You're not addressing what I am stating. You have admitted before that players would choose to grind mobs if it was the fast way to level. VAST majority of quest are just organized killing. Text does not make killing any less tedious. What makes it less tedious was that more experience is gained. Previously you would have to grind billion MOBS to level. Then the put in quest that controlled the pace at which you level.
No, they quit when they run out of content. Most quest involve the two things you said players hate which is running and killing. Run and delivery and run and kill/retrieve quest are the greatest number in MMORPG.
No, people generally killed at places they liked the best and stuck to it unless they need something for an item or an item itself or solo vs. grouping. Maybe their class had an advantage. But the point your missing is that you could have the same amount of killing. How many unique mobs do you fight in each MMORPG? Most are just reskinned so your still killing the same NPCS over and over. Except you don't have much option outside of the quest.
A grind is a grind. 50 shades of killing is still killing. Again, most quest are not special. A large majority are simple task involving killing, delivery or retrieving. Text does not make a kill quest different. Its not a bad thing because it what players like the most I content.
You're ignoring the fact that many players skip the world with queues for dungeons, overleveling experience, potions/rest and other things that an average player will spend a little while leveling and quit or spend the vast majority of their game in the same end game areas. World content(the world itself) shouldn't be one shot. Look at Skyrim. You revisit the same towns and areas but quest may lead you to a sewer or you need to talk to an NPC there.
But you're not addressing how seeing the same end game zones is better than seeing a variety of zones unplayed through a mature servers world. I think developers disagree which is why we have deleveling becoming more popular.
Again, you're making your own conclusion and arguing it as fact. Zelda is a debated as RPG, action rpg or action adventure. And the context I was bring was that we had games where you had locked content and open free world all at the same time. Not Zelda the game itself. This is why Skyrim is popular because its free form. It still has levels but has level scaling making all content relevant. You can't scale to one character in MMORPG though.
You describe quests as tedious. I'm describing things in objective terms, pointing out that with grind-based you experience objectively less variety. Most quests being kill quests doesn't change that, because they ask you to go different places to kill different mobs. Variety.
Designers always controlled the rate you level. That's not really relevant here, we're just discussing how much variety they require of players (and as we've covered many times: without requiring variety players will choose repetition, and when a game is repetitive players players will then choose a different game.)
Er, right players will quit when they run out of content. That's true. Contrast with a grind-based game where they'll quit much earlier than that because they're bored of the excessive repetition.
The point you're missing is that grind isn't just about the time something takes. "The same amount of killing" is irrelevant. The amount of variety to that killing is what matters. (And also the fact that in a quest-based game you're going to be doing a lot more non-killing things.) Don't you see that it's objectively shallower to have a game where you just pick the mob types your class kills best and only kill those mobs, than a game where you're forced to continually adapt to a variety of situations?
50 shades of killing is variety. Variety makes things less grindy. Again, "grind" is a poor variety / time ratio. (Which is why grind isn't just about the time something takes.) Players hate grind, and they enjoy variety. These are not complicated concepts to understand, why are you acting as though excessive repetition is what players want? Surely you don't actually believe that.
Why do you feel things like rested XP even matter? It's most important for a player's first character to have a satisfying, varied questing experience. But it's still beneficial if he misses some things and there is still even more variety to experience on subsequent characters. It's not as important, but it's still valuable.
As for Skyrim, I quit the game after doing ~85% of the game's static content (though the bigger factor was that stealth had utterly broken the game's challenge at that point.) Any repeat visits to the same towns you'd been to before were more or less the same as you'd experience in any quest-based MMORPG. (I was sent back to Orgrimmar for a quest for like the 200th time today.) After I fully completed the dungeons in one area of Skyrim I did not return to those areas because there was no reason to return. So the way you're describing Skyrim isn't really different from quest-based games; in fact their content is generally set up so you can't just sit in an area and grind to advance (which goes back to the "a quest by any other name is still a quest" point I made in the post before this one.)
You can scale to one character in a MMORPG, but if done too much it makes progression pointless. For example, my non-maxed characters can go back and do WOW's timewalking dungeons, because everyone is restored back to the appropriate level when doing them. Just like GW2's zones work. But if too much of the game works that way, it undermines the importance of progression (which isn't automatically a problem -- it was great in CoH -- but it definitely erodes some of the RPG qualities of a game.)
Questing is grinding. You havery repeated activities over and over. Gear grind is still a grind even though it's done through questing.
I find both mob grinds and quest grinds equally boring. They are repeated mechanism to have time sinks largely in useless ways because of focus on end game.
There are times I have wanted to grind mobs to level because I get tired of running stupid errands for random NPCs. The thing about people we bore of patterns. With themeparks you know the deal after 10 years. Click, accept quest and kill highlighted NPCs. The NPCs with different skins and models all are pretty much the same.
Now if the NPCs had quirkiness and quest were generally of a some sort of story or action and not generic NPCs standing around it might be different.
Questing is grinding. You havery repeated activities over and over. Gear grind is still a grind even though it's done through questing.
I find both mob grinds and quest grinds equally boring. They are repeated mechanism to have time sinks largely in useless ways because of focus on end game.
There are times I have wanted to grind mobs to level because I get tired of running stupid errands for random NPCs. The thing about people we bore of patterns. With themeparks you know the deal after 10 years. Click, accept quest and kill highlighted NPCs. The NPCs with different skins and models all are pretty much the same.
Now if the NPCs had quirkiness and quest were generally of a some sort of story or action and not generic NPCs standing around it might be different.
You don't have issue with quests in general, you have issue with quests done badly. Everyone agrees that bad quests are bad.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
I'm describing things in objective terms, pointing out that with grind-based you experience objectively less variety.
You really need to learn the difference between your opinion and objective reality.
Same as always, the actual truth to the matter is simply that questing incentivizes multiple activities and then forces players to gravitate to that activity through those incentives. A quest-based system is not the only way to do that and it's far from the perfect implementation so far.
To disprove your entire dialogue in one go I'll simply suggest a different mechanic where activities have a bonus XP/reward window when you do them for a while that eventually decays, prompting players to switch activities every so often to get the bonus XP/rewards and let the previous activity refresh so as to maximize gains and force a variety of activities.
Suddenly, players have the option of variety and it's actually of benefit to seek it out, but they are in no way strictly held to doing a finite set of tasks over and over in a sequence without any personal say or interest.
Quests themselves do nothing for variety except act as a framework to slot things into. It is more specifically a guide to lead people through things, and in many ways does in fact force a very narrow user-experience onto the players because they can trust every time the go to that zone or run through the content again on a new char, they are going to experience the exact same thing.
It very simply doesn't have to be that way, and even talking about within the questing mechanic it doesn't have to be so narrowly structured or grind-focused as it presently is.
The point you're missing is that swapping the face on the same activity doesn't change that you are still doing the exact same thing. The reality is that most mobs even in WoW do not change the standard rotation of combat or otherwise. Killing 15 mobs in one quest and killing 15 mobs in another quest in general plays no different, even if the mobs have a different model. "Adapting to the mobs" is such a rare occasion that only really comes up against elite mobs and bosses that to bring up it as an example of variety is laughable. You're still gonna press the same sequence of buttons you're accustomed to pressing and they're still gonna die. That itself is the reason it is such a massive grind.
"The above explanation is logical."
Any man who must say I am the king is no true king. If your comments are logical then state them and let their logic prove itself. Calling illogical dialogue logical, does not make it so.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Players en masse adopt the path of least resistance, whatever the devs provide.
If you make that path Questing, they'll run quests. If you make it grinding, they'll grind. If you make group content the most rewarding, all but the most asocial will turn to group content.
Personally, I always found world domination via market manipulation to be the least resistant path.
Some nerds like crafting. It rarely pays, because open-ended economies and game balance can't ever allow crafting to pay.
Some nerds like gathering. Efficient puppets, thanks ya'll.
Some nerds like "dailies." Welfare for the masses, and nearly the least efficient route to MMO wealth, right behind "farming."
But at any time, whenever the devs tinker with the status quo, if the balance shifts to an easier path, the herd will stampede to it, and the people already controlling the wealth will arrive there first.
Questing is grinding. You havery repeated activities over and over. Gear grind is still a grind even though it's done through questing.
I find both mob grinds and quest grinds equally boring. They are repeated mechanism to have time sinks largely in useless ways because of focus on end game.
There are times I have wanted to grind mobs to level because I get tired of running stupid errands for random NPCs. The thing about people we bore of patterns. With themeparks you know the deal after 10 years. Click, accept quest and kill highlighted NPCs. The NPCs with different skins and models all are pretty much the same.
Now if the NPCs had quirkiness and quest were generally of a some sort of story or action and not generic NPCs standing around it might be different.
The objective truth is that quest-based games are less grindy than grind-based games.
Whether you choose to hold games to an unusually high standard and subjectively call quest-based games a grind doesn't change that unavoidable, objective truth. So when you call questing grinding it just sounds like you want to deliberately try to ignore the objective truth at hand.
Any game designed to keep players playing a long time is going to require time. If you dislike games designed this way, then MMORPGs aren't the genre for you.
If you want to play a genre designed for long-term play, you're either going to have to find a PVP genre, or a PVE genre which balances content quality vs. cost. Quests are that balance. They're not a spammed bunch of mobs just plastered across terrain for players to endlessly grind (low quality), and they're not super-high-quality AAA content (too costly). They exist in the middle. It's the highest quality content MMORPGs can afford to produce, knowing that they have to produce hundreds/thousands of hours worth of content for players.
Within the concept of "quests" obviously there's a wide range of potential quality (as we covered earlier, a game could implement quests so badly that they'd be exactly as grindy as grind-based games.) As always throughout my posts I've been assuming at least the current quality bar for quests (WOW quests). WOW quests aren't even the best quests that could exist. But whatever better content would exist, it would invariably reward the player for engaging in a variety of activities, and would not allow the player to endlessly grind against mobs because letting players do something boring will result in players choosing to bore themselves, and quitting.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
HALT!! I think quests are the worst thing ever put into mmorpgs and therefore games that require them for leveling are a grindy waste of my time (wow, eq2, etc).
I can no longer read your posts. I'm disgusted.
That's not how grind works. If a game has objectively less variety then it has objectively more grind.
It's fine if you don't like something, but that doesn't mean it's a grind. Words don't work that way.
Wrong. A bad grind vs a good grind is subjective and I can't stand quests. Bouncing from quest to quest flying though areas is an utterly boring grind that I cant stand. Stop expecting everyone to want your trash.
The objective truth is that quest-based games are less grindy than grind-based games.
Dude, if the best input you have is to troll a thread with the most inane and obvious comment, and then extend that into a bunch of irrational dialogue based on your preferences, it'd be nice if you'd at least stop using the word "objective".
Quest-based games are just as much a grind as any other type of game because of the content offered by the game and the quality of it's delivery. They're not even the highest quality of balance than can be delivered. What quests are is a mechanic that we are familiar with when implementing so that we can daisy-chain things together. It's already been shown in example how quests can be considerably improved and not take a ridiculous amount of overhead or otherwise.
All you are doing at this point is batting your opinion and claiming it's right, in spite of evidence to the contrary.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
You can scale to one character in a MMORPG, but if done too much it makes progression pointless. For example, my non-maxed characters can go back and do WOW's timewalking dungeons, because everyone is restored back to the appropriate level when doing them. Just like GW2's zones work. But if too much of the game works that way, it undermines the importance of progression (which isn't automatically a problem -- it was great in CoH -- but it definitely erodes some of the RPG qualities of a game.)
I agree with you on your conversation. Not sure why you feel content scaling erodes RPG qualities of a game though. I think zone levels are a bad thing in general.
Because he only thinks of progression as vertical progression, which when combined with the remark that "RPGs must have progression" means that to him it seems that there is less progress made by the character when they aren't numerically considerably stronger than any given zone after leveling.
It's basically just the mistake of not seeing the ways in which progression on a character can be displayed in an RPG.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Please list the kind of grinds that are "necessary" in order for games to function on a massive environment. If these grinds are poor, then how may they be changed? Realizing that a Grind is still a Grind, which kind of grind is enjoyable, and which ones are the most annoying?
None of it falls into the category of fun, or even enjoyable, they are necessary evils, ''chores" if you will that must be done to reach my goals. (just like real life I guess)
I am Phenomenal
You are willing to do chores in using an entertainment product? Why?
There is no "chores" in games to me ... if there is, i can simply move to the next game.
Actually no. After darkfall went down and dfuw was a bust I haven't found anything that grabs me. At that point I decided to look into game development and have been having a blast.
Making games is entertaining? It sounds more like work to me. But hey, good for you.
If i were you, i would just go do something else like tv, anime, novels, or just single player games.
tv is meh, can't stand anime, I read for educational purposes and single players games haven't been enjoyable since EQ.
you ever do something other than play games and complain about other people's comments?
Yes .. all of those things I named. Reading, tv, anime, single player games ... all fun to me.
And yes, posting too .. otherwise, I would not be wasting my time here.
Wrong. A bad grind vs a good grind is subjective and I can't stand quests. Bouncing from quest to quest flying though areas is an utterly boring grind that I cant stand. Stop expecting everyone to want your trash.
Whether something is more grindy is objective; it's a straightforward comparison of the gameplay variety two games have relative to the time cost of each.
Whether something is called a grind is subjective, relative to just how much variety that player demands from games (relative to the time cost.)
Games which offer a lot of variety and no repetition are just never called a "grind". Portal (the game) wasn't ever called a grind because each puzzle was different (lots of variety) and the game was short (low time cost). Lineage 2 was very repetitive (little variety) and long (high time cost) which resulted in nearly everyone calling it a grind.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I agree with you on your conversation. Not sure why you feel content scaling erodes RPG qualities of a game though. I think zone levels are a bad thing in general.
It's mostly just one more benefit progression provides, and one of the core pillars of RPGs is progression, so you have slightly less progression as you remove the benefits progression provides. It's still an RPG just a little bit less so.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
MMOs are limited to combat social exploration and crafting/trade. All combat can be seen as grindy if you want to, as it is the same combat.
Grind is pretty clearly defined in the way players use it. It's always used to describe too much repetition (meaning too little gameplay variety relative to the time requirement.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
None of it falls into the category of fun, or even enjoyable, they are necessary evils, ''chores" if you will that must be done to reach my goals. (just like real life I guess)
I am Phenomenal
You are willing to do chores in using an entertainment product? Why?
There is no "chores" in games to me ... if there is, i can simply move to the next game.
Yep there are chores in games. Some people enjoy the task and some only enjoy the end result of said taks. Some like both.
None of it falls into the category of fun, or even enjoyable, they are necessary evils, ''chores" if you will that must be done to reach my goals. (just like real life I guess)
I am Phenomenal
You are willing to do chores in using an entertainment product? Why?
There is no "chores" in games to me ... if there is, i can simply move to the next game.
Yep there are chores in games. Some people enjoy the task and some only enjoy the end result of said taks. Some like both.
It is not a "chore" to me, if I enjoy it. And why bother enduring boring, tedious task when one can simply find a game that he/she likes the gameplay?
Wrong. A bad grind vs a good grind is subjective and I can't stand quests. Bouncing from quest to quest flying though areas is an utterly boring grind that I cant stand. Stop expecting everyone to want your trash.
Whether something is more grindy is objective; it's a straightforward comparison of the gameplay variety two games have relative to the time cost of each.
Whether something is called a grind is subjective, relative to just how much variety that player demands from games (relative to the time cost.)
Games which offer a lot of variety and no repetition are just never called a "grind". Portal (the game) wasn't ever called a grind because each puzzle was different (lots of variety) and the game was short (low time cost). Lineage 2 was very repetitive (little variety) and long (high time cost) which resulted in nearly everyone calling it a grind.
I don't think variety actually changes grinding. MMORPG just tend to have grind because progression is generally done by repetition. All grinds are just a large volume of something on repeat. The most hours I put into RPG lately is my Mycareer player in NBA2k15. Playing 82 games is a grind even though every game is vastly different individually. Collectively its a grind because I must play them to gain exp for my character. Just as quest become a grind because collectively I must do them and there are too many in a single MMORPG and as a whole genre.
When quest were first introduced to the progression treadmill... they were viewed as more enjoyable because it was different from what were forced to do before and it gave better exp. Again the high exp given by quest was the biggest thing for its acceptance. You just finished a game where you had to kill 8000 NPCs to level and then you're leveling off completing a dozen or so quest. It was a welcome change.
The change was 10 years ago. Now there are just too many task over the years. Quest in MMORPG are things generally to control your time and leveling. They're open world task that just tell you to do something like kill or pick up something. They were numerous to be a timesink and grind. Many miss the aspect of a few solid quest + epic quest vs. billion task that don't serve purpose to narrative or generic. They also divide the player base. Quest were hijacked by progression.
Quest in single player used to be something to set you in the right direction to solve your journey. The journey of the quest was the gameplay not ends to a mean. Or it would set up a scripted event to push along the game story. You didn't have too many quest to go killed so many orcs and then comeback. You were told to go to dungeon x and find your uncle's sword to let you kill so and so.
The players decided they wanted to get passed these task faster. Developers started to refine/track the player world like a single player game around quest hubs. Before they were open world. Introduced numerous conveniences that added to this. Then instances and phasing that push solo play to try to get some of the single player RPG scripted events. Open world quest have generally been dumbed further to just be pure task. Developers focused the game, the world all around the end game to make up for.
The problem this creates are that quest and conveniences based around it have driven the MMO out of the RPG. Now the world and the community is secondary to the needs of the individual in a genre that doesn't do the individual well. MMORPG mechanics were crap and now are mediocre. The genre's strengths were the players interactions and online world.
It's mostly just one more benefit progression provides, and one of the core pillars of RPGs is progression, so you have slightly less progression as you remove the benefits progression provides. It's still an RPG just a little bit less so.
Yup, he made the mistake of labeling vertical progression so integral as opposed to the many alternatives that can replace it. Saw that coming, what, half a day away.
Still waiting for him to catch the irony in saying raids and repetitious quests that get shortcut to sprint to "endgame" is good yet grind is bad.
The reality very simply is that players need incentive to change tasks so that they are drawn away from overly-repetitious activities. This does not need to be quests.
As I described a while ago now, it can be as simple as making a bonus reward mechanic for the XP and loot gained from an activity that drops off over time and has to be given time to reset, so that players are pushed to cycle multiple activities for optimal play without railroading them into a specific chain of activities like quests presently do.
But it's rather obvious Axe is arguing for an opinion as usual that WoW/Blizz is great, quests are a holy grail, and anything to the contrary is obviously "objectively wrong".
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Comments
I find both mob grinds and quest grinds equally boring. They are repeated mechanism to have time sinks largely in useless ways because of focus on end game.
There are times I have wanted to grind mobs to level because I get tired of running stupid errands for random NPCs. The thing about people we bore of patterns. With themeparks you know the deal after 10 years. Click, accept quest and kill highlighted NPCs. The NPCs with different skins and models all are pretty much the same.
Now if the NPCs had quirkiness and quest were generally of a some sort of story or action and not generic NPCs standing around it might be different.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
You really need to learn the difference between your opinion and objective reality.
Same as always, the actual truth to the matter is simply that questing incentivizes multiple activities and then forces players to gravitate to that activity through those incentives. A quest-based system is not the only way to do that and it's far from the perfect implementation so far.
To disprove your entire dialogue in one go I'll simply suggest a different mechanic where activities have a bonus XP/reward window when you do them for a while that eventually decays, prompting players to switch activities every so often to get the bonus XP/rewards and let the previous activity refresh so as to maximize gains and force a variety of activities.
Suddenly, players have the option of variety and it's actually of benefit to seek it out, but they are in no way strictly held to doing a finite set of tasks over and over in a sequence without any personal say or interest.
Quests themselves do nothing for variety except act as a framework to slot things into. It is more specifically a guide to lead people through things, and in many ways does in fact force a very narrow user-experience onto the players because they can trust every time the go to that zone or run through the content again on a new char, they are going to experience the exact same thing.
It very simply doesn't have to be that way, and even talking about within the questing mechanic it doesn't have to be so narrowly structured or grind-focused as it presently is.
The point you're missing is that swapping the face on the same activity doesn't change that you are still doing the exact same thing. The reality is that most mobs even in WoW do not change the standard rotation of combat or otherwise. Killing 15 mobs in one quest and killing 15 mobs in another quest in general plays no different, even if the mobs have a different model. "Adapting to the mobs" is such a rare occasion that only really comes up against elite mobs and bosses that to bring up it as an example of variety is laughable. You're still gonna press the same sequence of buttons you're accustomed to pressing and they're still gonna die. That itself is the reason it is such a massive grind.
"The above explanation is logical."
Any man who must say I am the king is no true king. If your comments are logical then state them and let their logic prove itself. Calling illogical dialogue logical, does not make it so.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
If you make that path Questing, they'll run quests. If you make it grinding, they'll grind. If you make group content the most rewarding, all but the most asocial will turn to group content.
Personally, I always found world domination via market manipulation to be the least resistant path.
Some nerds like crafting. It rarely pays, because open-ended economies and game balance can't ever allow crafting to pay.
Some nerds like gathering. Efficient puppets, thanks ya'll.
Some nerds like "dailies." Welfare for the masses, and nearly the least efficient route to MMO wealth, right behind "farming."
But at any time, whenever the devs tinker with the status quo, if the balance shifts to an easier path, the herd will stampede to it, and the people already controlling the wealth will arrive there first.
Whether you choose to hold games to an unusually high standard and subjectively call quest-based games a grind doesn't change that unavoidable, objective truth. So when you call questing grinding it just sounds like you want to deliberately try to ignore the objective truth at hand.
Any game designed to keep players playing a long time is going to require time. If you dislike games designed this way, then MMORPGs aren't the genre for you.
If you want to play a genre designed for long-term play, you're either going to have to find a PVP genre, or a PVE genre which balances content quality vs. cost. Quests are that balance. They're not a spammed bunch of mobs just plastered across terrain for players to endlessly grind (low quality), and they're not super-high-quality AAA content (too costly). They exist in the middle. It's the highest quality content MMORPGs can afford to produce, knowing that they have to produce hundreds/thousands of hours worth of content for players.
Within the concept of "quests" obviously there's a wide range of potential quality (as we covered earlier, a game could implement quests so badly that they'd be exactly as grindy as grind-based games.) As always throughout my posts I've been assuming at least the current quality bar for quests (WOW quests). WOW quests aren't even the best quests that could exist. But whatever better content would exist, it would invariably reward the player for engaging in a variety of activities, and would not allow the player to endlessly grind against mobs because letting players do something boring will result in players choosing to bore themselves, and quitting.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Games like Rust has 300 player servers, which is on par with what many MMOs operate with, or even higher.
Not 100% sure, but I think GW2 only allows around 200 players per map.
Dude, if the best input you have is to troll a thread with the most inane and obvious comment, and then extend that into a bunch of irrational dialogue based on your preferences, it'd be nice if you'd at least stop using the word "objective".
Quest-based games are just as much a grind as any other type of game because of the content offered by the game and the quality of it's delivery. They're not even the highest quality of balance than can be delivered. What quests are is a mechanic that we are familiar with when implementing so that we can daisy-chain things together. It's already been shown in example how quests can be considerably improved and not take a ridiculous amount of overhead or otherwise.
All you are doing at this point is batting your opinion and claiming it's right, in spite of evidence to the contrary.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
It's basically just the mistake of not seeing the ways in which progression on a character can be displayed in an RPG.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Please list the kind of grinds that are "necessary" in order for games to function on a massive environment. If these grinds are poor, then how may they be changed? Realizing that a Grind is still a Grind, which kind of grind is enjoyable, and which ones are the most annoying?
There is no "chores" in games to me ... if there is, i can simply move to the next game.
And yes, posting too .. otherwise, I would not be wasting my time here.
Whether something is called a grind is subjective, relative to just how much variety that player demands from games (relative to the time cost.)
Games which offer a lot of variety and no repetition are just never called a "grind". Portal (the game) wasn't ever called a grind because each puzzle was different (lots of variety) and the game was short (low time cost). Lineage 2 was very repetitive (little variety) and long (high time cost) which resulted in nearly everyone calling it a grind.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Grind is pretty clearly defined in the way players use it. It's always used to describe too much repetition (meaning too little gameplay variety relative to the time requirement.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
you mean like in Eve where you can spend $28k to bypass 20 years worth of skill points?
I mean like Blizzard.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
I don't think variety actually changes grinding. MMORPG just tend to have grind because progression is generally done by repetition. All grinds are just a large volume of something on repeat. The most hours I put into RPG lately is my Mycareer player in NBA2k15. Playing 82 games is a grind even though every game is vastly different individually. Collectively its a grind because I must play them to gain exp for my character. Just as quest become a grind because collectively I must do them and there are too many in a single MMORPG and as a whole genre.
When quest were first introduced to the progression treadmill... they were viewed as more enjoyable because it was different from what were forced to do before and it gave better exp. Again the high exp given by quest was the biggest thing for its acceptance. You just finished a game where you had to kill 8000 NPCs to level and then you're leveling off completing a dozen or so quest. It was a welcome change.
The change was 10 years ago. Now there are just too many task over the years. Quest in MMORPG are things generally to control your time and leveling. They're open world task that just tell you to do something like kill or pick up something. They were numerous to be a timesink and grind. Many miss the aspect of a few solid quest + epic quest vs. billion task that don't serve purpose to narrative or generic. They also divide the player base. Quest were hijacked by progression.
Quest in single player used to be something to set you in the right direction to solve your journey. The journey of the quest was the gameplay not ends to a mean. Or it would set up a scripted event to push along the game story. You didn't have too many quest to go killed so many orcs and then comeback. You were told to go to dungeon x and find your uncle's sword to let you kill so and so.
The players decided they wanted to get passed these task faster. Developers started to refine/track the player world like a single player game around quest hubs. Before they were open world. Introduced numerous conveniences that added to this. Then instances and phasing that push solo play to try to get some of the single player RPG scripted events. Open world quest have generally been dumbed further to just be pure task. Developers focused the game, the world all around the end game to make up for.
The problem this creates are that quest and conveniences based around it have driven the MMO out of the RPG. Now the world and the community is secondary to the needs of the individual in a genre that doesn't do the individual well. MMORPG mechanics were crap and now are mediocre. The genre's strengths were the players interactions and online world.
Still waiting for him to catch the irony in saying raids and repetitious quests that get shortcut to sprint to "endgame" is good yet grind is bad.
The reality very simply is that players need incentive to change tasks so that they are drawn away from overly-repetitious activities. This does not need to be quests.
As I described a while ago now, it can be as simple as making a bonus reward mechanic for the XP and loot gained from an activity that drops off over time and has to be given time to reset, so that players are pushed to cycle multiple activities for optimal play without railroading them into a specific chain of activities like quests presently do.
But it's rather obvious Axe is arguing for an opinion as usual that WoW/Blizz is great, quests are a holy grail, and anything to the contrary is obviously "objectively wrong".
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin