I dont see nothing wrong with TeH Grind. as long as the DEVs give you some story to make it interesting. See foreign lands, meet interesting people and KILL them. It can be fun if there is a challenge to it, not if its just button mashing in a different loc. There also has to be a reason for TeH Grind. So type of END GAME. I have to many times spent my money time and effort to max a Toon and get there and go OK What now? Same ol' raids over and over and over again arguing about loot, Humm guess I'll go play a alt til me subscription runs out. Grinding is also a way for peops to learn how to play. I cant count how many times I have gotten in a pickup grp and found that some guy has bought their toon on Ebay and I send all day getting wiped. I say enjoy the grind. Learn from the grind. and if Teh Grind suks then maybe its just the game that suks.
As someone who was in the SEED beta, I have to say that the grind was stiil there. There was "no combat" and no monsters to fight, but in the halls spawned broken machinery that had to be repared. The process was exactly like attacking spawned mobs that weren't actualy mobile. You didn't take damage back, but your tools did. You didn't risk death and xp loss, but you risked overstressing a tool and loosing that asset if it broke.
The developers' vision for the game was inspiring. Unfortunately they lacked the resources in time, money, and experience to see it truely happen.
I think the entire argument is ridiculous. One poster here said something along the lines of "what happened to all of the games where everything is unlocked like Quake 3 and UT" That post sums up exactly why I can't stand this "argument" anymore. Those games are alive and well - those are first person shooters.
Maybe its just that young people have no frame of reference and perspective, but Dungeons and Dragons PNP was VERY MUCH a grind game. By the time the NES came around, the idea of getting exp and leveling to build stronger characters to 'save the world' was an ANCIENT concept. Does no one remember Ultima, or Bards Tale or even the original "skill based" RPG Alternate Reality?
If you are so fixated on "hating the grind" either 1) the genre isnt for you or 2) you are mainly frustrated that you are feeling inadequate since MMOs are multiplayer. Both of those point to a problem with the player. You simply arent going to get an RPG of any kind where, right from the get go, EVERY player is capable of taking on EVERY challenge the game has to offer and "twitch skills" are all that seperate people. Those games are HERE. Play Halo. Maybe they need to make a fantasy Halo and then all of the people that claim to hate grinding can go play that. My guess is they will complain about that too b/c most likely they will be middle of the pack players (as most of us are) and games like that can really only rely on PVP (I mean how fun is PVE with NO hierarchy of skill???)
People seem to be claiming they want Golden Axe or Gauntlet MMORPG - I dont buy it. I would really like to hear how you can eliminate "the grind" and yet somehow still have an RPG environment where you start as a weak youngster with big dreams and eventually end up a mighty dragon slayer defending the kingdom. WoW has got to be the easiest game I've ever seen in terms of hand holding you to max level and yet people STILL complain.
The point is to ENJOY the world and content as you make it through each phase of your characters "life". If every step of the way all you are doing is fixating on how much you hate the fact you have to level (and not allowing yourself to enjoy the sights, the quests, the new areas) then of COURSE you are sabotaging your own experience. Once again, if thats the case, the RPG genre (ESP the multiplayer RPG genre) is simply NOT FOR YOU. A lot of people simply cant stand the fact that they have "so many levels to go" and they are "so low level" and so they blame the fact that leveling is part of the game. This is completely wrongheaded thinking but is very typical in our "entitlement society" as the author of the article made reference too. These games have a HEAP of content at EVERY level. Just enjoy the level you are at and ignore the lvl 90s running by and you will be a LOT happier. Its a good philosophy for life in general. Do you fly into a rage when you pass by a multi-million dollar mansion or see a new Ferrari?
Someone may make that fantasy Halo I theorized above and you might then find you love it, but that would just prove the point that the RPG genre is not for you. Unless we're going to agree now to redefine "RPG" to include every possible other genre, the idea of character development and advancement (which MUST include "a grind" by definition since you cant possibly just start out with a fully developed and advanced character day 1) is part of the package.
I think the entire argument is ridiculous. One poster here said something along the lines of "what happened to all of the games where everything is unlocked like Quake 3 and UT" That post sums up exactly why I can't stand this "argument" anymore. Those games are alive and well - those are first person shooters. People seem to be claiming they want Golden Axe or Gauntlet MMORPG - I dont buy it. I would really like to hear how you can eliminate "the grind" and yet somehow still have an RPG environment where you start as a weak youngster with big dreams and eventually end up a mighty dragon slayer defending the kingdom. WoW has got to be the easiest game I've ever seen in terms of hand holding you to max level and yet people STILL complain.
Yeah you missed my point entirely. What I was saying is that even first person shooters now have grind. If you have not played BF2142 then you no doubt have no clue what I'm talking bout. Read my post again
[edit] forgot to respond to your other point. Anyone that says eliminating 'grind' cant be done has absolutely zero imagination. You can have an MMO totally based on something like Unreal Tournament but simply make it massive multiplayer and have unlocks. You just have to make sure you balance the content carefully against progression. Guild Wars comes really close to this model- I hit lvl 20 on all my toons by doing all the missions only (pure storylines). I experienced 0 grind. It's not 100% MMO but close enough for most of us. So yeah, its totally possible but its HARD especially if you want to charge a monthly fee. Guild Wars overcomes all of this though and has hopefully paved the way for more 'bold' business ventures from publishers. I salute the Guild Wars. So many of these guys that say grind is inevitable have not played Guild Wars obviously!
A great article that acknowledges the limitations of the business design for MMORPG but also hits the nail on the head - DA GRIND can be a waste of our time on this planet. I loved Guildwars for the very reason that to max level only took a week and so gaining levels was no longer an issue. The game play (playing not grinding) and most important the pvp is 2nd to none. Voted the best game last year i see. However the article does touch on the solution. With spawning and no perma-death DA GRIND is inevitable. Bring in perma-death and leveling will not be the key issue but simply staying alive will. XP will still be important but role playing in a game where life and death is the key aim (i.e. don't die!) will alter the sense of grind - of course it should be perma death for the monsters too - but it does not take a genius to recognise that monsters are respawned but with a new skin.... In other words grinding is inevitably boring because if you die you just respawn just like the monsters/enemy. Imagine if every time you risk gaining experience you also risk losing it all. Not for the faint hearted but certainly will inject the so called GRIND with an infusion of intensity never seen before in an mmorpg. I am not here to labour the point just to say Dan has stumbled across (or deliberatly dropped a hint about) the answer. Lets hope a publisher or games company grows big enough balls to try it because in evolutionary terms it is the next step for mmorpg...gladiator style! lol
Good article. The consumer must accept some of the blame. Consumers dictate the trends, and as long as people are buying into this grind nothing will change. WoW is a mindless grind, but look at its success. It would be stupid to leave that formula if the sheep are following,
Fanbois proclaiming how great a game is even though 75% of the promised features is killing this genre, and killing the PC industry. We are already seeing less and less games coming to the PC. And I'm willing to say 90% of these games aren't worth looking at.
A great article that acknowledges the limitations of the business design for MMORPG but also hits the nail on the head - DA GRIND can be a waste of our time on this planet. I loved Guildwars for the very reason that to max level only took a week and so gaining levels was no longer an issue. The game play (playing not grinding) and most important the pvp is 2nd to none. Voted the best game last year i see. However the article does touch on the solution. With spawning and no perma-death DA GRIND is inevitable. Bring in perma-death and leveling will not be the key issue but simply staying alive will. XP will still be important but role playing in a game where life and death is the key aim (i.e. don't die!) will alter the sense of grind - of course it should be perma death for the monsters too - but it does not take a genius to recognise that monsters are respawned but with a new skin.... In other words grinding is inevitably boring because if you die you just respawn just like the monsters/enemy. Imagine if every time you risk gaining experience you also risk losing it all. Not for the faint hearted but certainly will inject the so called GRIND with an infusion of intensity never seen before in an mmorpg. I am not here to labour the point just to say Dan has stumbled across (or deliberatly dropped a hint about) the answer. Lets hope a publisher or games company grows big enough balls to try it because in evolutionary terms it is the next step for mmorpg...gladiator style! lol
has been tryed before.. do you realise what this suppose ?
the answer have already been posted in sevarls posts above... and you point out too the MAIN reason people complain about grinding in your post (oyou reference to GW lvling).
The grind, in most of the games, is an issue BECAUSE people aim for the last lvl and dont take time to even enjoy the world between lvl 1 and whatever lvl max is. for instance take WoW ( since it kinda became the mmo "reference" ) how many people dont even know why they have to kill XX spiders.. how many people just quest-grind to get to 60 ( 70 now) withotu even bothering reading the quests ? yet the same people complain about the quest grind but they have no idea why they been asked to do so.
its jsut a matter of play style , and people whilling to rush the max lvl right ahead but yet complain because its too muhc of a grind while they didnt even bothered with what the game have to offert are jsut not playing the right game imo.
most of the mmorpg's out ther give options , you are not forced to grind.. you decide to do so.. the only one that doesnt give you much of an option that come to my mind (P2P) is lineage 2 most of others dont have that. ( i played a lot of different but not EVERYONE so might have a few more)
Blaam you have a good point but Guild Wars absolutely does not have grind. You must not have played it. You can create a max level character from the start and jump right into pvp! Please, please play Guild Wars people before you try to diss it lol
If you choose to go PvE route you can stick to the main RPG storyline complete with cutscenes. You hit level 20 automatically upon completion. No grind whatsoever. I know, I did it with 3 toons.
"The Grind" or the leveling process has always been a part of RPGs. The problem is that many MMORPGs focus on the destination instead of the journey. The leveling process should be enjoyable. If it is not, then there is a problem. As long as the players are enjoying themselves, the won't mind "The Grind."
"Those who dislike things based only on the fact that they are popular are just as shallow and superficial as those who only like them for the same reason."
Yep wow, the grind master of them all has finally fixed this. I just hit level 58, finally after all of that grinding. This weekend I got to venture into Outland for the first time. It's very cool (could use better graphics, but still very cool). What's really great about Outland is the lack of grind. The game is just plain fun. Rewards for quests are 10000xp plus uber gear. It makes the game fun again. I really wish they would revamp Azeroth and make it play like Outland. Outland is just plain fun and I never feel like I'm grinding at all. I went from 58 to 60 in one day just doing quests and now have all new gear to go with it. No more buying crap at the ah for to much money, it's all handed to you in Outland.
Blaam you have a good point but Guild Wars absolutely does not have grind. You must not have played it. You can create a max level character from the start and jump right into pvp! Please, please play Guild Wars people before you try to diss it lol If you choose to go PvE route you can stick to the main RPG storyline complete with cutscenes. You hit level 20 automatically upon completion. No grind whatsoever. I know, I did it with 3 toons.
i actually did played during beta.. didnt like it.. bought nightfall and had lot of fun with my heros.. so i bought the 2 first addon and did all campains
i was jsut pointing at what was said about getting to lvl 20 in a week and have fun, too me it reflects well what happen in mmorpg's in general i means rush themax lvl like if only the high lvl content was worth it and THATs what takes away lot of fun un a MMORPG imo
ps : i ll jsut add that nightfall has lot of grinds farming titles is a pain and you have to od it if you whillling to lvl up some important titles that give you a huge hedge in the elite areas (spent a month grinding it off jsut to have the pleasure to be able to do it with my derviche and my heros )
SWG was mentioned so I need to add that Pre-NGE Galaxies was kinda dependent on Grinding. It had multiple xp pools to feed the varied skill based professions. Scouting xp was different from Pistol xp, though earned simularly. Why was grinding acceptable (to a degree) in SWG? Large groups made for interesting conversations. The odds were high for it with groups up to 20 players. Most of the time, the Loot/Resources gathered had a value and there was always a chance to score something useful (i.e. Legedary Weapons). The intensity to grind was high also when xp was traded for Jedi xp during the Village Unlock period for Jedi. I found grinding most fun when there was a quest goal attached such as the Padwan or Knight Trials. The only grind in SWG that about killed me was the Crafting Grind. Grinding for (Force Sensitive) Master Crafter just about did me in. Why was this tolarble? These were forms of Achievement that were very rewarding for gameplay. This would still be true if Jedi was not a starting profession and a alpha class in the NGE.
The public has spoken, however, and Sandbox MMO gameplay do not make the big bucks. In truth, what MMO is a 2nd rate smash hit compared to WOW? Nobody else has come close to hitting those numbers. I think the question is more than what did Blizzard do right but why hasn't anyone repeated Blizzards success?
I agree that grinding is much of a solution to content when enough can't be developed. I would also say that any content in (payed for) expansions that award high xp is a built in mechanic to sell the product. There is good and bad with grinding and having alternatives to any system or sub-system can't be bad. Variety is the spice of life. Though the game has troubles, I think Vanguard did something great to add the Negoiation (Political) system in as an alternative to fighting.
Nice way to mispell "The".....columnist.. Anways, Most games involve a grind. You either accept it or you don't. Get over it and be a man for a damn change. My god, how many columns do we need on this crap? The old days are gone.. no used complaining about it. And for your information, WoW has always been a grind. Guess the weed helps with that huh? No more comments!
This is a great article, a friend of mine and I have had this discussion many times (yesterday being one). The grind can be tedious yes but what is life but a grind. Your in a job, you start out in a low position and you grind and grind until your a manager. The grind in most games I do feel is pretty hard, for instance in Silk Road I remember being told in a quest to get 100 tiger paws from white tigers, and I ended up killing over 200 to get them, then only to return the quest and be asked to get another 200, thats when I logged off and never returned. I've played many mmorpgs and they hall have grind.
Yesterday when I was talking to my friend I had mentioned that if an MMO got rid of "how much XP I need to level bar" the feel of grind may be more untoticeable. When playing an MMO I notice people saying "how much more do you need to level". People are constantly looking at their level bar and I find that too and as I get higher level I'm looking at it and watching it slowly creep up and it gets boring. Without the level bar and you just level, it may seem a little less of a grind. In real live you don't have a level bar for when you get your next raise or when you get a promotion.
Another thing that kind of makes MMO's feel grindy to me is the fact that you go to an area and see the mobs just walking around in a 10 food area. I played the free Ryzom for a bit and the thing I found kind of neat is that the mobs would migrate, and if you stand in once place a mob may just come up to you and watch you, sniff you and maybe try to get your attention. This made the game more realistic which made it more fun, which made it seem less of a grind (reason I stopped is because I like playing games with certain friends and they didn't really care for the game).
The idea behind Dark and Light really got me interested when reading about it in early beta (now I hear its one of the worse games ever made). A game with a full eco system, plants dying and new ones growing, migrating mobs, changing land areas, it seemed exciting when reading about it. I think like making a game more realistic would make a game seem less of a grind. Make a game where you have to hunt your prey, you have to seek them out a bit. You may only be able to do that quest in certain seasons because they prey may not be there in the winter time....which means you have to make a game with seasons. The grind may be a major part of any MMO but the idea is to mask it and make it interesting.
Maybe the next gen of MMOs will be different. With computing power getting stronger, and broadband connections getting better and more people having them, I can see a whole new MMO. I have high hopes for Star Trek online and Stargate Worlds, I think these games will be a HUGE change in the way MMO's are played (or so I hope). Right now Pirates of the Burning Sea has potential, we'll have to see what happens. David Perry's secret game (which I'm going to try and work on and hopefully win the directorship) has great potential. Hopefully games will get more intelligent, have more options and be more realistic. I think then people will think less about the grind.
I'll add a comment to all the prior posts about Guild Wars and levels -- whether you liked GW or not (it seemed like most did) it seems you missed the point. GW has a low level cap, and allows you to reach it fairly quickly because it's not a "levels game" at all, it's a skill-based game. The only thing "Level 20" is for is that it tells everyone else your character more than likely has enough skills (and high enough armor) to survive and be useful in the bulk of the PvE storyline and PvP arenas. Aside from that, GW could just as easily not have levels whatsoever, they're virtually meaningless, unlike 99.9% of other MMORPG's. GW does have some grind, but it's totally voluntary grind such as going for titles, etc. It's your choice if you want to do that, it's not forced upon you.
And that, I think, is where grinding becomes the evil that most people hate. When what you're doing is fun and/or voluntary, I don't think people mind so much, especially if there are other choices of gameplay available for you to choose at any moment. But when the grind is forced upon you and you have no choice in the matter, it becomes very noticeable and the fun factor drops dramatically.
Without jumping on a WoW-bashing bandwagon, I'll give props to Blizzard for making an enjoyable game with plenty to do (even without grinding) from 1-59. Then you hit 60 and there's nothing much to do other than grind for gold, grind dungeons and raids for "phat loots" and grind various reputations for whatever rewards. After doing beta for several months for The Burning Crusade, that was the final straw for me. Mostly the same quests I'd already taken several characters 1-60 through, and a bazillion more reputations to grind, many of which are required to get attuned to a raid instance. 60-70 was pretty much a joke, even casual players were reaching 70 in a month or less, then back to the grind.
Content takes a vastly larger time to create than to play through unless it is based on some kind of grind. This is the root of the whole problem. It simply isnt physically possible for a company to produce content at the rate which even casual players will progress through it, grinding aside.
There is only one reasonable answer to this issue: Player Driven Content.
There are very few examples of this design style in MMOs and there are zero examples of it being pulled off with the polish of some of the npc driven MMOs. Ryzom Ring is one example where players design their own content and Lineage 2 is one example where players drive the content through a complex PvP system (when you arent taking part in the horrible grind.)
This is the ONLY way to solve this problem and it appears that, at the very least, Warhammer realizes this and is designing their game to be driven by PvP.
it's an issue and a big one for all of us here and developers a like. I'm sure that the people making the games themselves would like a less 'treadd mill' like approach but finnancial considerations apply. Ok on the bits about accepting buggy games and such yeah as consumers we do but i guess we all hope as a whole it'll lead somewhere one day. Who knows what might be achieved remember the true power in any field belongs to the consumer without them your company or product is dead.
I like grinding, it separates the men from the boys. Boys just lack endurance.
Either that or have jobs, girlfriend, kids, a social life, etc. Grinding is something that is currently being tolerated by the MMO public simply because the novelty factor of the MMO hasn't quite worn off yet. It's getting there though, the genre is becoming saturated and there is ALOT of garbage out there. RF Online is a key example of a publisher that just didn't give a damn. I played it for 3 months (for an essay I was doing) and though I thought playing a game as homework would be great, it was more tiring than doing the research.
I'm one of those players that hates the idea of XP in general. The whole reason XP exists in pen and paper RPGs is that there is no objective way to test a players skill. In chess, checkers, go, action games, FPSs, sports, you simply get better with time. Because pen and paper RPGs exist largely in the heads of players, that skill progression has to be emulated. There is no reason (apart from tech restrictions and now, force of habit) to include any kind of leveling system in any RPG. Live combat people. Non fetch-quests that are Zelda and puzzle like in nature, well designed dungeons that make you think. Skills that require player interaction rather than randomly generated output with a few modifiers tacked on. A REAL STORY.
Teh Grind is just about designer laziness. And I get that MMOs require alot of time, money and resources to put together and current technical limitations don't make everything listed above plausible. But at least some of it is.
Of course, players share the blame here. You're the one paying the subscription fees. Speak with your wallet.
People want a single player RPG they can play online. With a massive amount of people. Unfortunately, single player games don't work with a massive amount of people online, hence you have to create content that WILL work with a massive population all trying to do it at the same time. The inclusion of instanced content is a big step forward towards the more "single player" experience, but as we saw with Dungeons and Dragons online, too much instanced content in a supposed massively multiplayer game ruins it.
MMO's are a genre with its own strengths and weaknesses. I think people who complain about the grind are either A)playing a eastern developed game like Lineage 2 or unaware that they are not playing an offline single player game.
If you remove the grind, which would create an "end" point in a game, all you now have is a co-op game. Like playing Halo 2 co-op with a buddy and beating it. Remove the grind and you'd just have a co-op game with a frick'n huge player limit.
Now what do single player games do to keep people playing after they "beat" the solo content? Multiplayer. According to the definition of "grind" used by most, any and all multiplayer gaming is a grind. BF, Halo, CS etc. People may not think of it as a "grind" because it's more "involved" gameplay because it's "twitch" gaming. Hence, why most all MMO's have PVP, to give players something to do, something more "twitch" and competetive to enjoy in a true multiplayer experience.
People rush through the great, storied content to get to the "end game" only to realize they have to do the same thing more then once. Ever if you have 50 dungeons and 30 raids and 100 different PVP things to do, you'll end up doing the same thing over and over if you keep playing over a long enough period of time. Then you come to MMORPG.com or the game's forums and complain about the "grind."
What makes every multiplayer encounter different is the people you play with/against. Want to remove the grind? Play with people whom you really enjoy playing with and you have a good time with. You'll then hear yourself saying "what grind?! I'm having a great time."
I agree and disagree with you. Although you're right that the single player experience cannot be replicated in an MMO, I disagree that proper story elements can't be implement and that grinding is a necessity. I'm not sure how much experience you have with the MUDs but alot of the really amazing ones had brilliantly intricate plots that advanced continuously over the games life. Alot of MUDs have very deep, complex "adventure style" quests that can take days to complete and don't involve killing 150 rabbits to make a luck rabbits foot.
And lets not forget roleplaying, there are MUDs built completely on roleplaying with very little "game" holding them together. Granted, this is more difficult to pull off with a graphical UI but not impossible and with a little more "design" in the game design process and more frequent content updates as well as creative quest building these problems would be solved. Just look at the latest PS3 game LittleBigPlanet, that's some interesting multiplayer stuff going on there. Yes 70 person raids might be gone out the window, but a 6-8 person team would be perfect for really interesting challenging quests. Just a little brain sweat would be required on the part of the developers.
I think the only solution to "Teh Grind" is a complete revamp of MMORPG's in general. I've stopped playing FFXI recently because it has become so much of a grind (read: repetitious) that I really could just sleep through pressing the buttons. When your game is that exciting, you're going to get people who drop out.
I think you've really nailed it here about what Grinding really means: boring repitition. It's also one of the reasons that grinding is something for which different people seem to have different tolerance levels and interpretations of: some find slaughtering endless spiders cool and fun.....for a while at least......while others (myself included) begin to question the point of our actions after spider #10 and the quest objective is complete.
Soooo....I'd say that grinding by definition is really best defined as, "The threshold at which a MMO player is no longer enjoying the experience of the game, and/or is finding the game process so repetitious as to instill boredom."
Killing monsters need not be boring.....but if the game treats the process of kill-loot-earn xp-reapeat in to something which is like a chore, then the designers do them a disservice by failing to spruce up the way that their game can be played. I think there's plenty, even at the high-end levels of a game, that can be done to keep a player's interest and avoid boring repetition.
One thing, for example, that I think some developers miss the boat on is the fact that people do this stuff for reward.....so why not reward more often? Leveling in WoW, for example, always generates a new talent point and a bunch of advances,,,,,but what if leveling in WoW happened in smaller stages. If, instead of getting all those increases after 600,000 xp, what if every four bars of experience acquired you "mini leveled" and gto 20% of the total advances leading to the next level....effectively a quarter level's worth of experience earned and paid for. I know it would probably work to motivate my tired, addicted brain....
DDO does this, I think with it's achievement system.....but it doesn't really work, because the bonus is too little and takes too long even to get that. In fact, of all the MMOs I've played, I think I found DDO the most tedious to advance in, partially because I know how the paper and pencil version of D&D plays (and it is nothing as tedious as DDO), and because there simply isn't enough content in the game to escape grinding....you have no choice but to repeat dungeon after dungeon, over and over, to build up that exp bar.
So far, I think games like EQ 2 and WoW manage to balance advancement very nicely in their early levels (1-20), although with EQ 2 I haven't tested it past that point (check back in another week, heh). If they could only sustain the momentum on up to level 100.....sigh....
I like grinding, it separates the men from the boys. Boys just lack endurance.
Either that or have jobs, girlfriend, kids, a social life, etc. Grinding is something that is currently being tolerated by the MMO public simply because the novelty factor of the MMO hasn't quite worn off yet. It's getting there though, the genre is becoming saturated and there is ALOT of garbage out there. RF Online is a key example of a publisher that just didn't give a damn. I played it for 3 months (for an essay I was doing) and though I thought playing a game as homework would be great, it was more tiring than doing the research.
I'm one of those players that hates the idea of XP in general. The whole reason XP exists in pen and paper RPGs is that there is no objective way to test a players skill. In chess, checkers, go, action games, FPSs, sports, you simply get better with time. Because pen and paper RPGs exist largely in the heads of players, that skill progression has to be emulated. There is no reason (apart from tech restrictions and now, force of habit) to include any kind of leveling system in any RPG. Live combat people. Non fetch-quests that are Zelda and puzzle like in nature, well designed dungeons that make you think. Skills that require player interaction rather than randomly generated output with a few modifiers tacked on. A REAL STORY.
Teh Grind is just about designer laziness. And I get that MMOs require alot of time, money and resources to put together and current technical limitations don't make everything listed above plausible. But at least some of it is.
Of course, players share the blame here. You're the one paying the subscription fees. Speak with your wallet.
People want a single player RPG they can play online. With a massive amount of people. Unfortunately, single player games don't work with a massive amount of people online, hence you have to create content that WILL work with a massive population all trying to do it at the same time. The inclusion of instanced content is a big step forward towards the more "single player" experience, but as we saw with Dungeons and Dragons online, too much instanced content in a supposed massively multiplayer game ruins it.
MMO's are a genre with its own strengths and weaknesses. I think people who complain about the grind are either A)playing a eastern developed game like Lineage 2 or unaware that they are not playing an offline single player game.
If you remove the grind, which would create an "end" point in a game, all you now have is a co-op game. Like playing Halo 2 co-op with a buddy and beating it. Remove the grind and you'd just have a co-op game with a frick'n huge player limit.
Now what do single player games do to keep people playing after they "beat" the solo content? Multiplayer. According to the definition of "grind" used by most, any and all multiplayer gaming is a grind. BF, Halo, CS etc. People may not think of it as a "grind" because it's more "involved" gameplay because it's "twitch" gaming. Hence, why most all MMO's have PVP, to give players something to do, something more "twitch" and competetive to enjoy in a true multiplayer experience.
People rush through the great, storied content to get to the "end game" only to realize they have to do the same thing more then once. Ever if you have 50 dungeons and 30 raids and 100 different PVP things to do, you'll end up doing the same thing over and over if you keep playing over a long enough period of time. Then you come to MMORPG.com or the game's forums and complain about the "grind."
What makes every multiplayer encounter different is the people you play with/against. Want to remove the grind? Play with people whom you really enjoy playing with and you have a good time with. You'll then hear yourself saying "what grind?! I'm having a great time."
I agree and disagree with you. Although you're right that the single player experience cannot be replicated in an MMO, I disagree that proper story elements can't be implement and that grinding is a necessity. I'm not sure how much experience you have with the MUDs but alot of the really amazing ones had brilliantly intricate plots that advanced continuously over the games life. Alot of MUDs have very deep, complex "adventure style" quests that can take days to complete and don't involve killing 150 rabbits to make a luck rabbits foot.
And lets not forget roleplaying, there are MUDs built completely on roleplaying with very little "game" holding them together. Granted, this is more difficult to pull off with a graphical UI but not impossible and with a little more "design" in the game design process and more frequent content updates as well as creative quest building these problems would be solved. Just look at the latest PS3 game LittleBigPlanet, that's some interesting multiplayer stuff going on there. Yes 70 person raids might be gone out the window, but a 6-8 person team would be perfect for really interesting challenging quests. Just a little brain sweat would be required on the part of the developers.
ROFL! Lets not forget the inane reasons for some quests: If I kill 150 rabbits to get that lucky rabbit's foot to drop....that's a hell of a lot of unlucky rabbits! Hah!
I'll add a comment to all the prior posts about Guild Wars and levels -- whether you liked GW or not (it seemed like most did) it seems you missed the point. GW has a low level cap, and allows you to reach it fairly quickly because it's not a "levels game" at all, it's a skill-based game. The only thing "Level 20" is for is that it tells everyone else your character more than likely has enough skills (and high enough armor) to survive and be useful in the bulk of the PvE storyline and PvP arenas. Aside from that, GW could just as easily not have levels whatsoever, they're virtually meaningless, unlike 99.9% of other MMORPG's. GW does have some grind, but it's totally voluntary grind such as going for titles, etc. It's your choice if you want to do that, it's not forced upon you.
And that, I think, is where grinding becomes the evil that most people hate. When what you're doing is fun and/or voluntary, I don't think people mind so much, especially if there are other choices of gameplay available for you to choose at any moment. But when the grind is forced upon you and you have no choice in the matter, it becomes very noticeable and the fun factor drops dramatically.
Without jumping on a WoW-bashing bandwagon, I'll give props to Blizzard for making an enjoyable game with plenty to do (even without grinding) from 1-59. Then you hit 60 and there's nothing much to do other than grind for gold, grind dungeons and raids for "phat loots" and grind various reputations for whatever rewards. After doing beta for several months for The Burning Crusade, that was the final straw for me. Mostly the same quests I'd already taken several characters 1-60 through, and a bazillion more reputations to grind, many of which are required to get attuned to a raid instance. 60-70 was pretty much a joke, even casual players were reaching 70 in a month or less, then back to the grind.
You make an excellent point. I have played WoW two years and refuse to grind for rep and faction standing....but am alarmed at all the quests and stuff I miss out on because I know, absolutely know, my tolerance level for the grind prevents me from ever wasting precious air-sucking living time on something so stupid. I might as well run in circles for a few hours, at least I'll get exercise.
So yeah, if the game actually requires you to grind to have a chance of advancement......baaaad sign.
Maybe the next gen of MMOs will be different. With computing power getting stronger, and broadband connections getting better and more people having them, I can see a whole new MMO. I have high hopes for Star Trek online and Stargate Worlds, I think these games will be a HUGE change in the way MMO's are played (or so I hope). Right now Pirates of the Burning Sea has potential, we'll have to see what happens. David Perry's secret game (which I'm going to try and work on and hopefully win the directorship) has great potential. Hopefully games will get more intelligent, have more options and be more realistic. I think then people will think less about the grind.
I like the way you think. Unfortunately, I think it'll be a while yet before IPs like those you mentioned get fair treatment.....shortly after Star Wars Galaxies gets fixed, or we all experience a rectal emergence from winged primates......
Content takes a vastly larger time to create than to play through unless it is based on some kind of grind. This is the root of the whole problem. It simply isnt physically possible for a company to produce content at the rate which even casual players will progress through it, grinding aside. There is only one reasonable answer to this issue: Player Driven Content. There are very few examples of this design style in MMOs and there are zero examples of it being pulled off with the polish of some of the npc driven MMOs. Ryzom Ring is one example where players design their own content and Lineage 2 is one example where players drive the content through a complex PvP system (when you arent taking part in the horrible grind.) This is the ONLY way to solve this problem and it appears that, at the very least, Warhammer realizes this and is designing their game to be driven by PvP. Hopefully more companies will realize this soon.
I agree with you. I played the face of mankind beta and they tried to make a player driven mmo, but they skimped. The only missions people were able to make were "secure an area" if you were playing a cop and "take over an area" if you were playing a bad guy. Now I hear they're making NPC missions because the game tanked so bad. To rely on just players to make missions may not be a good idea because even though there are a lot of people with good imaginations out there, its hard to come up with good quests in the spur of the moment...unless you lead the people in the right direction. Give the people enough options to make good quests themselves. I never played Ryzom Ring, it sounds interesting though. I'll be cool to see the future of MMOs, one can only tell what may happen. It takes just one really good idea to sprout up many others.
The first MMO was a revolutionary thing and now the games are getting more expensive. Game developers are scared to make a drastically different game and have it tank so instead they keep adding minor changes here and there testing to see what we like and what we don't.
Maybe if game developers had forums not just on the specific games but on what people would like in a game and they read it, they would get a better idea of what the mass' want. Right now they have a few people reading their forums and most people have the same questions but the devs don't really promote bringing out ideas, using imagination. I was beta testing Matrix Online and I saw people give ideas but the devs didn't say anything about them. They would answer the questions about PvP and such, but when someone came up with an idea for the game it just went seemingly unnoticed....same with Face of Mankind. This is why I think the David Perry Top Secret challenge might be good. It'll show that the masses have good ideas and maybe devs will listen or even hire unknowns to direct video games. I know for years I've had ideas for games and would have loved the money to direct one myself.
Wolfrider certainly recalls correctly. Content, or rather the lack thereof, is the real reason for Grinding in Role-playing games. In your classic D&D days, the game designers would craft modules that 5-6 people would sit around a table and play from start to finish in around 6 hours. When the first RPGs go put on the early computers, designers ran into an awful shock-- the content of a D&D scenario was playable in about 20 min solo on the computer! Thus a 100 hour game was potentially equal to 300 D&D scenarios!!!
Now obviously there was not an entire monastery of designer monks hidden away cranking out all those scenarios so "filler" HAD to be added to soak up time.
Might and Magic I designed by the famous Jon Van Caneghem was the first to smack its forehead on this factor in 1988. Jon crafted this huge gaming map, it was designed to overawe everyone in its size and hence prompt people to buy his first game. So the map was in all the advertising months ahead of release. The Jon had to fill the empty map with "something"! ROFL, that turned out to be an incredible challenge. One city was only a few squares in one grid section on a map that was something like 12x16 grids. And then he had to populate that city with buildings, people, vendors, and quests. All in all a very daunting project that could have taken years to make it meaningful or even relevant. But in the always driving need to publish so you can eat, the game had to ship. So, 80+% of that huge map was totally empty, just random monster encounters. The grind here was time filling, not character related. Alas, the size of that map so captured public imagination that every RPG afterward was judged on how BIG was their map or how many 100s of hundreds of hours were needed to finish the game.
Now the real problem here is not just time, it is what to do in that time.
Computer game designers almost never talk about the thing that none to date have solved; the dreaded Middle Game. They know really really well how to do the intro levels of the games, and many have clear vision of the big blowoff at the end that they have in mind as a payoff to the players. Yet how to get the player from say 12th to 30th level? Grinding became the default no-brainer answer.
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Combat Medic, the ultimate Bi-polar job.
As someone who was in the SEED beta, I have to say that the grind was stiil there. There was "no combat" and no monsters to fight, but in the halls spawned broken machinery that had to be repared. The process was exactly like attacking spawned mobs that weren't actualy mobile. You didn't take damage back, but your tools did. You didn't risk death and xp loss, but you risked overstressing a tool and loosing that asset if it broke.
The developers' vision for the game was inspiring. Unfortunately they lacked the resources in time, money, and experience to see it truely happen.
http://erickveil.com/
I think the entire argument is ridiculous. One poster here said something along the lines of "what happened to all of the games where everything is unlocked like Quake 3 and UT" That post sums up exactly why I can't stand this "argument" anymore. Those games are alive and well - those are first person shooters.
Maybe its just that young people have no frame of reference and perspective, but Dungeons and Dragons PNP was VERY MUCH a grind game. By the time the NES came around, the idea of getting exp and leveling to build stronger characters to 'save the world' was an ANCIENT concept. Does no one remember Ultima, or Bards Tale or even the original "skill based" RPG Alternate Reality?
If you are so fixated on "hating the grind" either 1) the genre isnt for you or 2) you are mainly frustrated that you are feeling inadequate since MMOs are multiplayer. Both of those point to a problem with the player. You simply arent going to get an RPG of any kind where, right from the get go, EVERY player is capable of taking on EVERY challenge the game has to offer and "twitch skills" are all that seperate people. Those games are HERE. Play Halo. Maybe they need to make a fantasy Halo and then all of the people that claim to hate grinding can go play that. My guess is they will complain about that too b/c most likely they will be middle of the pack players (as most of us are) and games like that can really only rely on PVP (I mean how fun is PVE with NO hierarchy of skill???)
People seem to be claiming they want Golden Axe or Gauntlet MMORPG - I dont buy it. I would really like to hear how you can eliminate "the grind" and yet somehow still have an RPG environment where you start as a weak youngster with big dreams and eventually end up a mighty dragon slayer defending the kingdom. WoW has got to be the easiest game I've ever seen in terms of hand holding you to max level and yet people STILL complain.
The point is to ENJOY the world and content as you make it through each phase of your characters "life". If every step of the way all you are doing is fixating on how much you hate the fact you have to level (and not allowing yourself to enjoy the sights, the quests, the new areas) then of COURSE you are sabotaging your own experience. Once again, if thats the case, the RPG genre (ESP the multiplayer RPG genre) is simply NOT FOR YOU. A lot of people simply cant stand the fact that they have "so many levels to go" and they are "so low level" and so they blame the fact that leveling is part of the game. This is completely wrongheaded thinking but is very typical in our "entitlement society" as the author of the article made reference too. These games have a HEAP of content at EVERY level. Just enjoy the level you are at and ignore the lvl 90s running by and you will be a LOT happier. Its a good philosophy for life in general. Do you fly into a rage when you pass by a multi-million dollar mansion or see a new Ferrari?
Someone may make that fantasy Halo I theorized above and you might then find you love it, but that would just prove the point that the RPG genre is not for you. Unless we're going to agree now to redefine "RPG" to include every possible other genre, the idea of character development and advancement (which MUST include "a grind" by definition since you cant possibly just start out with a fully developed and advanced character day 1) is part of the package.
Yeah you missed my point entirely. What I was saying is that even first person shooters now have grind. If you have not played BF2142 then you no doubt have no clue what I'm talking bout. Read my post again
[edit] forgot to respond to your other point. Anyone that says eliminating 'grind' cant be done has absolutely zero imagination. You can have an MMO totally based on something like Unreal Tournament but simply make it massive multiplayer and have unlocks. You just have to make sure you balance the content carefully against progression. Guild Wars comes really close to this model- I hit lvl 20 on all my toons by doing all the missions only (pure storylines). I experienced 0 grind. It's not 100% MMO but close enough for most of us. So yeah, its totally possible but its HARD especially if you want to charge a monthly fee. Guild Wars overcomes all of this though and has hopefully paved the way for more 'bold' business ventures from publishers. I salute the Guild Wars. So many of these guys that say grind is inevitable have not played Guild Wars obviously!
Fanbois proclaiming how great a game is even though 75% of the promised features is killing this genre, and killing the PC industry. We are already seeing less and less games coming to the PC. And I'm willing to say 90% of these games aren't worth looking at.
the answer have already been posted in sevarls posts above... and you point out too the MAIN reason people complain about grinding in your post (oyou reference to GW lvling).
The grind, in most of the games, is an issue BECAUSE people aim for the last lvl and dont take time to even enjoy the world between lvl 1 and whatever lvl max is. for instance take WoW ( since it kinda became the mmo "reference"
its jsut a matter of play style , and people whilling to rush the max lvl right ahead but yet complain because its too muhc of a grind while they didnt even bothered with what the game have to offert are jsut not playing the right game imo.
most of the mmorpg's out ther give options , you are not forced to grind.. you decide to do so.. the only one that doesnt give you much of an option that come to my mind (P2P) is lineage 2 most of others dont have that. ( i played a lot of different but not EVERYONE so might have a few more)
Blaam you have a good point but Guild Wars absolutely does not have grind. You must not have played it. You can create a max level character from the start and jump right into pvp! Please, please play Guild Wars people before you try to diss it lol
If you choose to go PvE route you can stick to the main RPG storyline complete with cutscenes. You hit level 20 automatically upon completion. No grind whatsoever. I know, I did it with 3 toons.
"Those who dislike things based only on the fact that they are popular are just as shallow and superficial as those who only like them for the same reason."
All I can say is , The Burning Crusade!
Yep wow, the grind master of them all has finally fixed this. I just hit level 58, finally after all of that grinding. This weekend I got to venture into Outland for the first time. It's very cool (could use better graphics, but still very cool). What's really great about Outland is the lack of grind. The game is just plain fun. Rewards for quests are 10000xp plus uber gear. It makes the game fun again. I really wish they would revamp Azeroth and make it play like Outland. Outland is just plain fun and I never feel like I'm grinding at all. I went from 58 to 60 in one day just doing quests and now have all new gear to go with it. No more buying crap at the ah for to much money, it's all handed to you in Outland.
Thank You Blizzard for this wonderful expansion
i actually did
i was jsut pointing at what was said about getting to lvl 20 in a week and have fun, too me it reflects well what happen in mmorpg's in general i means rush themax lvl like if only the high lvl content was worth it and THATs what takes away lot of fun un a MMORPG imo
ps : i ll jsut add that nightfall has lot of grinds farming titles is a pain and you have to od it if you whillling to lvl up some important titles that give you a huge hedge in the elite areas (spent a month grinding it off jsut to have the pleasure to be able to do it with my derviche and my heros
)
SWG was mentioned so I need to add that Pre-NGE Galaxies was kinda dependent on Grinding. It had multiple xp pools to feed the varied skill based professions. Scouting xp was different from Pistol xp, though earned simularly. Why was grinding acceptable (to a degree) in SWG? Large groups made for interesting conversations. The odds were high for it with groups up to 20 players. Most of the time, the Loot/Resources gathered had a value and there was always a chance to score something useful (i.e. Legedary Weapons). The intensity to grind was high also when xp was traded for Jedi xp during the Village Unlock period for Jedi. I found grinding most fun when there was a quest goal attached such as the Padwan or Knight Trials. The only grind in SWG that about killed me was the Crafting Grind. Grinding for (Force Sensitive) Master Crafter just about did me in. Why was this tolarble? These were forms of Achievement that were very rewarding for gameplay. This would still be true if Jedi was not a starting profession and a alpha class in the NGE.
The public has spoken, however, and Sandbox MMO gameplay do not make the big bucks. In truth, what MMO is a 2nd rate smash hit compared to WOW? Nobody else has come close to hitting those numbers. I think the question is more than what did Blizzard do right but why hasn't anyone repeated Blizzards success?
I agree that grinding is much of a solution to content when enough can't be developed. I would also say that any content in (payed for) expansions that award high xp is a built in mechanic to sell the product. There is good and bad with grinding and having alternatives to any system or sub-system can't be bad. Variety is the spice of life. Though the game has troubles, I think Vanguard did something great to add the Negoiation (Political) system in as an alternative to fighting.
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Yesterday when I was talking to my friend I had mentioned that if an MMO got rid of "how much XP I need to level bar" the feel of grind may be more untoticeable. When playing an MMO I notice people saying "how much more do you need to level". People are constantly looking at their level bar and I find that too and as I get higher level I'm looking at it and watching it slowly creep up and it gets boring. Without the level bar and you just level, it may seem a little less of a grind. In real live you don't have a level bar for when you get your next raise or when you get a promotion.
Another thing that kind of makes MMO's feel grindy to me is the fact that you go to an area and see the mobs just walking around in a 10 food area. I played the free Ryzom for a bit and the thing I found kind of neat is that the mobs would migrate, and if you stand in once place a mob may just come up to you and watch you, sniff you and maybe try to get your attention. This made the game more realistic which made it more fun, which made it seem less of a grind (reason I stopped is because I like playing games with certain friends and they didn't really care for the game).
The idea behind Dark and Light really got me interested when reading about it in early beta (now I hear its one of the worse games ever made). A game with a full eco system, plants dying and new ones growing, migrating mobs, changing land areas, it seemed exciting when reading about it. I think like making a game more realistic would make a game seem less of a grind. Make a game where you have to hunt your prey, you have to seek them out a bit. You may only be able to do that quest in certain seasons because they prey may not be there in the winter time....which means you have to make a game with seasons. The grind may be a major part of any MMO but the idea is to mask it and make it interesting.
Maybe the next gen of MMOs will be different. With computing power getting stronger, and broadband connections getting better and more people having them, I can see a whole new MMO. I have high hopes for Star Trek online and Stargate Worlds, I think these games will be a HUGE change in the way MMO's are played (or so I hope). Right now Pirates of the Burning Sea has potential, we'll have to see what happens. David Perry's secret game (which I'm going to try and work on and hopefully win the directorship) has great potential. Hopefully games will get more intelligent, have more options and be more realistic. I think then people will think less about the grind.
And that, I think, is where grinding becomes the evil that most people hate. When what you're doing is fun and/or voluntary, I don't think people mind so much, especially if there are other choices of gameplay available for you to choose at any moment. But when the grind is forced upon you and you have no choice in the matter, it becomes very noticeable and the fun factor drops dramatically.
Without jumping on a WoW-bashing bandwagon, I'll give props to Blizzard for making an enjoyable game with plenty to do (even without grinding) from 1-59. Then you hit 60 and there's nothing much to do other than grind for gold, grind dungeons and raids for "phat loots" and grind various reputations for whatever rewards. After doing beta for several months for The Burning Crusade, that was the final straw for me. Mostly the same quests I'd already taken several characters 1-60 through, and a bazillion more reputations to grind, many of which are required to get attuned to a raid instance. 60-70 was pretty much a joke, even casual players were reaching 70 in a month or less, then back to the grind.
Content takes a vastly larger time to create than to play through unless it is based on some kind of grind. This is the root of the whole problem. It simply isnt physically possible for a company to produce content at the rate which even casual players will progress through it, grinding aside.
There is only one reasonable answer to this issue: Player Driven Content.
There are very few examples of this design style in MMOs and there are zero examples of it being pulled off with the polish of some of the npc driven MMOs. Ryzom Ring is one example where players design their own content and Lineage 2 is one example where players drive the content through a complex PvP system (when you arent taking part in the horrible grind.)
This is the ONLY way to solve this problem and it appears that, at the very least, Warhammer realizes this and is designing their game to be driven by PvP.
Hopefully more companies will realize this soon.
I'm one of those players that hates the idea of XP in general. The whole reason XP exists in pen and paper RPGs is that there is no objective way to test a players skill. In chess, checkers, go, action games, FPSs, sports, you simply get better with time. Because pen and paper RPGs exist largely in the heads of players, that skill progression has to be emulated. There is no reason (apart from tech restrictions and now, force of habit) to include any kind of leveling system in any RPG. Live combat people. Non fetch-quests that are Zelda and puzzle like in nature, well designed dungeons that make you think. Skills that require player interaction rather than randomly generated output with a few modifiers tacked on. A REAL STORY.
Teh Grind is just about designer laziness. And I get that MMOs require alot of time, money and resources to put together and current technical limitations don't make everything listed above plausible. But at least some of it is.
Of course, players share the blame here. You're the one paying the subscription fees. Speak with your wallet.
People want a single player RPG they can play online. With a massive amount of people. Unfortunately, single player games don't work with a massive amount of people online, hence you have to create content that WILL work with a massive population all trying to do it at the same time. The inclusion of instanced content is a big step forward towards the more "single player" experience, but as we saw with Dungeons and Dragons online, too much instanced content in a supposed massively multiplayer game ruins it.
MMO's are a genre with its own strengths and weaknesses. I think people who complain about the grind are either A)playing a eastern developed game like Lineage 2 or
unaware that they are not playing an offline single player game.
If you remove the grind, which would create an "end" point in a game, all you now have is a co-op game. Like playing Halo 2 co-op with a buddy and beating it. Remove the grind and you'd just have a co-op game with a frick'n huge player limit.
Now what do single player games do to keep people playing after they "beat" the solo content? Multiplayer. According to the definition of "grind" used by most, any and all multiplayer gaming is a grind. BF, Halo, CS etc. People may not think of it as a "grind" because it's more "involved" gameplay because it's "twitch" gaming. Hence, why most all MMO's have PVP, to give players something to do, something more "twitch" and competetive to enjoy in a true multiplayer experience.
People rush through the great, storied content to get to the "end game" only to realize they have to do the same thing more then once. Ever if you have 50 dungeons and 30 raids and 100 different PVP things to do, you'll end up doing the same thing over and over if you keep playing over a long enough period of time. Then you come to MMORPG.com or the game's forums and complain about the "grind."
What makes every multiplayer encounter different is the people you play with/against. Want to remove the grind? Play with people whom you really enjoy playing with and you have a good time with. You'll then hear yourself saying "what grind?! I'm having a great time."
I agree and disagree with you. Although you're right that the single player experience cannot be replicated in an MMO, I disagree that proper story elements can't be implement and that grinding is a necessity. I'm not sure how much experience you have with the MUDs but alot of the really amazing ones had brilliantly intricate plots that advanced continuously over the games life. Alot of MUDs have very deep, complex "adventure style" quests that can take days to complete and don't involve killing 150 rabbits to make a luck rabbits foot.And lets not forget roleplaying, there are MUDs built completely on roleplaying with very little "game" holding them together. Granted, this is more difficult to pull off with a graphical UI but not impossible and with a little more "design" in the game design process and more frequent content updates as well as creative quest building these problems would be solved. Just look at the latest PS3 game LittleBigPlanet, that's some interesting multiplayer stuff going on there. Yes 70 person raids might be gone out the window, but a 6-8 person team would be perfect for really interesting challenging quests. Just a little brain sweat would be required on the part of the developers.
I think you've really nailed it here about what Grinding really means: boring repitition. It's also one of the reasons that grinding is something for which different people seem to have different tolerance levels and interpretations of: some find slaughtering endless spiders cool and fun.....for a while at least......while others (myself included) begin to question the point of our actions after spider #10 and the quest objective is complete.
Soooo....I'd say that grinding by definition is really best defined as, "The threshold at which a MMO player is no longer enjoying the experience of the game, and/or is finding the game process so repetitious as to instill boredom."
Killing monsters need not be boring.....but if the game treats the process of kill-loot-earn xp-reapeat in to something which is like a chore, then the designers do them a disservice by failing to spruce up the way that their game can be played. I think there's plenty, even at the high-end levels of a game, that can be done to keep a player's interest and avoid boring repetition.
One thing, for example, that I think some developers miss the boat on is the fact that people do this stuff for reward.....so why not reward more often? Leveling in WoW, for example, always generates a new talent point and a bunch of advances,,,,,but what if leveling in WoW happened in smaller stages. If, instead of getting all those increases after 600,000 xp, what if every four bars of experience acquired you "mini leveled" and gto 20% of the total advances leading to the next level....effectively a quarter level's worth of experience earned and paid for. I know it would probably work to motivate my tired, addicted brain....
DDO does this, I think with it's achievement system.....but it doesn't really work, because the bonus is too little and takes too long even to get that. In fact, of all the MMOs I've played, I think I found DDO the most tedious to advance in, partially because I know how the paper and pencil version of D&D plays (and it is nothing as tedious as DDO), and because there simply isn't enough content in the game to escape grinding....you have no choice but to repeat dungeon after dungeon, over and over, to build up that exp bar.
So far, I think games like EQ 2 and WoW manage to balance advancement very nicely in their early levels (1-20), although with EQ 2 I haven't tested it past that point (check back in another week, heh). If they could only sustain the momentum on up to level 100.....sigh....
Current MMOs: Rift, GW2, Defiance
Blog: http://realmsofchirak.blogspot.com (old school tabletop gaming and more)
I'm one of those players that hates the idea of XP in general. The whole reason XP exists in pen and paper RPGs is that there is no objective way to test a players skill. In chess, checkers, go, action games, FPSs, sports, you simply get better with time. Because pen and paper RPGs exist largely in the heads of players, that skill progression has to be emulated. There is no reason (apart from tech restrictions and now, force of habit) to include any kind of leveling system in any RPG. Live combat people. Non fetch-quests that are Zelda and puzzle like in nature, well designed dungeons that make you think. Skills that require player interaction rather than randomly generated output with a few modifiers tacked on. A REAL STORY.
Teh Grind is just about designer laziness. And I get that MMOs require alot of time, money and resources to put together and current technical limitations don't make everything listed above plausible. But at least some of it is.
Of course, players share the blame here. You're the one paying the subscription fees. Speak with your wallet.
People want a single player RPG they can play online. With a massive amount of people. Unfortunately, single player games don't work with a massive amount of people online, hence you have to create content that WILL work with a massive population all trying to do it at the same time. The inclusion of instanced content is a big step forward towards the more "single player" experience, but as we saw with Dungeons and Dragons online, too much instanced content in a supposed massively multiplayer game ruins it.
MMO's are a genre with its own strengths and weaknesses. I think people who complain about the grind are either A)playing a eastern developed game like Lineage 2 or
unaware that they are not playing an offline single player game.
If you remove the grind, which would create an "end" point in a game, all you now have is a co-op game. Like playing Halo 2 co-op with a buddy and beating it. Remove the grind and you'd just have a co-op game with a frick'n huge player limit.
Now what do single player games do to keep people playing after they "beat" the solo content? Multiplayer. According to the definition of "grind" used by most, any and all multiplayer gaming is a grind. BF, Halo, CS etc. People may not think of it as a "grind" because it's more "involved" gameplay because it's "twitch" gaming. Hence, why most all MMO's have PVP, to give players something to do, something more "twitch" and competetive to enjoy in a true multiplayer experience.
People rush through the great, storied content to get to the "end game" only to realize they have to do the same thing more then once. Ever if you have 50 dungeons and 30 raids and 100 different PVP things to do, you'll end up doing the same thing over and over if you keep playing over a long enough period of time. Then you come to MMORPG.com or the game's forums and complain about the "grind."
What makes every multiplayer encounter different is the people you play with/against. Want to remove the grind? Play with people whom you really enjoy playing with and you have a good time with. You'll then hear yourself saying "what grind?! I'm having a great time."
I agree and disagree with you. Although you're right that the single player experience cannot be replicated in an MMO, I disagree that proper story elements can't be implement and that grinding is a necessity. I'm not sure how much experience you have with the MUDs but alot of the really amazing ones had brilliantly intricate plots that advanced continuously over the games life. Alot of MUDs have very deep, complex "adventure style" quests that can take days to complete and don't involve killing 150 rabbits to make a luck rabbits foot.And lets not forget roleplaying, there are MUDs built completely on roleplaying with very little "game" holding them together. Granted, this is more difficult to pull off with a graphical UI but not impossible and with a little more "design" in the game design process and more frequent content updates as well as creative quest building these problems would be solved. Just look at the latest PS3 game LittleBigPlanet, that's some interesting multiplayer stuff going on there. Yes 70 person raids might be gone out the window, but a 6-8 person team would be perfect for really interesting challenging quests. Just a little brain sweat would be required on the part of the developers.
ROFL! Lets not forget the inane reasons for some quests: If I kill 150 rabbits to get that lucky rabbit's foot to drop....that's a hell of a lot of unlucky rabbits! Hah!
Current MMOs: Rift, GW2, Defiance
Blog: http://realmsofchirak.blogspot.com (old school tabletop gaming and more)
You make an excellent point. I have played WoW two years and refuse to grind for rep and faction standing....but am alarmed at all the quests and stuff I miss out on because I know, absolutely know, my tolerance level for the grind prevents me from ever wasting precious air-sucking living time on something so stupid. I might as well run in circles for a few hours, at least I'll get exercise.
So yeah, if the game actually requires you to grind to have a chance of advancement......baaaad sign.
Current MMOs: Rift, GW2, Defiance
Blog: http://realmsofchirak.blogspot.com (old school tabletop gaming and more)
Current MMOs: Rift, GW2, Defiance
Blog: http://realmsofchirak.blogspot.com (old school tabletop gaming and more)
The first MMO was a revolutionary thing and now the games are getting more expensive. Game developers are scared to make a drastically different game and have it tank so instead they keep adding minor changes here and there testing to see what we like and what we don't.
Maybe if game developers had forums not just on the specific games but on what people would like in a game and they read it, they would get a better idea of what the mass' want. Right now they have a few people reading their forums and most people have the same questions but the devs don't really promote bringing out ideas, using imagination. I was beta testing Matrix Online and I saw people give ideas but the devs didn't say anything about them. They would answer the questions about PvP and such, but when someone came up with an idea for the game it just went seemingly unnoticed....same with Face of Mankind. This is why I think the David Perry Top Secret challenge might be good. It'll show that the masses have good ideas and maybe devs will listen or even hire unknowns to direct video games. I know for years I've had ideas for games and would have loved the money to direct one myself.
Wolfrider certainly recalls correctly. Content, or rather the lack thereof, is the real reason for Grinding in Role-playing games. In your classic D&D days, the game designers would craft modules that 5-6 people would sit around a table and play from start to finish in around 6 hours. When the first RPGs go put on the early computers, designers ran into an awful shock-- the content of a D&D scenario was playable in about 20 min solo on the computer! Thus a 100 hour game was potentially equal to 300 D&D scenarios!!!
Now obviously there was not an entire monastery of designer monks hidden away cranking out all those scenarios so "filler" HAD to be added to soak up time.
Might and Magic I designed by the famous Jon Van Caneghem was the first to smack its forehead on this factor in 1988. Jon crafted this huge gaming map, it was designed to overawe everyone in its size and hence prompt people to buy his first game. So the map was in all the advertising months ahead of release. The Jon had to fill the empty map with "something"! ROFL, that turned out to be an incredible challenge. One city was only a few squares in one grid section on a map that was something like 12x16 grids. And then he had to populate that city with buildings, people, vendors, and quests. All in all a very daunting project that could have taken years to make it meaningful or even relevant. But in the always driving need to publish so you can eat, the game had to ship. So, 80+% of that huge map was totally empty, just random monster encounters. The grind here was time filling, not character related. Alas, the size of that map so captured public imagination that every RPG afterward was judged on how BIG was their map or how many 100s of hundreds of hours were needed to finish the game.
Now the real problem here is not just time, it is what to do in that time.
Computer game designers almost never talk about the thing that none to date have solved; the dreaded Middle Game. They know really really well how to do the intro levels of the games, and many have clear vision of the big blowoff at the end that they have in mind as a payoff to the players. Yet how to get the player from say 12th to 30th level? Grinding became the default no-brainer answer.