like a mechanic to drive the economy and the daily relaxing.
in my personal taste i prefer for a daily to log in and go hunt 50 bears than hunt for quests, read texts etc, i want just to relax something easy going.. on the other side if you want a weapon with the name of the great pirate captain Hanckok, it will be bad this would demand you to grind 1000 pirates, but a quest for you and your friends to find the hidden pirate ship and kill the awesome uber skilled ghost of Hanckok and his minions ...once you have done it you can go there again to farm pirate minions just for their golden teeth. Thats my fantasies about a balanced quest and mob grind ... I loved the days back in Lineage ][, were we had to grind for coal, it was funny, but when the grind reached lvls of no life it become disgusting ...
Mob grind is way worse of the two. Apart from resource gathering, its got to be the most primitive content an MMO can have. Everything from finding spawns to camping respawns to fighting over spawns is everything I wasn't prepared to see in an MMORPGs when I first tried them.
Many old games revolved around this and I couldn't be any more disinterested. I was appalled by how many people actually enjoyed it past the point where the novelty wore off. It was not even challenging! Combat was based on the age-old straight and true, braindead tank 'n' spank and everything could be overcome with more grind.
It is the closes thing to a hamster wheel I've seen in a game. This is why I loathe those old-school MMORPGs. In my mind, there are not enough redeeming qualities to apologize for this abysmal gameplay and metagame. Every player who tried and played those games should look back and think "never again".
With what they know now, I doubt many would play a similar game today. ...or if they would, I would be very disheartened by how low they have set their bar.
I have a few issues with what you said.
First mob grinding is not something you have to do. You could level up by exploring different dungeons or different areas. People just did mob grinding because it was the safe thing to do. Some people actually enjoyed it to an extent because you weren't forced into following a predetermined path.
The holy trinity combat style seems not very complex to you, but you seem to think combat in this day and age is complex? You can basically solo any mob pre endgame without much regard for strategy of any kind.
To me the quest line games are even worse then grinding mobs. You follow little markers on the map around without any thought required. You do this until you are max level then you grind raids or PvP. At least with mob grinding and holy trinity there was some measure of thought required on your part in terms of where to go, what you needed to do in combat, and how to achieve these goals.
I utterly cringe at the thought of grinding mobs. I've done that far too many times in earlier MMORPGs, many years ago. Quests may be cliche, however they are less tedious in my opinion.
My own view is i like a mixture too many endless quests gets dull as does sitting grinding mobs.
I like games where I can level in a variety of ways eg pvp, crafting , dungeons aswell as quests and mobs.
One thing i dont like however is too much quest text, ive recently been playing some ESO and theres so much quest text i that game , i just end up clicking through it as fast as i can.
I think that quest grinding can be considered worse than mob grinding. Quest grind basically locks in the kind of rewards you get, and essentially puts you on rails. You get fed bits of story as it unfolds - worse yet, character story, proclaiming YOU the savior of the world, next to the thousands of other people who are also the sole savior - and you have no control with how you handle a situation. If it means kill 10 rats for gold, you better kill those 10 rats or the chain won't advance.
Meanwhile grinding mobs, you can choose what to kill based on what it drops - which can tie in very nicely into a player-driven economy - and the world story and lore can be told to you by what actually happens in world, not what some NPC spouts at you as an excuse to kill 10 rats, which often sounds forced anyways. That way, you can experience the world as you immerse in it, and if the game is truly freeform - sandbox style - you can perhaps even make up your own story in it. Granted there isn't much in the way of those sandbox games on the market, but some games might eventually cover that sector. Archeage probably wont, it looks to be a thinly veiled themepark that also seems to turn p2w and has a horrible concept of lore integrity with its user addded content, ESO is a shameless, narrow themepark with barely any freedom at all. EQN i have no idea, i know next to nothing about the game. Trials of ascension at lesat has some very promising dynamic world stuff going, which might have lots of potential. Black desert, well, maybe, but I'm leery of anything that comes off the eastern market, where P2W is such an accepted business model. And you can't really do player driven economy with P2W
since diablo 3 everyone who likes it, also likes grinding mobs.
Oh .. i have fun "grinding mob" the diablo way. But note that
a) it is not static spawn
b) there are min-bosses from time to time
c) you grind bounties, not mobs ... which can be thought of as quests without the annoying, irrelevant quest text (and no fed-ex quests).
Thats true what youre saying but all in one, its grinding. And actually the whole content is based on that grind. Imagine people would only play the story mode of d3. 59 dollar for 3 hours
I don't like either honestly. Obsession with vertical progression and themeparks only games lead to this problem.
It is not a problem if the game is structured like D3 .. just a series of tasks (with lots of choices & variation) aimed at progression.
Focused and get rid of all the distraction like stories, or what-not.
I think quest in MMORPG's are best when not forced.
In MMORPG the destination is more important then the journey... but let me throw these stories out there to stop you from getting there.
I don't think so at all. The only destination in most MMOs is endgame and I hate endgame with a passion, I won't play it. The only fun in MMOs is the adventure itself, the levelling journey. Beyond that, it's just a bunch of crap I want nothing to do with.
If you want cool end game or high level powers/areas/items or whatever you have to finish this story. You want to play with your higher level friends you better finish this story. There are psychological urges for most gamers in vertical progression MMORPGs.
I don't want any of those things. I want to have a good time playing a game and when it's done, I'll move on and do something else. I don't have higher level friends because none of my friends would be caught dead playing most MMOs. I don't care about high level powers/areas/items. I care about having a good time. Endgame is not a good time for me.
Maybeyou but I think most players are pushed in this direction to hit max level. Its how MMORPG's are designed.
I really don't get it. Questing is anti-social, has very little to no replayability, requires no skill/thought/knowledge of the world, requires a huge budget etc. I can understand questing in single player RPGs but it has no place in MMOs.
On the other hand I remember leveling over 30 characters to max level in DAoC (an MMO which didn't have quests). You had to find a group, then go out into the world and find a good spot to camp. It was social (made a ton of friends, had some great discussions etc.), very replayable (since every time you grouped up with different people/classes and camped different spots), and I'm sure it took a lot less effort and money to create compared to quests from level 1 to 50. Also, unlike questing, it was very challenging to find the correct group composition, it required knowledge of the world to find the correct camp, it required skill to maximize exp gain while and minimize wipes (CC was very important). All around it was a lot more interesting/fun. I don't understand why no MMO tried to copy it.
I remember back when all there really was, was mob grinding... looking back, I think I liked it better. You would find a group, stake out a spot, and commence to laying waste to everything in the area. Chatting, socializing... having a good time while passing the time.
I've been playing Neverwinter recently. And, I have to say... I like the way they are handling it.
It has it's fair share of kill&collect questing. But, they constantly change the exact way in which you are doing it and add in a lot of little side objectives like burning stockpiles. And, just when I feel the need for a change of pace, bam! escort quest. It also pushes me into new areas just at the right time (right when i feel like I am beggining to know an area like the back of my hand and like all the monsters are starting to get to easy). It's all very well... timed I want to say. I have not really felt the repetitiveness as I do things even though it's clearly there.
Still...at the end of the day. I wish more games did questing like Runescape. A game for which the questing in it has become my yard stick for judging how good questing is in other games.
since diablo 3 everyone who likes it, also likes grinding mobs.
Oh .. i have fun "grinding mob" the diablo way. But note that
a) it is not static spawn
b) there are min-bosses from time to time
c) you grind bounties, not mobs ... which can be thought of as quests without the annoying, irrelevant quest text (and no fed-ex quests).
Thats true what youre saying but all in one, its grinding. And actually the whole content is based on that grind. Imagine people would only play the story mode of d3. 59 dollar for 3 hours
Yes, but grinding is fun if done right (as in D3). Obviously it is .. otherwise people won't be dumping hundred of hours into it.
And the point is that D3 is grinding done right .. old MMO .. not so much.
I really don't get it. Questing is anti-social, has very little to no replayability, requires no skill/thought/knowledge of the world, requires a huge budget etc. I can understand questing in single player RPGs but it has no place in MMOs.
Why is it so hard to get? MMO devs want some of the SP games audience. Many players don't want to socialize, nor replay the same story.
It is really a question of economics ... and given how much the MMO market has grown, whatever devs are doing is working. Heck, even TOR, which is a primarily SP game in the guise of a MMO, makes more than $200M in 2013.
Some start telling mob grind is worse than quest grind because the grind in old game are heavy.
And i have to agree that the old game's grind are too heavy ... it worse.
But i hope you face the true , the quest grind MMORPGs nowadays give you more XP and require less XP to level up than old games.
It mean the "mob grind is hard labor" aren't true , you feel it worse because the old game abuse the system.
If you tell me go back to the heavy grind day , i refuse .
But if the grind pace are standard nowadays game then i greatly accept .
The feel that mob grind are heavy normally because quest give large XP reward bonus , if you take away the XP reward bonus and give back those XP to mobs then you will see the difference .
The mob grind pace will be same with quests grind ,
and quests still here for you to do
So i ready don't see why you have to complaint when other player get another option to chose lol.
As you don't care about other and don't want to depend on other player to have fun aka "i want to play alone",
the quests still out here for you to do ,
they don't disappear and you don't need to join with other to grind if you don't want
See ?
i don't understand why you complaint when you get all the candy you want.
The more options we have , the better the game is,
mob grinding is horrible IMO, but when quests are poorly created to be just fillers and just keep sending people to mob grind over and over without meaningful Lore behind the quest and the mob that need to die, and having a real outcome then im out.
Questing should never be a filler thing. Quests are the way for devs to tell the story of the game. Killing 10 rats and collecting 10 bear asses 2345235423 times a day has nothing to do with the story of the game and it jsut makes the game feel cheap and poorly designed.
Every new mmo that comes out seem to completely ignore that and therefore all of them feel exactly the same (like a wow clone). Questing is 90% of PvE themepark mmos, if not more. That is where devs must innovate and break the cycle or their mmos will feel the same and this is not 2004 anymore. (Wildstar im looking at you).
Originally posted by rojo6934 .......................
Questing should never be a filler thing. Quests are the way for devs to tell the story of the game. Killing 10 rats and collecting 10 bear asses 2345235423 times a day has nothing to do with the story of the game and it just makes the game feel cheap and poorly designed.
................................
That is what most of us want to say.
People want to break the quest as soon as possible because they want to level up , and the XP reward from quest are huge.
The the developer then add GPS on the quests to "help" player finish the quests faster .
It make everything about questing become worse.
Without XP reward , the quests still here , it just not the most effect way to level up ,
and people have more chose.
We all want something better , and get more options to chose always better than get only one option forced on you.
The problem with quest grinding is it encourages solo play because because you are not likely to find someone else on the exact same stage of the questgrind as you. With mob grinding, a certain mob is usually good for several levels. In the old days the leveling experience of mmos was mostly a group experience. And you could come, join a group, stay there a while, then go and find a replacement. The group stayed in teh area and players joined and left as they needed. The result was you met a lot of people, and got used to playing with others in group mechanics in that game.
Now all the leveling process teaches you is how to solo, and there is no encouragement to interact with other players because its more of a hassle and less efficient than just soloing your quests to level. Quests in this way are a big factor in how mmos have become much more anti social in the last 10 years.
When a younger generation mmo player hears people talking of dropping all these quests the idea that comes to their head is solo mob grinding like they would in the games they are familiar with. Those games were never designed for mob grinding so of course what they imagine, solo mob grinding in those games, sounds horrible and they become resistant to the idea of dropping quests. Thus the problem arises, nobody wants to make a good group grinding game because people who dont even really have experience doing that oppose it.
At some point random encounters in MMOs were dropped as well. A lot of RPG elements have been dropped from RPGs. It was one of the things that made getting some where in and old RPG challenging. I recall in Dragon Warrior that it was quite a task just to get from one city to another. There were nasty mobs and you didn't know when they would attack or if they would get the first attack. Your health/mana wouldn't go back to full automatically after combat. You would have to go back to a town and rest or use potions to restore them. Then we have things like the GPS and Quest markers added to games. It's nice to have because it makes things a lot easier, but at the same token it kind of defeats part of the reason to play the game in the first place. I'm willing to go for more options in games. The grind doesn't need to be as bad as it once was, but quests shouldn't be someone non instanced and optional. They also shouldn't hold your hand IMO. It seems developers are intent on making things as simple as possible to attract the largest possible audience. Most people could probably accomplish something more strategic if they really wanted to, but most do not. It is human nature to follow the path of least resistance.
Originally posted by Flyte27 At some point random encounters in MMOs were dropped as well. A lot of RPG elements have been dropped from RPGs. It was one of the things that made getting some where in and old RPG challenging. I recall in Dragon Warrior that it was quite a task just to get from one city to another. There were nasty mobs and you didn't know when they would attack or if they would get the first attack. Your health/mana wouldn't go back to full automatically after combat. You would have to go back to a town and rest or use potions to restore them.
I don't think random encounter are good in MMORPGs ,
it work well on turn base or instanced battle in single player game but it again the natural of multiplayer so we can't hope it work well.
Possible have mobs guard the way through city to city , but you need to sacrifice the freedom to move around . The roads design need to be like dungeon so player can't strip the encounter
Though random encounters wasn't nice idea for MMORPG , random spawn do work on same mechanic
I think random spawn will work , it keep player moving around the world to hunt the mobs , pretty much nice way to break the "stay in one place" grind.
But it hard to test if the idea work or not .
Though i like the idea of random spawn , monster don't wait in one place for you to kill them , you have to find them.
Originally posted by Flyte27 At some point random encounters in MMOs were dropped as well. A lot of RPG elements have been dropped from RPGs. It was one of the things that made getting some where in and old RPG challenging. I recall in Dragon Warrior that it was quite a task just to get from one city to another. There were nasty mobs and you didn't know when they would attack or if they would get the first attack. Your health/mana wouldn't go back to full automatically after combat. You would have to go back to a town and rest or use potions to restore them.
I don't think random encounter are good in MMORPGs ,
it work well on turn base or instanced battle in single player game but it again the natural of multiplayer so we can't hope it work well.
Possible have mobs guard the way through city to city , but you need to sacrifice the freedom to move around . The roads design need to be like dungeon so player can't strip the encounter
Though random encounters wasn't nice idea for MMORPG , random spawn do work on same mechanic
I think random spawn will work , it keep player moving around the world to hunt the mobs , pretty much nice way to break the "stay in one place" grind.
But it hard to test if the idea work or not .
Though i like the idea of random spawn , monster don't wait in one place for you to kill them , you have to find them.
I agree with you, but part of the mechanics could be implemented.
You could have it so that health and magic will not regenerate naturally over time. This will require you to come back to town and rest at an inn or make a camp of some sort.
This would mean that you would have to plan your trips carefully and couldn't just sit and camp mobs. You would have to periodically leave to go back to town and rest or gather the necessary tools to build a camp.
I prefer MOB Grinding, with some meaningful epic quests here and there.
btw Is there a decent modern MOBginding game out there?
Yes, great one .. Diablo 3.
You earn bounties by hunting different mobs. No lore, no quests as excuse to kill stuff. Just rewards, and challenging fun combat (if you so choose to).
Comments
If WOW never came out and all those MMOs after it kept doing the mob grinding thing, I would probably have not evn given MMOs a chance. EQ was the most boring game on this planet. So was Lineage 2. How can people mindless grind for hours on end is beyond me. All that stuff about community and talknig to people, sure you did that cause the game was so fucking boring.
WoW was the first MMO to adopt the quest based approach. All MMOs before it were what we refer to as korean style grinders. WoW had so many quests, it's ridiculous. I can't think of a single game at the time, both MMO and non-MMO games,that had so many quests. I personally think that that was one of the main reasons for WoW's success. People couldn't stop playing the game even when the servers were down most of the time for the first 3 years. Because levelling was actually enjoyable and varied. Something which was unheard of in MMOs. MMOs were not fun, were time consuming and were a glorifed Korean grinder before that.
Too bad that all MMOs decided to copy the way WoW did it and now most MMOs are WoW clones.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
since diablo 3 everyone who likes it, also likes grinding mobs.
Me for my part hate grinding mobs, and its the worst content a game can deliever.
Wow. Let's not think for one second that poorly developed quests are a good feature. Of course if you compare mob grinding to crappy quests then you may have an actual argument for mob grinding (although quest grinding still wins by a landslide... but not by an avalanche).
Quests allow the developer to flesh out the gameworld and the lore by an immense amount. Monster grinding is simply contextless, and does not allow for any kind of lore development. Of course everyone can think of crappy band-aids to make it seem like mob grinding has this great purpose but that's just talk. But obviously if the gameworld sucks and the devs don't give a damn about it and the lore there won't be any good stuff in the quests either. They will be poorly written and contain no valuable story tidbits to the player. The dev must have his priorities set straight first before quest based grinding can truly blossom. Though even then the critics and the players can trash on the game by simply assuming that it contains no good writing and script (e.g. what happened with FFXIV:ARR).
A massive fallacy in your argument is that *you* get to decide what to kill and where. Unless the monsters are carbon copies of one another, meaning there are no differences among them, the community will find the best spots to mob grind and that's where you will go. Especially if there is any type of grouping involved.
Unless you want to artificially slow down the grind just for yourself. Said no MMO player ever.
This has been proven time and time again. A massive downside to this is, of course, that the devs have no control over what the playerbase ends up doing. They can guess what happens if they modify the popular monsters somehow - although the end result is yet another Monster of the Month everyone grinds 100% of the time. For a developer this is silly, because they have no control over what the players do in their game, and they have to guess all the time what might happen if they adjust a parameter. When the developer has control over their game, they can do much better things with it.
I don't know why I bothered to even make this post. You people are hopeless. I hope y'all don't become too cynical in your quest for the return of the poopy MMO game design.
if my opinion counts i would say that Quests have to exist in order to support the lore, the history of the world, which the player is going to habitat ...
grinding mobs i can only imagine it would work better if the mobs are offering something special, f.e. if you want to make a special leather armor with critical dmg you had to get leather from wolfs etc, like a mechanic to drive the economy and the daily relaxing.
in my personal taste i prefer for a daily to log in and go hunt 50 bears than hunt for quests, read texts etc, i want just to relax something easy going.. on the other side if you want a weapon with the name of the great pirate captain Hanckok, it will be bad this would demand you to grind 1000 pirates, but a quest for you and your friends to find the hidden pirate ship and kill the awesome uber skilled ghost of Hanckok and his minions ...once you have done it you can go there again to farm pirate minions just for their golden teeth. Thats my fantasies about a balanced quest and mob grind ... I loved the days back in Lineage ][, were we had to grind for coal, it was funny, but when the grind reached lvls of no life it become disgusting ...
cheers
I have a few issues with what you said.
First mob grinding is not something you have to do. You could level up by exploring different dungeons or different areas. People just did mob grinding because it was the safe thing to do. Some people actually enjoyed it to an extent because you weren't forced into following a predetermined path.
The holy trinity combat style seems not very complex to you, but you seem to think combat in this day and age is complex? You can basically solo any mob pre endgame without much regard for strategy of any kind.
To me the quest line games are even worse then grinding mobs. You follow little markers on the map around without any thought required. You do this until you are max level then you grind raids or PvP. At least with mob grinding and holy trinity there was some measure of thought required on your part in terms of where to go, what you needed to do in combat, and how to achieve these goals.
My own view is i like a mixture too many endless quests gets dull as does sitting grinding mobs.
I like games where I can level in a variety of ways eg pvp, crafting , dungeons aswell as quests and mobs.
One thing i dont like however is too much quest text, ive recently been playing some ESO and theres so much quest text i that game , i just end up clicking through it as fast as i can.
Oh .. i have fun "grinding mob" the diablo way. But note that
a) it is not static spawn
b) there are min-bosses from time to time
c) you grind bounties, not mobs ... which can be thought of as quests without the annoying, irrelevant quest text (and no fed-ex quests).
I think that quest grinding can be considered worse than mob grinding. Quest grind basically locks in the kind of rewards you get, and essentially puts you on rails. You get fed bits of story as it unfolds - worse yet, character story, proclaiming YOU the savior of the world, next to the thousands of other people who are also the sole savior - and you have no control with how you handle a situation. If it means kill 10 rats for gold, you better kill those 10 rats or the chain won't advance.
Meanwhile grinding mobs, you can choose what to kill based on what it drops - which can tie in very nicely into a player-driven economy - and the world story and lore can be told to you by what actually happens in world, not what some NPC spouts at you as an excuse to kill 10 rats, which often sounds forced anyways. That way, you can experience the world as you immerse in it, and if the game is truly freeform - sandbox style - you can perhaps even make up your own story in it. Granted there isn't much in the way of those sandbox games on the market, but some games might eventually cover that sector. Archeage probably wont, it looks to be a thinly veiled themepark that also seems to turn p2w and has a horrible concept of lore integrity with its user addded content, ESO is a shameless, narrow themepark with barely any freedom at all. EQN i have no idea, i know next to nothing about the game. Trials of ascension at lesat has some very promising dynamic world stuff going, which might have lots of potential. Black desert, well, maybe, but I'm leery of anything that comes off the eastern market, where P2W is such an accepted business model. And you can't really do player driven economy with P2W
Thats true what youre saying but all in one, its grinding. And actually the whole content is based on that grind. Imagine people would only play the story mode of d3. 59 dollar for 3 hours
Maybeyou but I think most players are pushed in this direction to hit max level. Its how MMORPG's are designed.
I really don't get it. Questing is anti-social, has very little to no replayability, requires no skill/thought/knowledge of the world, requires a huge budget etc. I can understand questing in single player RPGs but it has no place in MMOs.
On the other hand I remember leveling over 30 characters to max level in DAoC (an MMO which didn't have quests). You had to find a group, then go out into the world and find a good spot to camp. It was social (made a ton of friends, had some great discussions etc.), very replayable (since every time you grouped up with different people/classes and camped different spots), and I'm sure it took a lot less effort and money to create compared to quests from level 1 to 50. Also, unlike questing, it was very challenging to find the correct group composition, it required knowledge of the world to find the correct camp, it required skill to maximize exp gain while and minimize wipes (CC was very important). All around it was a lot more interesting/fun. I don't understand why no MMO tried to copy it.
DAoC - Excalibur & Camlann
I remember back when all there really was, was mob grinding... looking back, I think I liked it better. You would find a group, stake out a spot, and commence to laying waste to everything in the area. Chatting, socializing... having a good time while passing the time.
It's different now.
I got your Deliverance!
Where's my banjo?!!
I've been playing Neverwinter recently. And, I have to say... I like the way they are handling it.
It has it's fair share of kill&collect questing. But, they constantly change the exact way in which you are doing it and add in a lot of little side objectives like burning stockpiles. And, just when I feel the need for a change of pace, bam! escort quest. It also pushes me into new areas just at the right time (right when i feel like I am beggining to know an area like the back of my hand and like all the monsters are starting to get to easy). It's all very well... timed I want to say. I have not really felt the repetitiveness as I do things even though it's clearly there.
Still...at the end of the day. I wish more games did questing like Runescape. A game for which the questing in it has become my yard stick for judging how good questing is in other games.
Yes, but grinding is fun if done right (as in D3). Obviously it is .. otherwise people won't be dumping hundred of hours into it.
And the point is that D3 is grinding done right .. old MMO .. not so much.
Why is it so hard to get? MMO devs want some of the SP games audience. Many players don't want to socialize, nor replay the same story.
It is really a question of economics ... and given how much the MMO market has grown, whatever devs are doing is working. Heck, even TOR, which is a primarily SP game in the guise of a MMO, makes more than $200M in 2013.
Some start telling mob grind is worse than quest grind because the grind in old game are heavy.
And i have to agree that the old game's grind are too heavy ... it worse.
But i hope you face the true , the quest grind MMORPGs nowadays give you more XP and require less XP to level up than old games.
It mean the "mob grind is hard labor" aren't true , you feel it worse because the old game abuse the system.
If you tell me go back to the heavy grind day , i refuse .
But if the grind pace are standard nowadays game then i greatly accept .
The feel that mob grind are heavy normally because quest give large XP reward bonus , if you take away the XP reward bonus and give back those XP to mobs then you will see the difference .
The mob grind pace will be same with quests grind ,
and quests still here for you to do
So i ready don't see why you have to complaint when other player get another option to chose lol.
As you don't care about other and don't want to depend on other player to have fun aka "i want to play alone",
the quests still out here for you to do ,
they don't disappear and you don't need to join with other to grind if you don't want
See ?
i don't understand why you complaint when you get all the candy you want.
The more options we have , the better the game is,
mob grinding is horrible IMO, but when quests are poorly created to be just fillers and just keep sending people to mob grind over and over without meaningful Lore behind the quest and the mob that need to die, and having a real outcome then im out.
Questing should never be a filler thing. Quests are the way for devs to tell the story of the game. Killing 10 rats and collecting 10 bear asses 2345235423 times a day has nothing to do with the story of the game and it jsut makes the game feel cheap and poorly designed.
Every new mmo that comes out seem to completely ignore that and therefore all of them feel exactly the same (like a wow clone). Questing is 90% of PvE themepark mmos, if not more. That is where devs must innovate and break the cycle or their mmos will feel the same and this is not 2004 anymore. (Wildstar im looking at you).
That is what most of us want to say.
People want to break the quest as soon as possible because they want to level up , and the XP reward from quest are huge.
The the developer then add GPS on the quests to "help" player finish the quests faster .
It make everything about questing become worse.
Without XP reward , the quests still here , it just not the most effect way to level up ,
and people have more chose.
We all want something better , and get more options to chose always better than get only one option forced on you.
I prefer MOB Grinding, with some meaningful epic quests here and there.
btw Is there a decent modern MOBginding game out there?
The problem with quest grinding is it encourages solo play because because you are not likely to find someone else on the exact same stage of the questgrind as you. With mob grinding, a certain mob is usually good for several levels. In the old days the leveling experience of mmos was mostly a group experience. And you could come, join a group, stay there a while, then go and find a replacement. The group stayed in teh area and players joined and left as they needed. The result was you met a lot of people, and got used to playing with others in group mechanics in that game.
Now all the leveling process teaches you is how to solo, and there is no encouragement to interact with other players because its more of a hassle and less efficient than just soloing your quests to level. Quests in this way are a big factor in how mmos have become much more anti social in the last 10 years.
When a younger generation mmo player hears people talking of dropping all these quests the idea that comes to their head is solo mob grinding like they would in the games they are familiar with. Those games were never designed for mob grinding so of course what they imagine, solo mob grinding in those games, sounds horrible and they become resistant to the idea of dropping quests. Thus the problem arises, nobody wants to make a good group grinding game because people who dont even really have experience doing that oppose it.
I don't think random encounter are good in MMORPGs ,
it work well on turn base or instanced battle in single player game but it again the natural of multiplayer so we can't hope it work well.
Possible have mobs guard the way through city to city , but you need to sacrifice the freedom to move around . The roads design need to be like dungeon so player can't strip the encounter
Though random encounters wasn't nice idea for MMORPG , random spawn do work on same mechanic
I think random spawn will work , it keep player moving around the world to hunt the mobs , pretty much nice way to break the "stay in one place" grind.
But it hard to test if the idea work or not .
Though i like the idea of random spawn , monster don't wait in one place for you to kill them , you have to find them.
I agree with you, but part of the mechanics could be implemented.
You could have it so that health and magic will not regenerate naturally over time. This will require you to come back to town and rest at an inn or make a camp of some sort.
This would mean that you would have to plan your trips carefully and couldn't just sit and camp mobs. You would have to periodically leave to go back to town and rest or gather the necessary tools to build a camp.
Yes, great one .. Diablo 3.
You earn bounties by hunting different mobs. No lore, no quests as excuse to kill stuff. Just rewards, and challenging fun combat (if you so choose to).