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Grinding, what exactly does it mean?
Zorgo
Member UncommonPosts: 2,254
This term when applied to mmo's is starting to intrigue me.
When I first started using it, it was during EQ1. We referred to 'grinding' experience. It started coming about after people slowly learned that the fastest and most efficient way to gain experience was to choose a spawn area and repeat it infinately. It became like factory line xp. You stayed clear of areas with irradic spawn rates, train possibilities, slow spawns or low mob counts; essentially, you eliminated all of the difficulties the game presented to repeat actions over and over and over again.
I believe that, although it was unintended for the game to be played in such a manner; developers of eq expansions started 'building' areas for xp grinds. They adjusted development for the way people were playing the game. Other games developed after observing that this is how the open world was being utilized, and so you saw a plethora of 'grind based' games come after it.
Naturally, we started to wake up to what was going on and said, wait this is 
. Why am I paying 15 bucks a month to work in a factory?
WoW in many ways, to a lesser degree EQ2 took this out of the equation. They readjusted their games so that completing storyline quests would be the most beneficial way to quickly gain xp and gear. DDO made xp only for completing quests, eliminating traditional grind completely (and everyone hated it....a subject for another post).
As this 2nd generation of games became the standard, 'Grinding' as a term seems to have changed. Now when people refer to grinding in this typical way:
Game X is a traditional grind grind grind game; hail 'x' npc, go kill 'x' number of and/or collect 'x' number of blah blah and return to me...
Now 'grinding' refers to factory quests.
I've thought, how can you take the factory out of the quests? When you think about traditional fantasy storylines they go something like this:
Our hero falls in love with a beautiful princess who cannot marry due to evil lord badass forcing her to wed him instead. Our hero seeks out the evil lord's tower, rushes in, heroically defeats the lord's minions and then has a showdown with the lord himself.
I see no other way for this to be translated to an mmo other than:
Princess NPC gives you quest to find bad lords tower, kill 'x' number of minions, defeat boss mob (lord badass), return for reward.
Or how about: Our hero finds learns that the book of eternal magic is located in a magically sealed vault that can only be opened by gathering the super magic key shards which mysteriously got skattered throughout the known world in the last age.....
Translation: Go collect 'x' number of super magic key shards.
Sound familiar?
So what can you do? What are some creative ideas for 'rethinking' how we complete quests so that it doesn't feel like a 'grind'? Not really asking someone to 'prove me wrong'; I'd honestly like to know what people think the alternatives might be.
My other brainstorm:
Maybe people are just misusing the word grind. Any level based game with a combat mechanic that never changes from lvl 1 to the end game may inherently become repetative. There may be no other way to complete quests without having quantifiers like kill 'x' number of mobs or collect 'x' number of items. Players who play a long time will certainly develop strategies they repeat themselves from lvl 1 to the end game. They say they like mmorpg's but don't like the 'grind'. Maybe that just means, they are getting bored. They've mastered the game mechanics and so it doesn't matter what new content is thrown at them, it feels like you are playing the same game you already mastered.
Maybe we should stop using the nebulous word 'grind' in our criticisms of games but rather replace it with, 'I've figured this game out, I'm now bored with it'. Don't say 'just another grind game'. Say, 'Game mechanics are easily mastered early in your experience, game begins to lose interest after awhile".
Because I think we will always see linear repetition in mmo's. You will always go from lvl 1 to lvl whatever in solid, consistant, predictable increments. Don't blame the developers, blame mathematics. I think we will always see kill 'x' mobs or collect 'x' items, again, blame math and comp science; your computer understands numbers a lot better than concepts and abstract creativity. Trick here is to get your eyes on the story rather than the quantities to receive your reward..but how?
I think that perhaps
Comments
Second brainstorm:
Or are people advocating 'skill-based' mmo's over 'lvl-based' mmo's, and is this what people mean when they say another 'grind game'. Does that translate to 'another lvl based game'?
If this is the case;
How would a skill based game work?
Would it be item centric? Meaning you get uber loot that makes you more powerful? Because that seems like it would create hugely unfair advantages in pvp.
Or would it mean everyone would have equivalent equipment? Meaning just powers you choose to use and finger dexterity determines the outcome. Because if that were the case, I think you lose the most important factor in at least fantasy and sci-fi mmo's which is that you quest for material goods or you craft a more powerful laser, or you have the ultimate doomsday device.....what happens to the RP in mmorpg if you can't get uber loot.
So say we had a campaign which was to destroy all undead, we'd have a series of quests that led to the ultimate goal of destroying all undead. It would always start off small. The first quest might be to do some research on undead and would have us going all about the land looking up people who might know anything, visiting libraries etc. It was the DM's responsibility to throw us a "plot hook". We might find an old scroll being used as a bookmark and recognise it as a "Raise Undead" spell that would be our first clue, for example. However, if you realistically had to go looking for something like that without direction, it could take you months before you found that specific book on that specific shelf in that specific library, assuming you find it at all. This is why a DM is required to take an active role.
Quests in MMOs today are not quests. They are not epic or special or unique. The quest for the holy grail is a quest, the quest to drop the one ring in a volcano was a quest. What we have in MMOs are rubbish. Everyone does the same damn quests and they're all really basic stuff, mostly consisting of someone telling you to go do something because they can't be bothered to do it. Kill this, collect that, talk to npc x, y and z. Run across the map, press a button, run back across the map, press another button, run back again and get a reward. These aren't quests, they're jobs. They're not week-long, unique quests with a goal to achieve like "Find the location of the Liche" that require you to innovate and search through books in a library. And even if they are, the content-designers get lazy and make the quest the same for everyone so you don't even have to LOOK for the Liche, you can just read his location off a fan website.
Quests in MMOs today are in no way quests. They are odd-jobs. Congratulations, you're paying money to be a handyman. You aren't an adventurer, you are part of the "unskilled labour" workforce.
I came up with a system a while back which, while it is labour intensive (and thus expensive and won't be adopted by major MMO companies), would allow DM-style participation in the game. Each player is assigned a "guardian angel", a special GM who presides over approximately 200 active players at a time and invents custom content for them - quests with nice rewards that form part of the overall storyline of the world. Each active player (a player who plays more than a few hours a week) would be offered participation in at least one major storyline event per year and may get as many as one custom sidequest every two months. That's roughly what I think one person can handle co-ordinating for 200 people. A guardian angel would design and hand out 100 non-storyline, short quests per month (3-4 per day), then help design content for and orchestrate one major storyline quest every 6-12 months.
Major events would involve a large number of players and people could invite their friends to help while the quests could be individual or group (depending on the player). One GM might be able to handle more than 200 players but that seems a nice safe number. The main advantage of this is that the quest is a real quest - it's unique and created based on the world's storyline and for the player. You can't look up the answer on a website and it certainly won't take you ten minutes to complete. As a result, the rewards can be substantial.
But it'll never happen. MMO companies would rather make more money and to do that, they have to pander to casual gamers who want nothing more than to log on for a few hours after a hard day's work, beat up some giant rats, pick up some coins they have for some inexplicable reason and go back to an NPC who will tell you how amazing you are for killing giant rats.
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i think quests should ideally be things which take weeks to do, involve many puzzles, help from a variety of other players NPCs, involve large areas of the world, and eventually make a lasting impact on the gameworld. Sure there can be fun side quests which are much much shorter, but doing sometihng like find the holy grail would be amazing.
NGE Refugee.
I'd also like to see players given the ability to create their own content that people could make "quests" or "raids" out of. The quest or raid wouldn't be so much a set event or standard thing, it'd be a name given to ransacking somewhere. For example, a player might break the law by studying necromancy and raising the dead. He could be outlawed from the towns and banned from using the town bank, so he'll have to store his posessions in a chest. The safest place for his posessions he can't carry with him would be locked in a box at the bottom of a deep, dark dungeon filled with monsters, right? So let him do that. Let him find an abandoned old dungeon and set it up to protect his stuff. Let him set up traps, hidden walls, secret locks (puzzles and such) etc. Let him raise hoards of undead to protect the place. I know lots of players would do that kind of stuff just for fun but a game that made things like this not only possible but the most effective course of action would be amazing. And it's NOT outside the scope of feasibility for an MMO, people have just gotten lazy on design in the past decade.
In Eve, players can mostly make their own fun as the developers have handed them the tools to build and conquer empires and fixed assets in the dangerous outer regions of space. Even so, there are events which are run specifically for the players in a certain region which most people may not even hear about. It'd be nice if a first person MMO would follow suit and give the players the ability to create content.
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The current questing system is a bit lacking in that it overusing quests for player actions which might have better names and definitions. Specifically a quest feels more important that a job, yet many games give you a classic bring me N body parts from a XYZ mob. Then you frequently get some kind of cash for the quest. Shouldn't that be called a job?
Shouldn't some jobs be repeatable? Say killing N Rats for tails, why should you be able to do that one time? Why not until the population of rats is reduced to a specific level. When that level is reached, that job is unavailable. But a hunter/ranger/forrester type of class, might have a little extra pay for the job or get different options in the repetition of the job.
There could be a number of other types: adventures, delving, crusade, mission, investigation, expedition, pilgrimage, voyage, research AND quests...
If you look at history people hated that job, the burn out rate was monumentous. Ford had to up wages considerably to keep workers.
Now what exactly does this mean? Well any repetitious behavior that appears to have very little change and requires nothing more than rote actions will become grating and boring and "grind" you down.
Have you ever sat in front of a computer for hour upon hour, or at a scholl desk for hour upon hour? Yes I am sure most of us have. Or an even better case have you ever driven by yourself for 10 hours straight? After a certain amount of time you simply must take a rest. You just have to stop or get up and go do something else. Anything, walk around, read book whatever.
I used to live a 12 hour drive away from my parents and siblings and I would make the drive from college back home on holidays. I would make that trip non-stop, except for bathroom breaks and one food stop. After about 4 hours it starts to wear on you. But it doesn't make you tired. In fact it gives energy but it a strange nervous energy. After about 8 hours I would be alert but spacey, I could drive and focus just fine, but i was jittery. By the time the trip was over around 11 hours if I went fast. I was both tired and wired at the same time. My mind was exhausted but my body would still be going. It would take me a full day or two to get right in the head again. After a while I stopped making that trip.
This is what "Grind" does to the human brain. Eventually it will mentally exhaust you. As the mile makers go by and by on and on and on you zone out but must keep alert.
But it is not the repetition it self that causes the exhaustion. Afterall we do repetitious stuff all day. Right now as I type I am doing a rote activity that will not mentally exhaust me. In a similar vein if I had done that driving 2 hours at a time with an hour break in between it would not have been nearly so mentally exhausting.
This is why WoW is such a success. This is why some people claim it has less "grind" pre-end game. WoW was purposely designed to never let people get stuck do exactly the same thing in exactly the same place for extended periods of time. It is why one of the major problem with Auto Assault was "lack of content". Auto Assault had and has plenty of quests, but people unconsciously desire a few more zones. If Auto Assault had the same number of quests but spread out over 3 times as many zones as they currently have, they would be twice as successful.
If you look very closely as WoW and chart out the instances/zones/quests you will see a general number ttrend. Each 5-10 level increment sends you to different zones and you ususally have at least 2 or 3 zones to choose from. You usually have at least 20 or 30 quests and somewhere between 1-3 instances. And non- of those are required to be repeated more than around 5 times or so. The quests often send you different little areas. And yet WoW is a highly highly repetitive, its gameplay is really not that varying or deep, there are only a few of each standard type of thing (DPS, taunt,heal) and very little in the way of innovative effects or special choices, very little deviation form the the simplistic tank/spank/heal paradigm. So why is it less grindy? Well frankly it is just as repetitive in the abstract, but they do throw just enough new stuff at justa quick enough pace to break things up. Sure you fight Quillboar out in the Barrens before you go to the quillboar instance and fighting either one is not that different, but in the instance you have to deal with patrol patterns you haven't seen before or slightly different spawns. Its different enough that you brain is no longer on autopilot. You don't just trance out.
In a nutshell WoW is successful because they breakup the monotony and thereby reduce the mental burden. Make no mistake Grinding is a mental burden, no matter how tough you are. Further it is a mental burden that is not initially obvious until you simply reach your limit. It is like having a bad night with tequilla, once you experience that vomitous hell the idea of touching tequilla again makes you ill. Or like my driving experience the idea of doing makes my hair tired, I simply won't do it unless I know I have plenty of time to recover. And lastly the effect of this mental burden is directly counterproductive to fun because it is draining and fun should be energizing.
I'd also like to see players given the ability to create their own content that people could make "quests" or "raids" out of. The quest or raid wouldn't be so much a set event or standard thing, it'd be a name given to ransacking somewhere. For example, a player might break the law by studying necromancy and raising the dead. He could be outlawed from the towns and banned from using the town bank, so he'll have to store his posessions in a chest. The safest place for his posessions he can't carry with him would be locked in a box at the bottom of a deep, dark dungeon filled with monsters, right? So let him do that. Let him find an abandoned old dungeon and set it up to protect his stuff. Let him set up traps, hidden walls, secret locks (puzzles and such) etc. Let him raise hoards of undead to protect the place. I know lots of players would do that kind of stuff just for fun but a game that made things like this not only possible but the most effective course of action would be amazing. And it's NOT outside the scope of feasibility for an MMO, people have just gotten lazy on design in the past decade.
In Eve, players can mostly make their own fun as the developers have handed them the tools to build and conquer empires and fixed assets in the dangerous outer regions of space. Even so, there are events which are run specifically for the players in a certain region which most people may not even hear about. It'd be nice if a first person MMO would follow suit and give the players the ability to create content.
How about letting characters build their own dungeons? They don't have to start out as dungeons, but they could be the characters home or base of operations. Suppose as part of one aspect of a character's advancement, they have to "trash" their existing home/base, which becomes a dungeon. The PC could have built his home with defenses, "Pets", special feature (fountains, trap doors, spell effects and such). Perhaps when the trashing occurs pets or items or research areas undergo a transformation.
You might imagine undead appearing where living creatures once were. Labs used for experiments shrouded in mists which affect vision and cause nasty side effects. Altars might have demons or a "Pet" which will periodically perform summoning rituals. All of these things could be used as a basis for quests.
NGE Refugee.
The possibilities are endless and yet MMO designers pick the same tired crap every single time they make a game.
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Great insight. Hopefully it helps some players cope with the grind. My opinions...
It would be nice to see quests that take you across different several places of the game world, collecting several different quest items while killing several different mobs and visiting several different NPCs, rather than just heading to one particular spawn spot to kill a gazillion orcs, collect a gazillion orc warts and return them to the quest NPC. I believe this would be an easy way to mask the grind, as it offers variation to the player, and it still fits within the constraints of most online game engines.
Quests should be a significant portion of PvE, but at the same time offer variety within itself.
Of course, there's also the creation of an engaging background story to motivate you to actually roleplay the quest (and not just do it for the sake of leveling up), but that's something that requires creativity on the part of the game designers, as opposed to just programming logic switches to test how much of item/mob/NPC x has been collected/slain/visited.
when i hear and talk about Grinding I say it mean killing mobs over and over. Grinding would mean getting exp for a long period of time. Thats why i only laugh and call the people stupid ***** when they say they want a MMO without any grinding.
There is no aspect of it that is not doable, I think he's just saying it'd be complicated. I personally don't give a crap how much work it is for the programmers, it's their job to take a design and make it happen. And I am a programmer, so I'm not just passing the theoretical responsibility onto someone else. The programmers are just codemonkeys, the game mechanics and innovation need to come separately from the design process before the monkeys are even brought in.
In short, if you're designing a game, you decide what will happen, you tell the programmers to do it and they do it.
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Unfortunately as long as the companies are making decent profits (can you say WoW?) they will probably have little inclination to change their game models. Voting with your dollar and continuing to speak up on official and fan sites (in a constructive manner) are probably our best avenues to get the industry to start to innovate again. Ditch the EQ clones and support the niche titles, bugs and all
I understand what you are saying, and your experience. A famous game DEV, Raph Koster, once posted that there are two types of "grind". Fun and not fun. EQ's grind was not fun. He stated all mmorpgs have grind, and unless someone came up with a new way to "advance" will always have grind. BUT if the grind is fun, it in a way is no longer a grind since the player does not notice it, or notices it very little.
Enter CSWG in which Koster went all out to attack boring, non-fun grind. CSWG was the only mmorpg with an incredible number of professions, and none of them templates. It was about players choosing what they found most fun. With over 30+ professions to choose from! With many, many, professions that had nothing to do with the old formula of classic grind, which you talk about. Kill the spawn, wait for it to respawn, kill it again, repeate 10,000 times then level up. Then repeat again another 10.000 times.
In CSWG one could work in a hospital, simply healing extreemly badly damaged players (if character damage was too bad, you would litterally pass out every few seconds heheh.). Another example, be a surveyor, taking mineral samples, on various planets. Be a storekeeper, and tons more. When players are having fun - they do not notice the grind = "no grind".
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And about WoW, no way did it defeat the grind. In fact, sometimes one is better off classic grinding in WoW instead of doing quests. Sometimes one can level up far quicker from classic grinding instead of doing quests. (The quest takes too long, it may lead to other quests, etc...). I remember looking at my xp bar in WoW, seeing it litterally stating the exact number of points needed to make next level. It's a simple calculation to see how much xp I get from a kill of a certain MOB, how long it takes to kill it, how long it takes for me to re-heal, how much armor damage I get, and if it's worth killing it over and over for 1-4 hours vs spending 4+ hours in pursuit of some quest that spans the continent, or more, or brings me into a more dangerous area, etc.... (like the Badlands with level 55ish MOBs, and quests...... but a randomly traveling world boss that is skull and bones to a level 60 player and drops you in 1-4 very swift hits.)
I will say WoW gives players more choices than classic EQ did. In WoW a player can choose to have fun doing quests, or classic grinding, or doing a little of both. I also like how one can level up by exploring new areas.
There is no aspect of it that is not doable, I think he's just saying it'd be complicated. I personally don't give a crap how much work it is for the programmers, it's their job to take a design and make it happen. And I am a programmer, so I'm not just passing the theoretical responsibility onto someone else. The programmers are just codemonkeys, the game mechanics and innovation need to come separately from the design process before the monkeys are even brought in.
In short, if you're designing a game, you decide what will happen, you tell the programmers to do it and they do it.It would have been nice to hear the other poster respond before anyone had a chance to help him.
Guild Wars had a bit of that, although it was tied more to your profession. Each profession had a particular NPC exclusive to them, and offered quests that rewarded the appropriate skills and/or items. Still, it's another nice way to break the monotony, and certainly makes players want to explore all character types and their exclusives, storyline or otherwise.
I specifically like Eve-Online because it's a game made originally by a bunch of guys that just decided to make a space game and it has evolved into this amazing game. Primarilly, I like it because the developers have a vision for how they want their game to be and won't compromise that vision to save a few subscriptions and gain a bunch more. At least they haven't so far and I'm hoping they keep it up.
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Unfortunately I think it is still a steep uphill battle for a small time studio who wants to make a niche game. Consumers expect timely delivery and a big splash (graphics, features, mega marketing, etc) to warrant their attention. Small studios often then have to get outside investors and consequently all the strings that come along with them. Look at Adventurine's Darkfall. Here is a small studio making a game on their own terms, own budget, and on their own time and they get a truckload of grief for it. Sad...
If a game is build up on static quests, static dungeons, static mob spots, it all comes down to grinding in the long run. Because how complexe they might be, in the long run it will be always the same.
To avoid grinding you have to build up the entire game on player interaction. The simpliest form of player interaction would be pvp, but i think there are a lot of other possiblilies, too. Be it trading/crafting, especially if it is build up competitive(look at single/multi-player games like Anno1602/1702/Siedler or similar games), or player generated content(quests and so on). This is the reason because old UO was not as repetive and was never refered as a grinding game, because there were at least some of those.
I think MMOs have to learn a lil bit form some single/multi-player games and build it in, in a virtual world, where all the players can interacte and shape the world in some form. Build up a trading monopoly(trading/crafting), a empire(warfare/pvp), and from those points(which are mostly just guild/clan content) it is possible to great dynamic content for soloplayers. A trading company could have some tasks for the solo player around the corner, and the same is true for the warfaring empire. And this are just two points, i think if we think a lil bit longer about this we could find a lot of other ideas, which will work similar, and which could generate more dynamic content.
And withit, the virtual world would awake to live, and grinding would be a term of the past.
Just my 2 cents.
Unfortunately I think it is still a steep uphill battle for a small time studio who wants to make a niche game. Consumers expect timely delivery and a big splash (graphics, features, mega marketing, etc) to warrant their attention. Small studios often then have to get outside investors and consequently all the strings that come along with them. Look at Adventurine's Darkfall. Here is a small studio making a game on their own terms, own budget, and on their own time and they get a truckload of grief for it. Sad... Absolutely agree. Because of this, and because i am tired of the same old grinding games, i follow the small independent development studios, and hope, that at least one of them will have success, and change the way MMOs are made up today.
If just one of them is really successful, the big companies will copy it, and maybe we will get some new, refreshing mmos in the future.
Those are games like Darkfall, or Renaissance, or Kaos War, or ToA(rest in peace), and hopefully one of them will have success.
Darkfall is the one, which could release even sometimes soon.. mabye.
I am also interested in the new game from Raph Koster, of course it is far away, but i have at least some expection, that he could try again to break the mold, and make something new and refreshing. Of course, it is a new startup, and withit he will have almost the same probs like every other independent studio, but he is a least a veteran with a lot of connections to mmo market. And as far as i heard Richard Bartle is even a councelor for this new game, and he had a lot of good and interesting ideas, and analysis of mmo or better virtual world mechanics.