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What exactly is the point of gear grind?
Yamota
Member UncommonPosts: 6,593
I have been playing TERA for the last couple of months and although it has been fun leveling up to the cap, I have to now choose either between ranked PvP, which is like League of Legends MOBA type battles but much, much worse, or get into the gear treadmill.
As MOBA type PvP is far more fun than TERA arena PvP I choose to do the gear grind. But as I was doing it, I was thinking what is the point?
You grind for gear so you can grind for higher level of gear and then stop until they release even higher level of dungeons and gears. I mean it is fun to do the dungeons for the first 10 times but after 50 times, it gets really boring and repetetive.
Now I would understand if there was some conquest type PvP where you needed high level gear, and there is something like that called alliance PvP, but it is all pointless as nothing is really permanent and it is just another end-game grind for PvP gear.
So I am not sure I get it, is this gear grind really fun to people?
Comments
I think gear grind works well in dungeon crawlers. If each monster drops a slightly better weapon than what you have at the moment, it can be a really fun mechanic.
If I think about Diablo or Titan Quest, it still is fun even when the upgrade drops only every 10-20 minutes or so. Then every hour or two, you get a significant upgrade in the form of an epic/legendary weapon - whatever you want to call it.
If you look back at your 2-3 hour play session, you have one or two big rewards, plus you were being rewarded every 15 minutes in form of smaller upgrades.
Now, where MMOs go completely wrong is the balancing. If you reach high-level content and it takes you days, weeks or even months to get an upgrade, who the hell would enjoy that. If I played Diablo for 3 weeks to get nothing but trash gear in hope of getting a slightly better weapon, it would easily be the worst game ever - and noone would bother playing.
Many devs are quite short sighted I guess - they simply adopt a system without even thinking how it originated and how it makes the game fun.
There is a big difference between playing a dungeon 30 times to get a bit better weapon each time, in contrast to playing a dungeon 29 times getting nothing and then getting a much better weapon on your 30th run.
Maze.....Rat.....Cheese.....
Leave it to yall to put where you fit on that . But that IS the point.
doubt the gear grind ever were fun to anyone, it is just the replacement for the old methods, so since the developers still want a chance to get their money back, they make you repeat the same instances over and over...
what the gear grind does is making "base gear" easy to gain for anyone.....and developers are happy, since they wont have to make any depth to their game.
well did enjoy playing a ratonga...but would point out, that Id be the one killing rats to get that cheese out of it
To progress your character. The more you upgrade your gear, the more powerful your character becomes. It's been this way in RPGs since the advent of Dungeons and Dragons.
Not that difficult of a concept to grasp.
As for your last question...yes, I do find it fun, as long as the game itself is enjoyable.
Five years ago you had to improve your gear in order to progress in a game and see content a game had to offer, and that was the best reward you can imagine while playing a computer game.
Nowdays, the philosophy in game design has changed, and everyone is entitled to experience everything in a game. In most new MMOs your gear makes no difference for your performance in gameplay, which means the grind has no point, really.
Sadly, people will collect tokens, gather herbs, hunt for achievements, and other mindless tasks if a game tells them to do so, even if it wasn't required to see new content. It really is pointless in this case.
But if mobs are too tough and deal lots of damage, and they happen to block your entry to new area you haven't seen before, a player starts to find solutions for the problem, and start to grind for better gear to finally see what the last boss of this new are looks like.
It's a shame we have to even ask this question today. MMOs surely have devolved a lot from what they once were.
Gear grind never keeps me in a game. That said..
Because the CARROT! You have a carrot but your carrot is small and that carrot over there is much BIGGER! But once you have carrot there is another carrot just over yon hill that is even BIGGGGGER! So on and on and on.
Depends. For some, gear grinding and most of the "go do this then rinse and repeat daily" stuff is just boring after you have done it a certain number of times. For me, I find my threshold to be about three times before I am just done with that sort of activity. And it is not just gear grind. Most MMO pvp at the "end game" gets so repetitive that my eyes glaze over once I have done all the arenas and game types just once. So, for me, when I get to this point it is not end game but END OF GAME.
The only reason that any of those activities are put into MMO's is to try to keep people subscribed or buying from the cash shop. If people leave their game, they no longer make money. So as long as they can convience people that the boring end game stuff is "fun", people will mindlessly stay and pay.
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There is barely any grind in FPS/RTS/MOBA games, why do you think its necessary in MMOs?
Obviously I understand the concept but I was asking if it is fun?
Like I said, doing the same instance 10 times might be fun. But 20? 30? 100?
Right now there is some PvP gear which gives some sort of credit and if you have a certain amount you can get some PvP gear. How many times do you need to run PvP instances to get those? It depends on how much you win but in overall it takes about a 4-500 times to get enough credits to get only ONE PvP gear item.
Imagine that, running PvP battle grounds (of which there are only 3-4 different) 500 times just for one piece. I can't believe that this is fun in any way or form.
League of Legends 500 times, yeah sure I have probably done that. But TERA's PvP is nowhere near as interesting as a proper MOBA. And imagine doing the same thing against PvE mobs, which are predictable, I would go crazy.
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That's what I don't understand either. I like working towards a goal in MMOs especially in sandbox MMOs where I can set my own goal since I can do just about anything. But i don't get the traditional MMO where the goal is literally to acquire gear and the real fun doesn't really start until you've acquired the gear which can take months. Then when you get the gear it's only for a short time you get to use it before everything resets.
Check out this article on Why Crafting Sucks
In terms of improving the game, there is no point and never has been.
In terms of functionality, gear grinds forcibly expand the value of content by slowing the rate at which it can be experienced. In other words, it helps the developers to somewhat keep up with the rate at which content is consumed.
Sure there is, you're grinding the same maps and battles over and over again. It's no different than grinding dungeons or daily quests in an mmo.
Ideally new gear opens up new options for playstyles by making a different spell/specc viable, variation is necessary or players will get bored. Since MMO devs can't create content fast enough the variation comes from gear instead, that's how I view it atleast.
If players could create dungeons/content themselves then maybe gear grind wouldn't be necessary for variation, that would be my ideal MMO.
gives you something to look forward to and achieve. people like to get stuff for doing stuff. i know all the sandbox players will be dry heaving because of that statement but most people like the gear grind, they like upgrading their gear on a consistent basis and like the feeling when THAT piece of gear they have been grinding for finally drops.
or you can play a game like archeage where i never saw a piece of gear drop from level 13 on (besides quest gear). Only to have people justify it as "its a crafting game the best gear is bought having drops would ruin the economy ... go back to wow if you want drops"
guess what ... i did "go back" to WoW(i say go back but the reality is i was never there in the first place i was more of an EQ2 guy) and im having much more fun. it feels like an MMO version of Diablo or Path of Exile. run dungeons collect loot run harder dungeons collect better loot for harder dungeons.
So i may be a rat in a maze but god damn am i having fun getting all that cheese!
I like the "Maze - rat - cheese" comparison.
In the end it's to keep you occupied. Do the even more complex things. In the meantime you can do other stuff if you don't only want to raid (gear-grind).
I realized (again...) after latest Wow expansion how fast the gear becomes obsolete with new level expansions. Sucks. But that's MMO reality. Personally I don't mind too much though since I don't have much time and thus can't and won't raid more than the WoW - Raid Finder. All the hobbies and alt-levelling upon that, and that's end-game for me. And if I get bored - I pause and play single player games.
One is like "really? wow! Dragon Age 3 has 120-200 h story line alone?" - so? As MMO player that is minimum.
Just blabbering...
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Kind of depends on the type of game we're talking about.
In a PvE game it's pretty much as someone else said, going for the carrot, then an even bigger carrot after that. It's that artificial feeling of power and number inflation. You upgrade, and sure you can kill lower level stuff / content even easier now, but the stuff you just got is actually designed for higher content and when you go do that content you're still the same in overall power vs the content as you were in the previous set of gear and dungeons / raids. Sadly, this seems to make millions of people feel better and we get mostly nothing but gear grinds over and over again instead of actually introducing content of truly increased difficulty (more challenging AI, more RNG rather than a static dance that everyone knows the steps to, etc) that requires players to become better rather than just meeting some arbitrary number / stat that determines the outcome.
When it comes to PvP games though, that is often a grind to become the strongest player. In gear based PvP games (games like WoW, Rift, etc) having the top end pvp gear gives you a massive advantage over someone in weaker gear, allowing you to take on more and more enemies at a time purely due to dishing out more damage, taking less damage, healing for more, etc. Often in these kinds of games you run into a case of whoever has the highest gear possible are the "best" PvPers, when in reality it's simply them having much higher stats, not actually being the best at PvP. Not that everyone in good gear is automatically bad, just that most of the time the gear is earned simply through investing the time to grind enough currency for the gear, or finding ways to abuse the PvP mechanics to get yourself easy gear (trading kills with alts for example). So yeah, you may have been a great pvper to earn that gear, but the simple fact that you have the gear doesnt mean shit unless you actually put it to use against people in equal gear. Much of the time in games with this type of setup you'll see the braggarts in top end gear early in the game acting like they are the gods of PvP because they managed to abuse some mechanic and get the gear quickly. Then a few months later when everyone else is running around in that same gear they are suddenly nowhere to be found or are always coming up with excuses to dodge fights.
On the other hand you have more skill based games like Darkfall where gear is only a minor factor and unless you have good twitch skills you can buy all the fancy gear you want, but you're still going to lose it 5 minutes later to some naked guy with starter weapons who outplays the shit out of you and takes your full gear bag. Now if you're a very skilled player who also has the advantage of great gear, you tend become the source of much raging in global chat. Unfortunately though even this game instead of actually proving you're the best in a game which actually does require some player skill rather than gear, people spend more time shit talking in chat while coming up with excuses for not wanting to fight anyone (oh thats too far, oh i dont have time, you're a bitch so i wont fight you) than they do actually PvPing.
I bet you dont believe in what you say, and you are just trolling for sake of trolling.
I'm trolling because I said that FPS and MOBA's have repetitive/grindy gameplay? Wtf are you talking about? A grind is a grind. FPS's are some of the most repetitive games out there, you literally play the same handful of maps over and over again, doing the same thing. Especially since they added leveling and perks to games like CoD. I see no difference between running 5 different heroic dungeons over and over in an mmo, and playing team deathmatch on 5 different maps in an FPS over and over.
It was back in vanilla WOW, right before the BC launch that I realized what the impact of the Gear grind was and I thought, what's the point.
Previously MMO's I played to that point had gear upgrades, but not the true grind that I first saw in WOW.
Since then I've run into it countless times, and when that's the endgame, it's time for me to end playing the game, I just won't do it anymore.
Guess I'll be staying in EVE indefinitely unless someone one day designs some MMO's that move away from traditional theme park gear grinds.
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I agree with most of your points, but wanted to highlight that there is a difference between a MMO and a PC game and you should not conflate the two. One is meant to be (for lack of a better term) infinite and the other is finite.
In an MMO I believe it should take you months to progress (not just a specific upgrade) - because the whole point is to interact with a virtual world. That concept has been effectively lost and MMOs have been reduced to arcade like achievements (where everyone wants them as fast as possible). No one is trying to live in the world. They are trying to get to the 'end'.
The second problem is that developers don't (care) to create the necessary systems to support players at end game. They dont take advantage of the world that they create. So players consume the linear content then get bored because there is nothing else to do in the world except gear grind. That becomes boring in any context.
Developers are using gear grind AS end game instead of a PART of it.
Thats a problem, especially for an MMO.