I havn't played many F2P games so can't give you any valuable advice there. But in your case I would give tabula rasa a try. In most MMOs (all that i can think of) your going to be grinding either mobs or quests for exp. So you have decide which youd rather grind. When i played tabula i found my self doing the quests, when i was done id move on the next area/zone and do some more quests/instances, but never sat there and Ground off of mobs. Not there are a few quests that require you to kill 200 mobs or something like that, but those quests give Clone credits which is very worth it.
Could try picking up a COH/COV trial and see how you like that as well. Altough it is kinda a grind game to different extent.
______________________________ Can't find an MMO worth playing
The only grinding in DDO is completely optional, for favor rewards or certain raids. You can level to cap without ever repeating a single quest though, and the quests are actual quests not kill 100 X.
IMHO CoH/CoV have a lot of grinding, so does Tabula Rasa....
I would suggest LOTRO maybe, you CAN grind in it if you want, but its entirely optional and its better than JUST grinding because you can get titles or complete deeds such as killing 50 wargs will give you the title "Player, the Warg hunter" etc...
Other than that... hmmmmm... well thats it I guess.
Try the LOTRO trial, also try the EVE trial just for the heck of it if you want... it cant be classified under a NO GRIND or an ALL GRIND game depending on how you look at it.
Played almost everything... Currently playing nothing... Waiting for: Darkfall, WAR, Guild Wars 2.
Zu Online takes about 8 hours to reacj lvl 70 , it has afk leveling , grind begins at 120 , because its incomplete. Daily events for free xp . World of Warcraft takes 3 months , or less to hit lvl 60
Much less. I started WOW in dec and I am at L59 now. I am a pretty casual player too.
Maybe I should have restated my question. I'm looking for a game with minimal grinding, not a game with no grinding at all. I understand that in all MMOs you must grind to a certain point but I don't want it to be a typical Asian MMO where you end up grinding and grinding only to the point where you want to dig out your eyes. I tried the LOTRO trial today and I really like it, I'm thinking about buying the game.
A lot of MMORPGs have decreased the Grind time. Even WoW has. Nonetheless I wager that Guild Wars has one of the quickest start to end game grinds. Daoc is also a good choice where you can get to leve 50 before the trial period is over
well ive been playin cabal as of late and id have to say it has alot of quest for each lvl so the grinding is minimal at best...but it does lack travel yet, but its still in early beta for american servers...mostly walking atm but the (Hearth) stones you get make mish really easy and it has a great community atm
Guild Wars has no grinding because its story based.
Otherwise they all have lotsa grinding, its just a matter of where they placed it and how they disguised it. Whether you like the disguise determines how grindy you think these games are. If random generation is yoru cup of tea then CoX appear less grindy. But in the end they all have you running on a treadmill of some sort. Whether its running 5 door missions to get a level or running Mauradon 5 times to to get a level or rep grinding for a blueprint or whatever or killing 50 spiders for a deed or rerunning the goodblade missions on elite to get your extra bag tab.
I guess you could say when there is no grind, farmers will disappear. But of course Devs will never have that happen, because they know they need the grind.
City of Heroes/Villains have very little or tons of grinding, it's depend what consist of grinding for you...it isn't long to reach max level...however, it may be more repetitive than most other MMOs...
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
I have pretty much played all of the main MMos released over the last 5 years or so.
To be honest there is no way to avoid the so-called grind in any MMo, nor is it ever likely that an MMo will be released with no so-called grinding. At the end of the day MMos are about character development, item acquisition, money acquisition, and crafting; all of which take time.
If you want to play a game where you don’t have to kill thousands of mobs over and over, don’t have to mine for ores or resources for months on end, and don’t have to do the same thing over and over then the only game out there at the moment is Dungeons and Dragons Online.
DDO is a group and quest based game. Put simply you join a group of players and go into an instanced dungeon to carry out a mission, of various types and complexity. When you complete the quest, which typically takes from 20 minutes to an hour, you are awarded an amount of experience points. When you have done enough quests and gained the required Xp you can level up your character.
As someone mentioned earlier you can take your character from level 1 to level 16 without having to do any quest more than 1 time. I am currently doing this system with a fighter/paladin multi-class character .At the moment he is level 11(of 16) and has done every level 1-9 quest. Which is about 1/4 to 1/3 of the total game quests.
Of course in any MMO there are particular items you may want to get for your character and in DDO this may mean doing some quests more than 1 time. But it is not a requirement that you repeat any quest more than 1 time to advance your character.
DDO is not perfect by any means. I have played SWG, Lineage, Earth and beyond (yep an oldie), DAOC, EVE online, WOW, Horizons, Tabula Rasa, Guild wars and Hellgate London.
I would say from that bunch DDO is the least grind orientated. Guild war is also very good as it is mission based however for me it was to simplistic and basic.
Eve online has a slightly different taken in that your character gains skills offline based on real time training of skills. However Eve still has a massive grind for money and loot items. In fact if you are starting from scratch and don’t have a big and generous corporation to join you are probably going to be spending many months on end mining asteroids .Or doing agent missions over and over to earn the money you need to buy and equip and most importantly to insure you ship.
Also with eve being such a long established game you will never catch up to the players that have been in for a year or more. Simply because the training of your character is based on real time. I played Eve for over a year and it was fine but felt like doing a real full time job lol.
having said all the above you can of course download all the games as demos and try them out to find one that you like.
Zu Online has minimal grinding (I'm lvl 32 right now from doing quests..and the quests are very linear that guides you to the next area/quests and you get TONS of exp and item rewards from handing them in.) It's F2P so you should give it a shot .
I played that game for nearly two years and it's nothing but grinding. Sure, the level grind isn't that long, but every other part of the game is also a grind. EVEN THE PVP IS A GRIND. Do not play WoW if you want minimal grinding.
Also with eve being such a long established game you will never catch up to the players that have been in for a year or more. Simply because the training of your character is based on real time. I played Eve for over a year and it was fine but felt like doing a real full time job lol.
I see you have absolutely no experience with Eve Online to make such a statement. You do realize the only advantage a veteran has over you is the ability to be flexible, aka: Trade, Combat, Mining, etc. For example, you want to specialize in Heavy Assault Ships, a veteran would most likely have Tech2 skills on all his equipment. So, you would just need Tech2 Guns, Shields/Armor, and any other minor components. Granted, you will be on par only with that particular ship, you will not be able to fly any other ships as good as the veteran because he went on and trained other skills in a different department, for example Battleships/Dreadnoughts.
In conclusion, you will catch up to a veteran in particular skills, however never the flexibility.
Therefore, you are an inexperienced douche.
Good day.
To answer your ridiculous post. I played eve for 12 months strait from launch and then went back to it a couple of more times for a few short re subscriptions. Myself and 5 or 6 friends set up a small corp. called Acer Industries. Please fell free to check it out in the corp. list. In total I played it for about 16 months.
Eve is real time skill training based ,so it is a fact that a new player can never catch up to a veteran because the guy with a year ( quite possibly 4 years or more )under his belt is training at the same time as you and has a 12 months or more head start .You can argue and insult all you like but this is an indisputable fact and there is no way around it
Of course if a new player play’s for 4 or 5 months he can get a minimal specialisation in say ,cruiser and go and do stuff, but he is never going to be able to compete on a level playing field with veteran player in the same ship, as the vet will have uber weapons and more importantly top notch skills as the vet will have spent much more time getting tier 5 skills trained in multiple disciplines. And woe betide the new player with his cruiser going out into un-policed 0.0 space.In addition it is unlikley in the extreme that a vet will even be fly the same ships as a new player in the first place.Or to make it even more obvious i will give an example . I put my main in a cruiser , who has been training various weapon,shield, engine and other skills etc for 16 months and go head to head with a new guy with 5 months training ,and assuming equal player skill. the new guy has no chance at all vs me. Its as simple as that
Of course it is obvious that you are an eve fan boy who wont have anything said against his life, erm I mean game. But the poster of this thread asked a question about Mmo`s and grinding and your spurious comment, dare I say it flame, has no place in this thread. Perhaps if the thread starter does sub to eve you will give him the 100 million or so that he will need to get good weapons and ships, so that he doesn’t have to grind for months on end.
Eve is real time skill training based ,so it is a fact that a new player can never catch up to a veteran because the guy with a year ( quite possibly 4 years or more )under his belt is training at the same time as you and has a 12 months or more head start .You can argue and insult all you like but this is an indisputable fact and there is no way around it Of course if a new player play’s for 4 or 5 months he can get a minimal specialisation in say ,cruiser and go and do stuff, but he is never going to be able to compete on a level playing field with veteran player in the same ship, as the vet will have uber weapons and more importantly top notch skills as the vet will have spent much more time getting tier 5 skills trained in multiple disciplines. And woe betide the new player with his cruiser going out into un-policed 0.0 space.In addition it is unlekey in the extreme that a vet will even be fly the same ships as a new player in the first place.
While I don't agree with the other posters tone, you are in fact, wrong. In 9 months I can train up every skill I ever need to fly a Vagabond (HAC) as well as any other veteran in EVE. They might have a 5% edge on me in one or two places, but otherwise I'll have more than enough to beat 7/8 players in this game.
And considering fights are rarely one vs one, nor do people look for fights they can't win, your argument is just incorrect. Sure, if I try to solo a dread I'm gonna lose, however if me and 30 friends attack a dread, its doing down. EVE is more a game of teamwork than individual actions.
I have a corp mate who chose to specialize only in interceptors and with 15 months under his belt I dare say there is no one in this game who has more skills relating to interceptors (because he has them all).
And he's damn near unbeatable. He kills between 2-8 ships a day, and rarely loses (having +5 snake implants really encourages a person to win)
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Comments
I havn't played many F2P games so can't give you any valuable advice there. But in your case I would give tabula rasa a try. In most MMOs (all that i can think of) your going to be grinding either mobs or quests for exp. So you have decide which youd rather grind. When i played tabula i found my self doing the quests, when i was done id move on the next area/zone and do some more quests/instances, but never sat there and Ground off of mobs. Not there are a few quests that require you to kill 200 mobs or something like that, but those quests give Clone credits which is very worth it.
Could try picking up a COH/COV trial and see how you like that as well. Altough it is kinda a grind game to different extent.
______________________________
Can't find an MMO worth playing
WOW
I'll be sure to ask my friend about Tabula Rasa, and I'll give COH/COV a try, perhaps just download the trial and see if I like it. Thanks.
guild wars, second life. That's bout it
Zu Online takes about 8 hours to reacj lvl 70 , it has afk leveling , grind begins at 120 , because its incomplete. Daily events for free xp .
World of Warcraft takes 3 months , or less to hit lvl 60
The only grinding in DDO is completely optional, for favor rewards or certain raids. You can level to cap without ever repeating a single quest though, and the quests are actual quests not kill 100 X.
IMHO CoH/CoV have a lot of grinding, so does Tabula Rasa....
I would suggest LOTRO maybe, you CAN grind in it if you want, but its entirely optional and its better than JUST grinding because you can get titles or complete deeds such as killing 50 wargs will give you the title "Player, the Warg hunter" etc...
Other than that... hmmmmm... well thats it I guess.
Try the LOTRO trial, also try the EVE trial just for the heck of it if you want... it cant be classified under a NO GRIND or an ALL GRIND game depending on how you look at it.
Played almost everything...
Currently playing nothing...
Waiting for: Darkfall, WAR, Guild Wars 2.
Much less. I started WOW in dec and I am at L59 now. I am a pretty casual player too.
Every mmorpg has a "grind" if you mean repetitive tasks but so does life, example; want to build up your muscle... you need to grind on weights lol.
World of Warcraft is the game you want.
Maybe I should have restated my question. I'm looking for a game with minimal grinding, not a game with no grinding at all. I understand that in all MMOs you must grind to a certain point but I don't want it to be a typical Asian MMO where you end up grinding and grinding only to the point where you want to dig out your eyes. I tried the LOTRO trial today and I really like it, I'm thinking about buying the game.
A lot of MMORPGs have decreased the Grind time. Even WoW has. Nonetheless I wager that Guild Wars has one of the quickest start to end game grinds. Daoc is also a good choice where you can get to leve 50 before the trial period is over
Torrential
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
Eve Online, it does not have a grind, period.
well ive been playin cabal as of late and id have to say it has alot of quest for each lvl so the grinding is minimal at best...but it does lack travel yet, but its still in early beta for american servers...mostly walking atm but the (Hearth) stones you get make mish really easy and it has a great community atm
Guild Wars has no grinding because its story based.
Otherwise they all have lotsa grinding, its just a matter of where they placed it and how they disguised it. Whether you like the disguise determines how grindy you think these games are. If random generation is yoru cup of tea then CoX appear less grindy. But in the end they all have you running on a treadmill of some sort. Whether its running 5 door missions to get a level or running Mauradon 5 times to to get a level or rep grinding for a blueprint or whatever or killing 50 spiders for a deed or rerunning the goodblade missions on elite to get your extra bag tab.
I guess you could say when there is no grind, farmers will disappear. But of course Devs will never have that happen, because they know they need the grind.
Guild War probably.
City of Heroes/Villains have very little or tons of grinding, it's depend what consist of grinding for you...it isn't long to reach max level...however, it may be more repetitive than most other MMOs...
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
I have pretty much played all of the main MMos released over the last 5 years or so.
To be honest there is no way to avoid the so-called grind in any MMo, nor is it ever likely that an MMo will be released with no so-called grinding. At the end of the day MMos are about character development, item acquisition, money acquisition, and crafting; all of which take time.
If you want to play a game where you don’t have to kill thousands of mobs over and over, don’t have to mine for ores or resources for months on end, and don’t have to do the same thing over and over then the only game out there at the moment is Dungeons and Dragons Online.
DDO is a group and quest based game. Put simply you join a group of players and go into an instanced dungeon to carry out a mission, of various types and complexity. When you complete the quest, which typically takes from 20 minutes to an hour, you are awarded an amount of experience points. When you have done enough quests and gained the required Xp you can level up your character.
As someone mentioned earlier you can take your character from level 1 to level 16 without having to do any quest more than 1 time. I am currently doing this system with a fighter/paladin multi-class character .At the moment he is level 11(of 16) and has done every level 1-9 quest. Which is about 1/4 to 1/3 of the total game quests.
Of course in any MMO there are particular items you may want to get for your character and in DDO this may mean doing some quests more than 1 time. But it is not a requirement that you repeat any quest more than 1 time to advance your character.
DDO is not perfect by any means. I have played SWG, Lineage, Earth and beyond (yep an oldie), DAOC, EVE online, WOW, Horizons, Tabula Rasa, Guild wars and Hellgate London.
I would say from that bunch DDO is the least grind orientated. Guild war is also very good as it is mission based however for me it was to simplistic and basic.
Eve online has a slightly different taken in that your character gains skills offline based on real time training of skills. However Eve still has a massive grind for money and loot items. In fact if you are starting from scratch and don’t have a big and generous corporation to join you are probably going to be spending many months on end mining asteroids .Or doing agent missions over and over to earn the money you need to buy and equip and most importantly to insure you ship.
Also with eve being such a long established game you will never catch up to the players that have been in for a year or more. Simply because the training of your character is based on real time. I played Eve for over a year and it was fine but felt like doing a real full time job lol.
having said all the above you can of course download all the games as demos and try them out to find one that you like.
you can max coh/cov pretty fast, all you need is to farm.. with a good team of coz..
Which FF Character Are You?
Zu Online has minimal grinding (I'm lvl 32 right now from doing quests..and the quests are very linear that guides you to the next area/quests and you get TONS of exp and item rewards from handing them in.) It's F2P so you should give it a shot
.
Alright, thanks everyone I think I have a few options to choose from now. Great response from the mmorpg.com community as usual. :-)
StarQuest Online
To the people that said World of Warcraft...
I played that game for nearly two years and it's nothing but grinding. Sure, the level grind isn't that long, but every other part of the game is also a grind. EVEN THE PVP IS A GRIND. Do not play WoW if you want minimal grinding.
wow is full of grind, don't lie
I see you have absolutely no experience with Eve Online to make such a statement. You do realize the only advantage a veteran has over you is the ability to be flexible, aka: Trade, Combat, Mining, etc. For example, you want to specialize in Heavy Assault Ships, a veteran would most likely have Tech2 skills on all his equipment. So, you would just need Tech2 Guns, Shields/Armor, and any other minor components. Granted, you will be on par only with that particular ship, you will not be able to fly any other ships as good as the veteran because he went on and trained other skills in a different department, for example Battleships/Dreadnoughts.
In conclusion, you will catch up to a veteran in particular skills, however never the flexibility.
Therefore, you are an inexperienced douche.
Good day.
To answer your ridiculous post. I played eve for 12 months strait from launch and then went back to it a couple of more times for a few short re subscriptions. Myself and 5 or 6 friends set up a small corp. called Acer Industries. Please fell free to check it out in the corp. list. In total I played it for about 16 months.
Eve is real time skill training based ,so it is a fact that a new player can never catch up to a veteran because the guy with a year ( quite possibly 4 years or more )under his belt is training at the same time as you and has a 12 months or more head start .You can argue and insult all you like but this is an indisputable fact and there is no way around it
Of course if a new player play’s for 4 or 5 months he can get a minimal specialisation in say ,cruiser and go and do stuff, but he is never going to be able to compete on a level playing field with veteran player in the same ship, as the vet will have uber weapons and more importantly top notch skills as the vet will have spent much more time getting tier 5 skills trained in multiple disciplines. And woe betide the new player with his cruiser going out into un-policed 0.0 space.In addition it is unlikley in the extreme that a vet will even be fly the same ships as a new player in the first place.Or to make it even more obvious i will give an example . I put my main in a cruiser , who has been training various weapon,shield, engine and other skills etc for 16 months and go head to head with a new guy with 5 months training ,and assuming equal player skill. the new guy has no chance at all vs me. Its as simple as that
Of course it is obvious that you are an eve fan boy who wont have anything said against his life, erm I mean game. But the poster of this thread asked a question about Mmo`s and grinding and your spurious comment, dare I say it flame, has no place in this thread. Perhaps if the thread starter does sub to eve you will give him the 100 million or so that he will need to get good weapons and ships, so that he doesn’t have to grind for months on end.
Regards
While I don't agree with the other posters tone, you are in fact, wrong. In 9 months I can train up every skill I ever need to fly a Vagabond (HAC) as well as any other veteran in EVE. They might have a 5% edge on me in one or two places, but otherwise I'll have more than enough to beat 7/8 players in this game.
And considering fights are rarely one vs one, nor do people look for fights they can't win, your argument is just incorrect. Sure, if I try to solo a dread I'm gonna lose, however if me and 30 friends attack a dread, its doing down. EVE is more a game of teamwork than individual actions.
I have a corp mate who chose to specialize only in interceptors and with 15 months under his belt I dare say there is no one in this game who has more skills relating to interceptors (because he has them all).
And he's damn near unbeatable. He kills between 2-8 ships a day, and rarely loses (having +5 snake implants really encourages a person to win)
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon