Am I the only one who hates quest grinding? (rant inside)

Eronakis · April 2009

I know this has nothing to do with anything for mmo's in this post I am about to put here but I got a chuckle out of it. My friend was here while I was looking at the forums and he asked to read your rant. The 1st thing he said was this.. "This OP must really hate his life because he grinded out his human form, from evolution..according to his name here.."

JB47394 · April 2009

Originally posted by firesnake77
Originally posted by JB47394
Although EverQuest suffered from stratification, the glacial pace of advancement brought a certain stability. You knew that you'd be level 38 for the next couple weeks, and you'd be killing the same monsters - perhaps even the exact same room - for most of that time.
THIS sounds utterly horrible. I can't imagine anyone paying for such an experience.

To the OP, I thought your post was good, and you had some very valid points. But I still think even crappy questing beats the scenario described above by JB47394. Beats it by FAR.

The issue is not which is better but to understand that slowly advancing through a series of layers that socially stratifies a player community permits more socialization than rapidly advancing through it. It is simply a design point to be appreciated.

Notice how there is stability in the raiding community in World of Warcraft. That's because the players are all grinding the same content day after day without gaining levels. That's pretty much what the EverQuest experience was like. In EverQuest, the grinding was for experience and gear. In World of Warcraft, the grinding is for gear (and other stuff, I suppose).

Derrial · April 2009

Originally posted by Josher
Originally posted by CayneJobb
The problem for me is uninteresting quests. When I play a single-player RPG, the quests are usually interesting and very story-driven. I feel like each quest advances the game's story or is at least somewhat compelling. In MMORPGs, they go for quantity over quality, loading up the games up with hundreds of dull, repetitive, quests that feel like they're created from a template. MMO quests are generally too short (kill 10 bears is not a quest, it's a menial task), too similar to each other, too numerous, too generic.
Another problem too is that quests are all text in MMOs. If they voice-record all quests in an MMO (maybe a gargantuan undertaking, but that's mostly because there are too many quests) it would help bring the quests alive. When I jump onto an MMO at 2am, I really don't want to read blocks of quest text. Too often I find myself just reading the part that tells me what I have to do and then go off and do it.

I imagine you didn't play older MMOs, or else you wouldn't complain about uninteresting quests, because just getting something even semi-interesting was step up from nothing=)

You're right, I didn't play many older MMOs. I've played Lineage II which has extremely lame quests, and I definitely noticed the improvement in games like WoW and LOTRO, but I'm still complaining.

You have a very valid point, but you just can't expect every quest to be great. Think about how much time you spend on single player RPGs. 60 hrs average maybe less and think of all the filler in them? You beat it in 2 weeks. How much time do you spend in a MMO? Months? Years? It takes years just to create a quality 60 hr single player game. If after 3 yrs in development, a MMO only kept you busy for a couple of weeks, you've got some problems. Its just not feasable. Something has to give. Thats where all the filler quests come in. They fill in the time between the good ones.

Well, typically MMOs keep you busy for years with endgame stuff like raiding and PvP, not so much questing unless you count tripe like rep-grind daily quests. The questing/leveling aspect of a game like WoW, for example, is infamously fast. In its current state, I'd say WoW 1-80 takes probably like 20-30 hours tops, and that's if you stop to smell the roses. Then the "real game begins," as they say.

But I understand your point, and I still don't think bland filler quests are necessary. Let me put it this way: I would rather do one quest with a good story, voiced dialogue, and a good reward that requires me to travel all over the world killing 1000 mobs than to do 100 dull, repetitive, melt-my-eyes-from-reading-blocks-of-text quests that require me to kill 10 mobs each and reward me with junk items. It would probably be much less work for developers to make the one big quest and much more enjoyable to me.

Some MMOs do have lots of VO, but like you said, you can't record voice for every quest.

Except if you make big quests like what I describe above, your game only needs about 20-30 quests total and then each one can be voice-acted, animated, include cutscenes, whatever you want.

Also, MMOs aren't single player games. You can't be the hero that saves the world, because there are 15k other players on the server that want to do the same thing. That kind of limits the possibilities if you want a persistent world.

That's ok. I'm not one of those who needs to be known by everyone in the game. I just want to feel like I'm involved in an epic story instead of doing repetitive menial labor for ornery NPCs in an effort to get to the level cap as fast as I can.

As far as reading blocks of text, I assume you didn't play RPGs in the 90s. There was very little to no voice at all besides cut scenes maybe=)

I did play a few RPGs in the 90s. Adventure games too like Maniac Mansion with floating text over the heads of the blocky characters. Or better yet, Infocom text adventures like Zork and Planetfall - those were ALL text. But hey, it ain't the 90s anymore. We should be well past the text adventures, n'est pas?

firesnake77 · April 2009

Originally posted by JB47394
The issue is not which is better but to understand that slowly advancing through a series of layers that socially stratifies a player community permits more socialization than rapidly advancing through it. It is simply a design point to be appreciated.

Ah, okay. I can see and concede this point. I, myself, have often remarked that the leveling speed is too great in WoW and its clones. I'd love to see it take six months or more for an average, reasonably active player to hit level cap.

Actually, I'd rather these games not have a "level cap" or anything called "endgame" at all, but that's a much bigger can of worms.

So how many of the people who have complained about the WoW-like MMORPGS in this thread would feel that your issues were largely addressed if level advancement in WoW (or its clones) simply took ten times as long as it does now?

Also, you all keep using this term, "quest grinding". I don't see it that way, and never, before reading this thread, had it ever even occurred to me to look at questing as a "grind". I've levelled up a lot of characters in several of the WoW-like MMORPGS, and I always just played the game and enjoyed the content. It never felt like a grind to me. The gameplay is varied and ever-changing when you quest. You go different places, see different things, achieve different goals, and complete objectives in different ways. Along the way, you HAPPEN to gain XP and loot, and level up. And sometimes (not always), there's even a cool story behind it.

Grinding, on the other hand, is just killing the exact same mobs, in the exact same place, in the exact same way, over and over and over and over, COUNTLESS times, just to move an XP bar up in tiny increments until you finally ding. That's a grind, for sure. I've done it, but it sure isn't fun. To me. Obviously others have different tastes in fun.

I get that many people don't like questing as it exists in WoW and its clones. I can see your points, and I can totally understand how it might feel really dissatisfying to many gamers. I don't share that feeling, obviously, but I do GET it. It's a totally valid preference.

However, many of the arguments, or more specifically the CLAIMS, being made in this thread by people about WoW and WoW-clones are just plain untrue. False dichotomies are being set up all over the place, and massive, sweeping generalities are being thrown around based on . . . well, based on very little, that I can see. Rumors maybe? Tiny bits of personally skewed experience? Sheer speculation? Unsubstantiated negative thinking elevated to the level of fact?

You can level just fine in any of these games without questing. You can get good gear in any of these games without questing. You can find groups in any of these games to quest, to grind, to run instances, or to do whatever else you want to do. All of the arguments that WoW and WoW-like MMORPGs "force" you to solo or "force" you to quest are just pure bunk. Nonsense. Lies, frankly. The people making these claims either have very little experience with the games in question, or have allowed their preconceptions and prejudices to actually color (or shape) their experiences with these games, or they're just really lousy at finding ways to make the games work for them (uncreative, impatient, closed-minded, all of the above?), or maybe they're just bad at dealing with people in a setting that doesn't FORCE people to seek out contact with them. Who knows? But the limited experiences that are being claimed here are NOT universal, nor necessary.

In other words, as Josher said earlier in the thread, if you're having these problems with these games . . . it's not the game, it's YOU.

And hey, if you want to revise your complaints to say, "In these games, I cannot have the kind of play experience I like without making extra effort, adapting my methodology, learning anything new, or having to actually interact with people in slightly more demanding ways, and therefore, in order to take the path of least resistance and stay as close as possible to my prior comfort zone, I am FORCED to do x, or simply not play at all because the gameplay style I want is not automatically enforced upon the playerbase and thus handed to me by default," then sure, I'm totally behind you, and have no problem with your reasoning. In that case, you have my sympathies.

nate1980 · April 2009

Originally posted by firesnake77

Originally posted by JB47394
The issue is not which is better but to understand that slowly advancing through a series of layers that socially stratifies a player community permits more socialization than rapidly advancing through it. It is simply a design point to be appreciated.