Most satisfying grinding ever?

sunandshadow

A lot of people complain about grinding, because when it's bad, it's torture.  But a lot of people also quietly and happily produce dozens of max-level Pokemon or max out some crafting skill and become a gear-factory for a clan or a whole server, or maxing out all the playable characters in some JRPG like a final fantasy, or maybe minecraft or terraria or farmville or harvest moon or monster rancher or digimon...  So I'd like to know, what was the best, most satisfying grinding you've ever done?

st4t1ck

I really dont call it grinding but i know it fits most peoples definition, but for me it was FFXI,    Finding camping spots and spending time talking and fighting together with others was the most fun "Grinding" i had.   Met so many people and actually cared what people thought of me.  People became famous and infamous in there own right

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lilreap2k3

NexusTK, Rose Online, Ragnarok Online

GladDog

Grinding in City of Heroes was thrilling, especially for a tank!  Before Issue 5, the only limit to how many bad guys you could agro was the screen graphics, which was 119.  Beyond that, any other bad guys that entered the screen released already agro'd bad guys.

Two incidents:  First, I was helping some friends level up on my 25 invul tanker.  One of them was a fire tank, and I was showing him how to be a Burn tanker.  So he was gathering about 6-8 mobs and Burning them down, mostly minions.  After watching for a few minutes, I said, "Wait here."  I went out and agro'd about 80 Freakshow and pulled them into the room.  The girl on our team playing an emp healer screamed on voicecomm when she saw the group!  I then called the Burn tanker over, centered the mob on him and held agro.  He burned them to cinders in about 3 minutes.  That was exhilarating!  And my fire tank friend was absolutely hooked!

Next, same invul tanker, but at level 28.  I was bored, so I went into Perez Park and started jogging around, agro'ing everything I saw, mostly they were level 7-10.  before long I had the limit of 119, and I went to a large parking lot and called on zone chat, "FREE XP!  COME KILL THE MOBS, THEY WON'T ATTACK YOU!"  Next thing you know, a team of startups shows up and starts cautiously firing into the group.  Once they realized I had unbreakable agro, they let loose with abandon!  They started leveling like popcorn on the stovetop, and I never lost agro on a single one of them.  Each of them gained about 4 levels in less than 10 minutes.  Since I did not do any damage, I was not reducing their XP gain.

Incidents like this were thrilling!  Even after they fixed the taunt limit, bringing it down to 17, and fixed invuls so they weren't, you know, invulnerable, there still plenty of fun and hijinx with grinding.  Even after playing 8 years, I still had fun with the grind...

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Viper482

EQ. Wasn't called grinding back then, it was called playing the game.

st4t1ck

Viper482 said:

EQ. Wasn't called grinding back then, it was called playing the game.

I agree, we played. That was it, no qualifying, just a lot of fun.  

ShrikeArghast

Ragnarok Online, simply because it was utterly mindless. By contrast, I find grinding in, say, BDO, absolutely atrocious because of the high level of micromanagement involved just to stay alive.

cameltosis

If something is a grind, it can't be satisfying to do the grind itself (a fun grind is just playing the game) so I'm assuming we're talking about grinds that, whilst we may not have enjoyed them, were worth it in the end due to the payout?

There aren't many really. 

I was really pleased when I finished leveling in SW:TOR. I played from launch, hit cap about 3 weeks later but man, what a boring 3 weeks! leveling in swtor was a chore - trivially easy content, boring classes and generic af storylines. Hitting cap was such a relief, I could focus on what I actually enjoyed - raiding and pvp. Sadly, we'd cleared all the raids on hardmode by week 6 so the fun didn't last long, but I was still really happy to have finished the leveling grind. 

Lotro - Barad Gulder (12 man raid). This was such a weird raid. Only 3 bosses and limited trash, but quite hard trash. For example, from entrance to 1st boss was a never ending stream of trash with no breaks. With a combat system that includes heavy resource management, this was hard! Each boss had a HM version which unlocked second piece of gear. Killing the final boss on HM was a massive grind. Complicated tactics, long ass fight, little room for mistakes....took us ages to master it so felt like a massive grind, but we were very happy when we finally did it!

Sovrath

Lineage 2, Tera and I'm enjoying myself in Black Desert.

Sid_Vicious

Having all crafter types in Vanguard to build twinks was fun... took a long time but I enjoyed it

Loke666

Anything satisfying just ain't grinding no matter how repetetive.

Grinding (video gaming), repetitive and uninteresting gameplay (from wikipedia).

If you are doing something you already done before and it bores you then you have a grind, repetetive content can be very different  (Tetris is still popular even though the content is the same and have been since the game was made in the late 60s (yeah, it is ancient), if it would have been a grind no-one would have bothered playing it for more then 5 minutes.

Phaserlight

Vendetta Online; it has the best grinding. I just find it very relaxing, meditative, even.  I'll often listen to music or lectures when I grind.  The 3d, floating-ness in space helps.

LacedOpium

CoH.

The combat in CoH was just over the top fun.  It was visually and aesthetically pleasing. It was equally rewarding whether in solo mode or group.  It had a large variety of dungeons to engage in, but it was also just as fun to simply fly around the cities and fight random mobs. The quests were action packed and cool.  A huge variety in character skill builds and customization.  It was challenging, yet thrilling, due to a very unforgiving death penalty making death meaningful.  It was just an overall great fun game from level one to top level.  A cool game that minimized the "grind" effect because the combat and world settings were, pure and simple, just fun packed.  

killion81

I enjoyed killing Winterfall furbolgs for hours in Vanilla WoW. I guess it was technically a reputation grind, but even after I maxed out rep, I still went back to kill them for fun. Also, back when all buffs stacked, it was always fun to bring stacks of Winterfall Firewater to raids for the melee DPS.

SEANMCAD

Farming Simulator mowing grass.

true story..

after that really isnt a grind but I have done it so many times its so natural its like doing something fairly involved and meditating at the same time and that is.....

The first 2 nights or so in 7 days to die. 

Amathe

Xp groups in EQ1. Places like Crystal Caverns. 

Myrdynn

Asheron's Call easily, first was Black Death Lair, and Valley of Death

LIOKI

Diablo

Warlyx

i agree with the ppl that said COH , is a game that i never got bored of creating a char and grind some levels trying new builds , and powersets

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Octagon7711

SWG was the most fun I had grinding in Tuskan Village.  Got to know and have fun with a lot of players there.  L2 was a lot of fun.

Why do Devs nerfs grinding stops, people enjoy it which is the point of the game.  So they level faster then questing, that says something about the design of quests.  It also says something about the fight to maintain time sinks.

Strizzy12

City of Heroes

DrDread74

The funny thing, there are plenty of games where "grinding" is the entire game. Like Diablo, or Gauntlet, any kind of shooter game is essentially killing stuff endlessly and leveling up through it. I think the MMOs problem is that they can't seem to capture that kind of fun when it comes to endlessly killing stuff. Perhaps all the other "MMO Stuff" is actually getting in the way.

Ideally killing monsters would the thing you WANT to do in the MMO because its fun, and the crafting is something you want to do regardless of what you get out of it because its fun also. MMOs never seem to focus on the playability of what you are actually DOING in the MMO and instead dump all the money and effort into features

ARSoulSin

That's a hard question.

In a general way, the best grindings are the most mindless.
After all if you are going to stop in the same map to kill mobs in thousands, the better is that the simpler, the better.

Most MMos nowadays add a lot of action to PvE that sometimes can get on the way.
It's not like its bad, its just that staying "focused" and "grinding" don't marry well.