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Am I the only one who hates quest grinding? (rant inside)
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Why is it tedious? Is it because it made you think and learn to play your charater instead of being able to do a million mindless pointless quests?
How does mob grinding make you any better a player? It isn't like you don't have to kill dozens of mobs to complete a typical quest in mmos.
Do you somehow get better because you are killing mobs of your liking instead of some that are the objective of a quest?
because doing solo quest grind requires you to only worry about yourself, while group exp grinding makes you learn what others are able to do and how you can work with them which in turns makes you a better player.
mob grinding in itself does not make you a better player but because it makes you work with a team to do it, it makes you a better player. Learning to be a team player is something that the current MMO games lack until end game and then it is too late to change people's playstyle.
If someone soloed to max level then joins a raid, they will not be as good a player as someone that grouped till max level and joined the same raid.
Sooner or Later
Just to touch on this, unless WoW's leveling has drastically changed recently, leveling without any quests takes almost twice as long.
Also, there is a difference between the OP's definition of 'Quest Grinding' and having quests in a game. I don't think anyone here is arguing that there should be NO quests, but that they don't want so many small tasks such that it basically writes your character's journey to the T. There are other variations of questing that I find more useful and enjoyable. For example, lengthy kill quests, or rare quest drops coming from various types of mobs scattered around a region gives a player much more freedom, while also giving them something to shoot for and perhaps keep their eyes off the XP bar for a bit. Another example is larger, longer quests that are more 'In the grand scheme of things.' These quests give you a general idea and show you the way without cramping your character's journey so much. There's a difference between wanting to make your way through some area or another versus having to individually explore each separate corner of it before you feel like you can/should continue.
Quest grind=boring
In EQ1 I never even quested one time.
We would just sit out and pull diffilcult mobs as we had conversation with other group members.
I think you are looking at the past with some rose colored glasses on friend.
Socializing and community were already dying in everquest long before wow was even a thought. Instant travel from PoK, instancing, buff changes, the bazaar and a host of other changes that soe made killed some pretty big parts of the games community. There was also a pretty heavy movement from players to "solo" level in the game. From power leveling with a higher level character to the trend of botting/multi-boxing or whatever it is called in game now. The desire for more independance from group play was already underway. Forced grouping is a failed mechanic, but incentive to group in games is something developers are ignoring it seems. You are spot on right about solo play in wow to max level.
The main problem with quests is that they don't support grouping. Sure they are easy to complete solo, but it is just to hard to get people in a group on the same stage of a quest. It really needs reworking from top to bottom.
As for getting max level in everquest not being the goal of the game, that was a different era in a mmo. That was before spoiler sites, maps of every zone being at players finger tips, strategies for every encounter being in a nice handly little writeup on some website and most people just didn't understand raiding. I vividly recall the time period you are referring to, but things were different back then, only because the genre was so new. Yes it was beyond awesome when everyone was more concerned about where they character was, both levelwise and location in the world, instead of trying to get to max level.
The goal of eq became getting to max level and raiding all to fast and expansions only solidified that mentality.
When wow came out, sure there were people that rushed to max level, but there were plenty of people that enjoyed the journey. I enjoyed it for 9-10 months, because the world is very well made and yes the quests/dungeons were entertaining. I started wow late and there were always plenty of people we joined up with (dungeons, etc).
Games age, people got savy, websites spoil everything and the focus of most mmos is end game content. That is the sad reality and most likely won't change until games stop measuring progression by levels.
And so we come half-circle (or is this full circle?).
Everyone has been dancing around a center point of conversation here. Solo Accessibility. The Death Penalty, Social Downtime, Questing Stratification/Sub-Stratification, ect. all revolve around this center point.
I remember this was a hot topic, oh, five, maybe more years ago. Everyone was tired of the EQ model-the group oriented gameplay. If I recall correctly, the biggest reasoning was that people felt that they couldn't compete or keep up with someone because they had a life or some such. Such things change, as they are destined to do. And now we are starting to debate whether or not Solo Accessibility is desirable yet again, only from the other side of the fence.
People tend to follow the path of least resistance, which is what was making solo accessibility all the more so desirable. Unfortunately, by shifting our paradigm over to said stance, a lot that made up the heart and soul of MMORPGs was lost.
Shifting over to the solo accessibility model was instrumental in opening MMORPGs to the masses, but we lost meaningful interactions with the game world through the weakening of the Death Penalty, and the weakening of mobs found throughout the game world, thus creating a linear progression path, which was even further lineated with the introduction of quest based primary advancement. Mobs and zones now follow a very logical progression, from weaker to stronger. One rarely travels back to old zones, in a form of circular content advancement which would place higher level players in closer proximity to help/socialize with lower level members creating a tighter community.
Not only did we lose interaction with the game world, but we also lost interactions with each other. Sitting around by yourself waiting for your mana or health to come back is even less fun than sitting around in a group waiting for your health and mana to come back, so we lost social downtime with the addition of quicker recovery. Adding quest based advancement to cope with the solo grind further disrupted the continuity of community through the creation of questing stratification/sub stratification which kept people from working together unless they were on the same step of the same quest.
A Prime example of this change is EverQuest 2. When EQ2 first emerged, it was a heavily group oriented game, sprinkled with some solo content. Overtime EQ2 changed drastically. People began clamoring for more solo content. And as more and more solo content was added, grouping in EQ2 slowly died off. I returned shortly before the release of Kunark to see how the game had changed, and I literally could not find a group to save my life. And much of the old content had been changed to make it more solo accessible. At this point, I realized that solo accessibility and group orientated game play are mutually exclusive, you can't appease both sides.
Why is it tedious? Is it because it made you think and learn to play your charater instead of being able to do a million mindless pointless quests?
How does mob grinding make you any better a player? It isn't like you don't have to kill dozens of mobs to complete a typical quest in mmos.
Do you somehow get better because you are killing mobs of your liking instead of some that are the objective of a quest?
The only difference between mob grinding and quest grinding is that I get rewards and a story and purpose while killing the mobs. Otherwise, its the same damn thing. Quest grinding IS mob grinding, but with some purpose and direction, which makes it a bit more fun. Theres nothing HARDER about randomly killing mobs compared to killing the same mobs as a part of a quest. How is there any more thinking invovled and how do you learn your character better, when you're doing the same exact thing.
Ok I see what you are saying now. I assume you are talking about running dungeons and not mob grinding in open world zones with a group (because that is about as easy as running quests in a group).
Same thing happened in EQ. Kiters and soloers in the open world zones were horrible in group situations compared to people who grew up running dungeons. The same thing applies to any game and there are people who solo and people who dungeon crawl in every game.
You are talking about people that group together to level as opposed to people that solo, as long as the content for the group is challenging that is.
Why is it tedious? Is it because it made you think and learn to play your charater instead of being able to do a million mindless pointless quests?
How does mob grinding make you any better a player? It isn't like you don't have to kill dozens of mobs to complete a typical quest in mmos.
Do you somehow get better because you are killing mobs of your liking instead of some that are the objective of a quest?
The only difference between mob grinding and quest grinding is that I get rewards and a story and purpose while killing the mobs. Otherwise, its the same damn thing. Quest grinding IS mob grinding, but with some purpose and direction, which makes it a bit more fun. Theres nothing HARDER about randomly killing mobs compared to killing the same mobs as a part of a quest. How is there any more thinking invovled and how do you learn your character better, when you're doing the same exact thing.
You do it in a bloody GROUP!
Party, team, Comrades, ? ????????-??????????! The whole point is that you learn teamwork, something soloquesting can never give!
I hate WoW because it made my plush hamster kill himself, created twin clones of Hitler, punched Superboy Prime in reality, stared my dog down, spoiled my grandmother, assimilated me into the Borg, then made me into a real boy, just to make me a woman again.
Just to touch on this, unless WoW's leveling has drastically changed recently, leveling without any quests takes almost twice as long.
Also, there is a difference between the OP's definition of 'Quest Grinding' and having quests in a game. I don't think many, if any people here are arguing that there should be NO quests, but that they don't want so many small tasks such that it basically writes your character's journey to the T. There are other variations of questing that I find more useful and enjoyable. For example, lengthy kill quests, or rare quest drops coming from various types of mobs scattered around a region gives a player much more freedom, while also giving them something to shoot for and perhaps keep their eyes off the XP bar for a bit. Another example is larger, longer quests that are more 'In the grand scheme of things.' These quests give you a general idea and show you the way without cramping your character's journey so much. There's a difference between wanting to make your way through some area or another versus having to individually explore each separate corner of it before you feel like you can/should continue.
Quoting this because I edited, and no one will see it.
I think you are looking at the past with some rose colored glasses on friend.
Socializing and community were already dying in everquest long before wow was even a thought. Instant travel from PoK, instancing, buff changes, the bazaar and a host of other changes that soe made killed some pretty big parts of the games community. There was also a pretty heavy movement from players to "solo" level in the game. From power leveling with a higher level character to the trend of botting/multi-boxing or whatever it is called in game now. The desire for more independance from group play was already underway. Forced grouping is a failed mechanic, but incentive to group in games is something developers are ignoring it seems. You are spot on right about solo play in wow to max level.
The main problem with quests is that they don't support grouping. Sure they are easy to complete solo, but it is just to hard to get people in a group on the same stage of a quest. It really needs reworking from top to bottom.
As for getting max level in everquest not being the goal of the game, that was a different era in a mmo. That was before spoiler sites, maps of every zone being at players finger tips, strategies for every encounter being in a nice handly little writeup on some website and most people just didn't understand raiding. I vividly recall the time period you are referring to, but things were different back then, only because the genre was so new. Yes it was beyond awesome when everyone was more concerned about where they character was, both levelwise and location in the world, instead of trying to get to max level.
The goal of eq became getting to max level and raiding all to fast and expansions only solidified that mentality.
When wow came out, sure there were people that rushed to max level, but there were plenty of people that enjoyed the journey. I enjoyed it for 9-10 months, because the world is very well made and yes the quests/dungeons were entertaining. I started wow late and there were always plenty of people we joined up with (dungeons, etc).
Games age, people got savy, websites spoil everything and the focus of most mmos is end game content. That is the sad reality and most likely won't change until games stop measuring progression by levels.
Maybe I am looking at EQ though some rose colored glasses but I don't think so because I enjoyed the community in EQ, I had alot of people on my friends list outside my guild, I did PuG groups and raids, I talked to just about anyone that would stop and listen.
I agree PoK and some of the other things you mentioned changed the game for the worst but EQ still had a great community. People would help each other out for no other reason then they knew they would need help at some point as well.
I can still remember meeting a druid in West commonlands outside of Befallen. She helped me get my corpse back which had my first ever set of band mail I made though crafting and I though I had lost my corpse for good after falling down that god dam well in befallen, she did not need to stop and help me, she could have gone off to do her own thing, consider she was 30 levels higher then me but no she stopped and helped me.
She became my frist ever guild leader and to this day I still talk to her family as she has passed away in RL. I will never forget her kindness to a newbie dwarf warrior. I could write a book on how many people I helped or helped me in EQ knowing full well they would get nothing in return other then a thank you.
I remember my hardcore raiding guild on the way to a raid, stopping and helping a poor durid finish there epic fight because his guild could not handle the last mob. We stopped our raid to help some stranger finish a quest. Would that ever happen in today's MMO community?
Sooner or Later
Ok I see what you are saying now. I assume you are talking about running dungeons and not mob grinding in open world zones with a group (because that is about as easy as running quests in a group).
Same thing happened in EQ. Kiters and soloers in the open world zones were horrible in group situations compared to people who grew up running dungeons. The same thing applies to any game and there are people who solo and people who dungeon crawl in every game.
You are talking about people that group together to level as opposed to people that solo, as long as the content for the group is challenging that is.
I am talking about both. There were open world places that required a group to be perfect to be able to exp grind in that zone.
Yea as long as the group content is challenging it makes players better. You could tell very quickly who knew there charater and who did not when grouping in EQ.
Sooner or Later
Clearly you are not the only one that hates quest grinding.
The problem is games that force people down one route. It seems crazy to me if the EXP bonus for questing means this becomes the only viable option for levelling.
- Have follow-on gear quests for the questers
- Have EXP bonus for group play (to allow for time taken LFG)
- Have rare resource nodes for explorers and gatherers
- Have drops that can be sold for crafting and random good gear to help the grinders
- Have top quality craftable gear to help the crafters and gatherers
I could go one, but the point is that MMOs should try to find something to appeal to all types of players.
I agree with you but I also disagree with you... You will never be able to please everyone. All I am asking for is a game that caters to the other side of the quest grinding easy mode MMOs on the market right now.
Sooner or Later
Personally, going out and killing mobs just for the sake of raising my XP bar is boring. I need a purpose, a reason for doing something more that just to level up. Questing gives me a reason to be doing these things.
OK my 1st mmo was EQ... played that for 5 or 6 days before hitting uninstall.. but that had more to do with having to type to the NPCs and didn't like the fact I spend 4 days collecting mats for something and having it fail, and losing EVERYTHING I just collected, because it failed. Anyway that's beside the point....
The 2nd MMO I played was FFXI shortly after it hit the US, about a year before WoW released. I played it for 3 months.
It was fun for awhile. I enjoyed grouping when I could find one, which is in the end what really killed the game for me...
Trying to find a group when I played, between 7am-11am EST, wasn't easy or happen often.
Most days I sat online grinding, soloing green con mobs, because I couldn't find a group.
I top of that, I'm sitting there going "where the hell are the quests... it's an RPG, right? So where are they?"
What quest there were few and far between, and impossible to do solo or without leveling 1st, which required the group grind.
Well, that slowly started pissing me off... so I finally quit.
Then WoW hit and give me what I was looking for, a reason to play, a purpose, something FFXI didn't give me.... in the form of quests.
Yea, the down side was questing was mostly a solo afair, but it stop me from grouping up from time to time.
Even when leveling an alt, I would group up with random people and end up chatting with them, via tells, even after we split up.
So the social aspect is still there... just doesn't happen as often as it does in group grind games like FFXI.
Sovrath, really? We have different opinions, and that's fine. But my analogy WAS apt. You're right, I am boiling it down to the tasks one does, because that's what quest-grinding does -- it boils everything down to the tasks you do. What else is there in the game?
Honestly, I'm not saying the new forms of MMOs are horrible. I'm also definitely not saying the old forms are great. I played EQOA and then FFXI, and while I love some of the features of those games, MY LORD they take forever to get stuff done. It was great when I was 16, because what else did I have to do? But now I just don't have enough time to sit and wait for 3 hours looking for a group.
The problem is NOT mob grinding. The problem is also NOT quest grinding. The problem is that current MMOs make everything about gaining levels, and whatever way you can get there fastest, people are going to do. Either way, people will get bored. We can say oh, well at least I didn't have to wait for a group. Or, oh, at least I was able to talk to people while I played. But the problem remains -- the systems in these games are generally BORING.
Why is questing or killing a grind? I can play Street Fighter for years and not get bored of that combat. It's not even that hard -- my girlfriend loves that game, and she's not a gamer. But ask me to kill monsters by myself for years and I'll get extremely bored, because the combat systems in MMOs generally suck.
That's why, to me, you need community, and that's why, to me, GROUPING is good. I don't care if there's a quest grind if people GROUP. I want to be able to talk to people. Some of you have said it ruins immersion -- honestly? This brings me back to one of my points earlier. If you want to be immersed in a game and not bothered by other people, play a single player rpg. You will be so much more immersed, and the stories are so much more rewarding.
If you like playing mmos, but the combat systems suck, and the crafting systems are usually trivial, and you don't like having your immersion ruined by other players, please, enlighten me as to why you play them. I'd be willing to bet it's because you feel like you are gaining some real ground -- if I get to level 99 in Final Fantasy 7, who cares? If I get to level 80 in WOW and get some epic armor, well, NOW people can SEE me. That's about the only reason I can see people playing instead of a single player rpg, if you don't like grouping.
The real question isn't quest grinding vs mob grinding (it does boil down to killing mobs, really) but whether or not you prefer group play or solo play.
If you prefer solo play, take into account the things I've said, and please enlighten me as to why you play.
Botting is a problem for every type of game, random loot tables have nothing to do with it. In fact random loot tables is an option to fight afk botting because a random mob could never drop the item the person wants due to the random loot table.
Sooner or Later
There is some truth to this post in that quest grinding incorporates the worst aspect of mob grinding into it's system. The worst part of mob grinding being the type of mob grinding wherein you methodically kill weak mobs solo with no risk. That type of mob grinding is incredibly boring.
You say that the difference is that quest grinding gives you rewards, story, and purpose. Ok I'll grant you the rewards part. In a quest grinding game the worthwhile rewards are definately handed out for completing quests. Of course they are because that's how the game was intended to be played.
As for purpose, I really think the only purpose it gives anyone is the desire to get the reward.
So that leaves story. Now honestly, can you really look someone in the eyes and say that the majority of quests in those games have good stories behind them? I know that this question is purely a matter of opinion but as far as I'm concerned the vast majority of stories behind those quests are inane drivel.
Stuff like, "Oh, our crops are doing poorly. What could be causing this? Go talk to the local farmers to uncover the source of our woe." So the quest sends you running around yakking at the farmers, bouncing you around like a ping-pong ball from one npc to the next untill finally one of them tells you the problem is the local badgers digging holes in the fields.
Really? And the first farmer I talked to couldn't just tell me that himself? What kind of friggen idiot farmer is he that he couldn't see the dang holes in his field himself and put two and two together? All of that running around was absolutely nothing more than a time sink. Ok, these games are rife with time sinks and I accept that but this sort of time sink is not only not fun it's very nearly infuriating to have moronic npcs jerking me around like that.
Ok, but they've finally told you what you need to do. You need to kill 16 badgers in their fields. Now the mob grinding part starts. But as I said it's the worst kind of mob grinding. The badgers are so weak and have such limited agro ranges that they pose no threat to you at all. That is terribly boring, just hanging around methodically killing weak things that can't even really fight back.
So what you have with quest grinding is the worst sort of mob grinding plus some very annoying and boring running around and it's all justified by incredibly lame and nonsensical stories which most people won't even read. And to top it all off it makes grouping so impractical (for reasons already discussed) that you are always going to be doing all of this lame, boring stuff alone even if you want to group.
I've already admited that straight up mob grinding games are far from perfect. And yes, that can get pretty boring too. Referencing EQ again because it's the mob grinding game I played the most I will say that the most boring times were, perhaps paradoxically, the times when everying was working smoothly and efficiently. When you were in an unitterupted routine of methodically killing things it could get pretty boring. The compensation was that you didn't have to do it alone.
The fun parts of mob grinding in EQ came from a few different factors.
1. The mobs could actually fight back. All AI is stupid but in EQ you couldn't get experience from things that were so weak that they posed no threat to you at all. Generally you would beat most things that you intentionally attacked but the mobs weren't so weak that they had absolutely no chance of hurting you at all.
2. The death penalty was painfull so when you did have a close shave there was some degree of excitement to it. That "dodged a bullet" feeling. You don't get that feeling in games in which death doesn't hurt. And here I have to say that some people get confused about the desire for a painfull death penalty. Some people seem to think that guys like me enjoy having a death penalty applied to us. No, we hate having a harsh death penalty applied to us. That's the whole point in having a real death penalty. It's not getting hit with the penalty that we like, it's the threat of the penalty hanging over us that adds a little excitement to the game.
3. Unpredictable chaos. Some of the best times in EQ were when things were not falling into a methodical routine. Unexpected things could happen that caused those close shaves that broke up the routine and kept things interesting. Wandering mobs wandering a little too close and agroing on you in the middle of a fight. A pull going bad so that you got more than you bargined for. The spawns in a room all respawning too rapidly when you weren't really ready for them. Trains in dungeons (if you played EQ you know what I'm talking about) causing massive chaos and sending thirty or fourty people running for their lives or squeezing back into a corner to get out of the way.
The unpredictable chaos is a big one. I absolutely believe that you have to have a degree of unpredictability in a mob grinding game or it will be boring as hell. I could tell so many stories about times in EQ when things got crazy and the group I was with had to scramble to survive. Everyone had to be Johnny-on-the-spot with their class or we all would have gone down. Touch and go fights that went on for ten minutes or more and left you feeling a little punch drunk when it was over.
It wasn't always like that but having that sort of thing happen from time to time made it all much more interesting.
There is some truth to this post in that quest grinding incorporates the worst aspect of mob grinding into it's system. The worst part of mob grinding being the type of mob grinding wherein you methodically kill weak mobs solo with no risk. That type of mob grinding is incredibly boring.
You say that the difference is that quest grinding gives you rewards, story, and purpose. Ok I'll grant you the rewards part. In a quest grinding game the worthwhile rewards are definately handed out for completing quests. Of course they are because that's how the game was intended to be played.
As for purpose, I really think the only purpose it gives anyone is the desire to get the reward.
So that leaves story. Now honestly, can you really look someone in the eyes and say that the majority of quests in those games have good stories behind them? I know that this question is purely a matter of opinion but as far as I'm concerned the vast majority of stories behind those quests are inane drivel.
Stuff like, "Oh, our crops are doing poorly. What could be causing this? Go talk to the local farmers to uncover the source of our woe." So the quest sends you running around yakking at the farmers, bouncing you around like a ping-pong ball from one npc to the next untill finally one of them tells you the problem is the local badgers digging holes in the fields.
Really? And the first farmer I talked to couldn't just tell me that himself? What kind of friggen idiot farmer is he that he couldn't see the dang holes in his field himself and put two and two together? All of that running around was absolutely nothing more than a time sink. Ok, these games are rife with time sinks and I accept that but this sort of time sink is not only not fun it's very nearly infuriating to have moronic npcs jerking me around like that.
Ok, but they've finally told you what you need to do. You need to kill 16 badgers in their fields. Now the mob grinding part starts. But as I said it's the worst kind of mob grinding. The badgers are so weak and have such limited agro ranges that they pose no threat to you at all. That is terribly boring, just hanging around methodically killing weak things that can't even really fight back.
So what you have with quest grinding is the worst sort of mob grinding plus some very annoying and boring running around and it's all justified by incredibly lame and nonsensical stories which most people won't even read. And to top it all off it makes grouping so impractical (for reasons already discussed) that you are always going to be doing all of this lame, boring stuff alone even if you want to group.
I've already admited that straight up mob grinding games are far from perfect. And yes, that can get pretty boring too. Referencing EQ again because it's the mob grinding game I played the most I will say that the most boring times were, perhaps paradoxically, the times when everying was working smoothly and efficiently. When you were in an unitterupted routine of methodically killing things it could get pretty boring. The compensation was that you didn't have to do it alone.
The fun parts of mob grinding in EQ came from a few different factors.
1. The mobs could actually fight back. All AI is stupid but in EQ you couldn't get experience from things that were so weak that they posed no threat to you at all. Generally you would beat most things that you intentionally attacked but the mobs weren't so weak that they had absolutely no chance of hurting you at all.
2. The death penalty was painfull so when you did have a close shave there was some degree of excitement to it. That "dodged a bullet" feeling. You don't get that feeling in games in which death doesn't hurt. And here I have to say that some people get confused about the desire for a painfull death penalty. Some people seem to think that guys like me enjoy having a death penalty applied to us. No, we hate having a harsh death penalty applied to us. That's the whole point in having a real death penalty. It's not getting hit with the penalty that we like, it's the threat of the penalty hanging over us that adds a little excitement to the game.
3. Unpredictable chaos. Some of the best times in EQ were when things were not falling into a methodical routine. Unexpected things could happen that caused those close shaves that broke up the routine and kept things interesting. Wandering mobs wandering a little too close and agroing on you in the middle of a fight. A pull going bad so that you got more than you bargined for. The spawns in a room all respawning too rapidly when you weren't really ready for them. Trains in dungeons (if you played EQ you know what I'm talking about) causing massive chaos and sending thirty or fourty people running for their lives or squeezing back into a corner to get out of the way.
The unpredictable chaos is a big one. I absolutely believe that you have to have a degree of unpredictability in a mob grinding game or it will be boring as hell. I could tell so many stories about times in EQ when things got crazy and the group I was with had to scramble to survive. Everyone had to be Johnny-on-the-spot with their class or we all would have gone down. Touch and go fights that went on for ten minutes or more and left you feeling a little punch drunk when it was over.
It wasn't always like that but having that sort of thing happen from time to time made it all much more interesting.
Most of the stories in quests are forgetable and pretty pointless. Not all though. There are plenty of really good ones. But anything is better than nothing at all.
1. Mobs in WOW also fight back and can be hard if you actually choose to attack the hard ones. Because you're not forced to, its much easier to kill greens all day long with little to no threat. That doesn't mean a challenge isn't there. You just have to purposely go after the harder mobs. I prefer the choice to control the difficulty, as do most people. I imagine that was the motivation behind Blizzard. That and of course giving people the choice to kill mobs solo in a fun way.
2. A harsh death penalty no doubt gives things a rush, but eventually that rush wears off and turns to tedium and frustration esspecially when deaths can be caused by others. THEN it becomes a PITA. I'm not advocating a lack of a punishment like in WAR or AOC. WOWs was well balanced before money flowed like water, before alts, and people buying gold. When you died it did hurt. You died enough and you couldn't buy that new spell exactly when you wanted to. The armor degrading took its toll as well. It was a sting. It wasn't a kick in the balls like in EQ or DAOC;)
3. WOW has some unpredictable chaos as well. You have to just get out of the starter areas, which many people that mock the game judge everything by. Elite and named mobs do roam and are more prevalent in the expansions. Play on a PvP server and there's chaos as soon as you leave a town. You can overextend yourself as well and I don't miss TRAINS one bit. Again, many people choose to take the easy road and kill greens all day without risk. Soloing in an elite area with enemy players around and there were plenty of chance to die. Trains were a side effect of bad programming and when combined with a death penalty, a very easy way to cause extensive amounts of grief. I remember it well in DAOC because it happened constantly;) Hearing people yell TRAIN wore thin quickly.
I agree with you about the chaos. When all you're doing is grinding mobs, without the chaos it can get extremely tedious. Its the reason I played on a PvP in WOW. Chaos without extreme frustration, a happy medium at least for me. WAR and AOC had very bland PvE and the reason was a server lack of being able to lose and when you did, the penalty was so non-existant, it really didn't feel like losing.
I wish every darn quest was amazing, but its just not realistic. WOW had plenty of the best examples of what you can do with a quest in a MMO. They did it all within reason and feasibility. Ignoring the text completely and using mods to remove any reading what so ever doesn't help though. Using FAQs to tell you exactly what to do without even bothering to figure out the basics doesn't fill me with any sympathy, when those same people talk about how boring it can be. I didn't read every quest, but I did read a lot of them which immerses you in the lore. Choosing to ignore them all will make the game boring. You can't help those people and its not my problem. GOing into a game with the kind of attitude that all the stories suck, will essentially prevent you from finding any joy. But apparently thats what alot of whining people want. Misery.
Neaderthal makes some really good points about the flaws in a quest grinding system currently. Most solo mobs are push overs in mmos, but only because players find the sweet spot of where the kill/downtime ratio is at a premium. Really players could do higher level quests, but they don't because the return on investment/time spent isn't as good. It doesn't matter what level the mobs are labeled or the amount experience of experience they give, players will find that spot. Playing with the experience rewards to scale with difficulty also ramps up the "grind" aspect of mob grinding. It really is just an experience/effort ratio since the AI is the lacking part of the equation.
He is also right about many games having way to many boring quests. This stems from developers wanting to claim "we have over 2,500 quests in our game". Most of them are just recycled crap. Lotro/wow being an exception imho. Lotro did a fine job of showing a world in trouble through the actions of the npc quest givers. Wow tells some fantastic stories that are entertaining to read not to mention the new mechanics they have added really breath life into questing. Riding horses while getting chased across the zone by werewolves and having to use some "riding" abilities to save yourself. Not to say both don't have to many nonsense quests though, because they sure do.
Yet at the same time you point out the flaws as if they are set in stone and things that cannot be fixed.
For example: the weak farmer brown quests should be labeled as tasks. They should be aimed at giving people something to do when they are without a group for whatever reasons. Simple little tasks that have decent motivations, rewards, story, etc. They should be treated for exactly what they are.
Quests should then be a little bigger in scale. Either needing more players, tougher mobs, longer stories, longer journies, more centralized storylines, random branches in story/direction based on factions or state of the world, etc (not necessarily better rewards).
Maybe there is a sliding scale between tasks/quests for various difficulties, etc.
The phasing mechanic in lich king also opens the door to players actually effecting the world through their actions. It is still a very rough element, but it has lots of potential.
Another example is combine questing with mob grinding and I bet some people warm up to it if it is made as another available path for players to follow. Set up some dynamic areas where players need to defend something from waves of npcs for a time period of a number of creatures. Sort of like how warhammer does PQ's, but with some actual life built into them or ring events in everquest. Have it scale dynamically with players in the area or on the quest. Add a dozen other variations and now players can do something else than follow quest locations or randomly picking spots to murder anything that moves simply for the experience it offers.
Questing and mob grinding as we know it now just needs an overhaul. It is long since time that someone looks at questing like blizzard did to mmos and asks what do players like about this, what don't they like, how can it be improved, etc.
Edit: i have to echo josher in not missing trains one bit. Sure I have some fun memmories of them, but more often than not they become tools of grief or punishment for the stupidity of someone else that just happens to be running by you. Why not have mobs in the dungeon let out a warcry and gather up some allies to come get you instead of waiting to be pulled? Same effect, no grief, good luck hope you win?
I'm just going to reply briefly to the thing about trains. I can certainly understand the lack of enthusiasm for reinstating that particular phenomenon. I have good and bad memories of it but you are right in saying that people used it as a griefing mechanism.
Sometimes it was kind of fun, sort of a communal "RUN LIKE HELL", moment for everyone in the dungeon. And sometimes it was more like, "That _____ing idiot has pulled 10 trains in the last 20 minutes. They should ban his arse from the game."
i hate quest grinding when it is required to level (EQ, WOW, etc). But when you make it an alternative to levelling for just some rewards and some xp, but mostly for a story....then this to me is what questing should be about....not for just the xp and money.
It's possibly why i loved swg and love eve....i don't have to quest, those are very minor components of the game...and were completely optional.
Maybe MMOs really should just start labeling your mindless, go take this letter here or kill 15 bunnies, as TASKS. They really are just something to do, not really a quest. Of course a quest can involve killing things or delivering something, but if the story is inconsequential a quest isn't really a good definition. A quest really should have a story with characters, ideally.
umm EQ did not have a quest grind at all. It had very few quest and those were all optional.
Sooner or Later
I think anything done for too long is bad- and this applies to the old school and new school mmos. It's a tragedy of the mmo genre that it needs to be done- that, players have to engage in something so many times that it is scarcely enjoyable and becomes a 'grind'. Old-school grinding was just as soul-destroying as the quest-grinds- all because of the game's unfortunate need for an extended treadmill.
I can't say I absolutely hate griding, it's just the matter of when you've done it for over an hour, and you only get about 10% of the exp you need. That's when it gets annoying. Not to mention when there's a limited amount of quests you can do for good amounts of experience. So in the end, you do the same old thing over and over, and that's how a lot of games start to burn out fast.
What they truely need, are changing quests that are challenging, but once you complete them, they pretty much level you or whatever you're tryin' to do. You shouldn't have to do the same easy thing over and over, you should have an extremely hard task that you and a batch of friends can tackle down for masses of exp or whatever your goal is. so you don't kill the same monsters and such repetitively, but it's not an instantly thing, you actually have to work for it.