I still pay PWI because I dont have much time up my sleeve and really cant be bothered learning a new game (I have GW2 but havent jumped into it yet for certain reasons). Although outdated by the sounds of things, I keep playing because of the promise and excitement of new things with major updates when they come along. The OP hits the nail on the head. PWI was really badly grindy from levels 1-80 until fairly recently, now grind type quests for those levels have been updated and are quicker and easier with much greater rewards. For levels 80-100 but, the grind is terrible and people just bypass those levels usualy with a particular system in place that defeats the whole purpose, but gets you to end-game reasonably quickly. There is now a call from players to similarly change those level 80-100 quests to make them worth doing also.
I have thought for some time now that player housing as an end-game activity should be more greatly developed. I think I was reading in Acheage (not sure) about the housing and tax to keep your house and such things and I think this is where its at.
I mean, imagine at end game everyone running around in the high-end op gear. At that point the only thing that might set people apart is a self build house/ship or something similar - something you cant buy - where a small structure shows little effort, but a castle shows great effort. I would love to see something like that. The whole mechanics of grinding proves to me that people WILL grind if the reward is worth the effort (think of somthing simple like Mine Craft). I would embrace an opportunity to build something big in an MMO if the effort directly correlated to the results and if they couldnt be overshadowed by the simple act of using real cash by someone else to get similar result to all the hours/days/weeks that someone else might put in.
For some unknown reasons I always loved grinding on Lineage 2 back in the time. I think it's because my clan and the open world pvp. (You was in danger 24/7 )
(Off topic: When I jumped into WoW for the first time, I lvled up to 20+ just by killing mobs. Until I realized that these exclamation marks above the NPCs actually meant something :P For someone who used to wrap his keyboard with duct tape so that his toon could auto farm endlessly for days and days, quests were the best anti-grind thing ever.)
On topic: Imho, grind is actually something good, a nescessary evil simply because it' s vital for every MMOs success. Now before you start raging think about this: why WoW was such a big success? Yes it was innovative, yes it had great lore etc but it's secret weapon was the so called (and much hated these days) "hamster wheel".
Every P2P MMO needs a hamster wheel in order to make players play (and pay) for a loooong time. Which means that the hamster wheel (aka grind mechanisms) is actually what makes an MMO addictive and I believe addiction is the real reason someone will keep playing a game 24/7.
That's why I believe, modern MMOs fail to achieve the numbers (and longevity) of their predecessors. After all, grind is like nicotine. Every smoker knows that it's bad for our health, yet it's what keeps us smoking.
But maybe I m wrong. Gamers demand so much these days but are less and less eager to pay for it, so it could be that even we (the gamers) don't really know what we want . But it makes me sad that technically excellent games like GW2 failed to capture me for a month or two, while grind-fests like EQ or even vanilla WoW kept my interest burning for years.
in different mmoRPGs i had different "end game" experiences....
in DaoC it was RvR, MLs, Artifact farming, Grinding twinks, socialising....
in SW:G it was hanging out in cantinas talking to people while i dance for them, getting the latest rumors from crafters, spending hours and hours traveling the galaxie to find a new perfect outfit, designing hourses for other people, destroying that nasty star destroyer with my B-wing.....
in my short vacation in WoW it was raiding cause there was literaly nothing else to do anymore... people didn't meet to just hang out.... i made 0 friends in WoW with which i still play....
in COH/COV, CO, DCUO it was making great outfits for myself trying out new powers cause they look amazing.....
in my opinion grinding was one of the best experiences in mmoRPGs i ever had... spending hours and hours camping ML/Artifact spots in DaoC with a couple of friends so we can finaly get that damn item and hoping noone comes and steal the spot was amazing...
im a big enemy of those instanced raids/dungeons and quests.... not quests in general but how they are in mmoRPGs.... in p&p rpgs a quest was sometimes a weeklong epic task given by a stranger to do something that was challanging.... in todays mmoRPGs its kill 20 bunnys cause they threaten the world and the next quest is kill 22 frogs cause they threaten the world... and then comes to endless GRIND for items.... it doesnt matter to me how fancy you call it raiding questing farming or whatever its still a mindless grind killing the same boss over and over and over again....
i still remember an 4 hour long talk with some stranger in SW:G i had never met him before i at that time rented out my lots to make some quick cache.... and we spend hours running around to find a perfect spot for him to place his harvesters....
i sincerely hope that the coming mmoRPGs bring some of the old stuff back but i think the problem is less the game then more the player
I have bait and switched my play style! I am no longer content with the current "theme park" style endgame, i.e raids, dailies, gear farm. Infact in recent days I have returned to dark age of camelot and am enjoying keep taking and so forth. I am not a pvp'r by heart all I know is this is more fun playing with and against people rather than mostly alone or to a raid schedule with set time frames and time expected. I do sometimes like getting things done on my own or in small teams in short pockets of fun engaging content. I am not against PvE I just don't like where it is at the moment, such things as raiding and especially dailies do feel too much like work.
Although I will say I did enjoy the slight difficulty level and the time CoX raids took.
The grind does not bother me as long as their is a reward worth obtaining at the end. Folks complain about grinding now days, they don't remember swg. We had the holo grind for jedi back in the day, that was changed to grinding out xp to dump at the vialiage, not that was a true grind. A lot of the newer mmo's don't put in artificial grinds, however they forget to reward you. I will just point at swtor for instance. There was a grind put in at level 50 so you could get purple add on's for your gear, well the problem was well after a very short grind you were left with nothing but pvp.
That pretty much summarizes the grinding that's involved in MMOs. I look forward to the day when I can be the veteran looking back and sharing my tales to the newbies.
I think the appeal of endgame stuff for me is that I can really flush out my character's potential. Sure, in games like SWTOR I can get the best kind of gear of his or her level as I go through the motions of gaining experience and going through the story, and I can use their moves in the best way possible but it isn't necessary for me to do so to the full extent as doing end game stuff. When I reach the level cap, though, my sole mission is to flush out my character's abilities as well as get them the best of the best gear so they can live up to their potential. Hence why I like to raid so much and why I'm willing to grind my way through dailies and hard-mode flashpoints/dungeons.
what keeps me going is haveing a connections with my char.
tools to RP when i want to with friends without haveing to make do, with areas people arnt likely to harras us in.
content that is fun to go through even if not tuly rewarding, cause eventually i WILL get all best tweaked build possable and then whats left to do? wait for more ubber gear please no.
i do like collectables, things like badges, intuitive crafting for more then gear upgrades, vanity pets, that i get in game rather then buying off the shop of via constant grind, one time items for event. you know the show off dun stuff that dousnt actully affect game play.
. . . . . . . . .base editor with my base that i spent 5 years building. . . . . . . . ;_; i miss my base.
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
This one might be a multiple poster for me, as it's a long article and I'm taking things out as I think about them.
"The obvious problem here is content creation on the developer’s part. They just spent 4+ years making enough content to satisfy the leveling grind for at best three months, and at worst a marathon weekend bender."
First, spending four years or more on content to satisfy the leveling grind is unnecessary and kind of ridiculous. Put together a plan and stick to it, don't just make the same crap we've been playing with for fourteen years: FedEx, Kill, Gather, and Zone; the plan I'm talking about is developing story lines to flesh out, with short, medium, and long chains of tasks. Oh, and that's another thing: it's NOT a quest guys, it's a task, at best. A quest would be, potentially, thousands of what you call quests, now, which each are a single task the character is called on to complete and receive a reward for. It IS possible to have stories with substance and length, as well as being what grinder's and leveler's are looking for to move ahead. As long as they're making XP and getting goods from the game, who cares beyond that what they want.
Second, I could not possibly perform all tasks developed over four years or more in three months or less! If someone's incapable of spreading time out while playing this game, so they might enjoy it and take time to see all of the other things the developers busted their tails to put into the game, they have a problem far beyond completing tasks.
"Developers need a player to feel like they are constantly working towards accomplishing something, but don’t have the resources to create eternal gameplay. What they end up making is either “dailies” or something akin to a Raid: a mechanics-heavy piece of content that can be repeated (usually at time-locked intervals), giving out fractions of a reward for each completion."
How absolutely despicable this entire paragraph is; I know it's the truth, but I think this is why I've never "finished" an MMORPG. The closest I ever came was World of Warcraft, and I stopped playing that just prior to Burning Crusade, after I explored the last square centimeter of every bit of space I could get into, whether I was supposed to get into it or not.
It should NOT be the Developer's responsibility to come up with further content; the game is over, and a final task should be set for the player, a congratulations for winning, a great closing video, and that's it. Most players will have, by this time, played this game over the course of a couple of years, it's time to move on, anyway, so do so.
Dailies and Raids are the utterly despicable part of my statement, above. I'm one of those strange people who utterly despises PvP and WILL NOT participate in it, except in a game like MechWarrior Online, where it's something of a necessity and is magnificently done, and I likewise despise Raids. The idea of being a part of a small army destroys my characters uniqueness, ruins the way I prefer to play, and diminishes the immense power I have grown through the course of the game to almost nothing. Of the Raids I have participated in, and I avoid these like the plague, it has been this overblown, underbuilt, bit of crap that is only a larger instance, having monsters that are, except for their hit points, otherwise insignificant.
Raids and dailies should not be necessary, and I will not be doing them if I can help it. To make them a major part of any story line, as they have in Lord of the Rings Online, I'm coming to find out, is ridiculous. There are much better means of pulling off late to end-game content than these hustles and dodges.
"Developers need a player to feel like they are constantly working towards accomplishing something, but don’t have the resources to create eternal gameplay. What they end up making is either “dailies” or something akin to a Raid: a mechanics-heavy piece of content that can be repeated (usually at time-locked intervals), giving out fractions of a reward for each completion."
How absolutely despicable this entire paragraph is; I know it's the truth, but I think this is why I've never "finished" an MMORPG. The closest I ever came was World of Warcraft, and I stopped playing that just prior to Burning Crusade, after I explored the last square centimeter of every bit of space I could get into, whether I was supposed to get into it or not.
It should NOT be the Developer's responsibility to come up with further content; the game is over, and a final task should be set for the player, a congratulations for winning, a great closing video, and that's it. Most players will have, by this time, played this game over the course of a couple of years, it's time to move on, anyway, so do so.
Dailies and Raids are the utterly despicable part of my statement, above. I'm one of those strange people who utterly despises PvP and WILL NOT participate in it, except in a game like MechWarrior Online, where it's something of a necessity and is magnificently done, and I likewise despise Raids. The idea of being a part of a small army destroys my characters uniqueness, ruins the way I prefer to play, and diminishes the immense power I have grown through the course of the game to almost nothing. Of the Raids I have participated in, and I avoid these like the plague, it has been this overblown, underbuilt, bit of crap that is only a larger instance, having monsters that are, except for their hit points, otherwise insignificant.
Raids and dailies should not be necessary, and I will not be doing them if I can help it. To make them a major part of any story line, as they have in Lord of the Rings Online, I'm coming to find out, is ridiculous. There are much better means of pulling off late to end-game content than these hustles and dodges.
. . . . . . . everything you just said you hated is pretty much what made up the meat of every MMO since they started comening out are you sure actully like MMOs as a genra
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
"What motivates you still playing your character when you’ve reached the level cap?"
Again, I've not reached the level cap in any of my current games, because I don't play those ridiculous placeholder events at the supposed "end-game". You said it best, there should be no level cap. Frankly, if levels were removed altogether, replaced by skills and abilities being raised individually, instead, and content worked so the types of opposition you and/or your team faces scaled for them, and gear was removed as a primary reason to play the game, and there were no requirement for grouping (which, right now, in EVERY SINGLE GAME, is group or die), but positive reasons to group were built into the games, then I could concentrate on character development and exploration, like I want to. The guy who wants to grind would have every reason to grind through all of the content, in whatever order and for whatever reason they wanted to. The person who wants to craft could get their crafting skills up all the way without the necessity of grinding through level-based zones. Then, we could really see a true advent of sandbox MMOs, instead of the hybrid sandbox/theme parks developers are trying to push through, now.
What kept me playing my maximum level characters (and not alts) in my fave MMO (COH) was the joy of playing the character. In that MMO (COH) rather than other MMO's I could "play down" or be "exemplared" (to use COH terminology) and thus able to partake in my share of loot, scaled appropriately for the team size and level. Later on City of Heroes developed an Incarnate system for maximum level characters--and like many people I plugged away at it, reaping the rewards. While in the In-Game rewards would be deemed "worth the effort" by many, what really kept me coming back was the fun of teaming up! Too bad, there's just no other MMORPG on the market today that has even 1/2 the creativity, fun, and puts players in the driver's seat at City of Heroes.
I really enjoyed reading your article, Mr. Miller. In fact, you are one of the reasons why I read MMORPG.com e-magazine at all. Since COH ended, I am just not into MMORPG's at all. Maybe that's just as well, since I do have other interests and hobbies, such as local grassroots politics, and I'll admit an MMORPG as fine as City of Heroes diverted me from RL heroic causes. Still, I and others sure miss the fun we had in virtual space. Hats off to you, sir. /em holdtorch!
"Developers need a player to feel like they are constantly working towards accomplishing something, but don’t have the resources to create eternal gameplay. What they end up making is either “dailies” or something akin to a Raid: a mechanics-heavy piece of content that can be repeated (usually at time-locked intervals), giving out fractions of a reward for each completion."
How absolutely despicable this entire paragraph is; I know it's the truth, but I think this is why I've never "finished" an MMORPG. The closest I ever came was World of Warcraft, and I stopped playing that just prior to Burning Crusade, after I explored the last square centimeter of every bit of space I could get into, whether I was supposed to get into it or not.
It should NOT be the Developer's responsibility to come up with further content; the game is over, and a final task should be set for the player, a congratulations for winning, a great closing video, and that's it. Most players will have, by this time, played this game over the course of a couple of years, it's time to move on, anyway, so do so.
Dailies and Raids are the utterly despicable part of my statement, above. I'm one of those strange people who utterly despises PvP and WILL NOT participate in it, except in a game like MechWarrior Online, where it's something of a necessity and is magnificently done, and I likewise despise Raids. The idea of being a part of a small army destroys my characters uniqueness, ruins the way I prefer to play, and diminishes the immense power I have grown through the course of the game to almost nothing. Of the Raids I have participated in, and I avoid these like the plague, it has been this overblown, underbuilt, bit of crap that is only a larger instance, having monsters that are, except for their hit points, otherwise insignificant.
Raids and dailies should not be necessary, and I will not be doing them if I can help it. To make them a major part of any story line, as they have in Lord of the Rings Online, I'm coming to find out, is ridiculous. There are much better means of pulling off late to end-game content than these hustles and dodges.
. . . . . . . everything you just said you hated is pretty much what made up the meat of every MMO since they started comening out are you sure actully like MMOs as a genra
That is absolutely correct. These are called MMORPGs, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, and they should live up to their classification; otherwise, rename them MMOCGs, or Combat Grinds. cRPGs are NOT, except in rare circumstances, such as with Oblivion and Fallout 3, related to role-playing at all. LotRO has come close, but there are still essential social elements that are left out, and it is not truly an RPG.
Apologies for my typos; the above comment SHOULD read:
What kept me playing my maximum level characters (and not alts) in my fave MMORPG (COH) was the joy of playing the character. In that MMO (COH) unlike other MMO's I could "play down" or be "exemplared" (to use COH terminology) and thus able to partake in my share of loot, scaled appropriately for the team size and level, etc. Later on City of Heroes developed an Incarnate system for maximum level characters--and like many people I plugged away at it, reaping the rewards. While the In-Game rewards would be deemed "worth the effort" by many, what really kept me coming back was the fun of teaming up! Too bad, there's just no other MMORPG on the market today that has even half the creativity of, fun, and puts players in the driver's seat as City of Heroes.
I really enjoyed reading your article, Mr. Miller. In fact, you are one of the reasons why I read MMORPG.com e-magazine. Since COH ended, I am just not into MMORPG's at all. Maybe that's just as well, since I do have other interests and hobbies, such as local grassroots politics, and I'll admit an MMORPG as fine as City of Heroes diverted me from RL heroic causes. Still, I and others sure miss the fun we had in virtual space. Hats off to you, sir.
Originally posted by JohnR Apologies for my typos; the above comment SHOULD read:
What kept me playing my maximum level characters (and not alts) in my fave MMORPG (COH) was the joy of playing the character. In that MMO (COH) unlike other MMO's I could "play down" or be "exemplared" (to use COH terminology) and thus able to partake in my share of loot, scaled appropriately for the team size and level, etc. Later on City of Heroes developed an Incarnate system for maximum level characters--and like many people I plugged away at it, reaping the rewards. While the In-Game rewards would be deemed "worth the effort" by many, what really kept me coming back was the fun of teaming up! Too bad, there's just no other MMORPG on the market today that has even half the creativity of, fun, and puts players in the driver's seat as City of Heroes.
I really enjoyed reading your article, Mr. Miller. In fact, you are one of the reasons why I read MMORPG.com e-magazine. Since COH ended, I am just not into MMORPG's at all. Maybe that's just as well, since I do have other interests and hobbies, such as local grassroots politics, and I'll admit an MMORPG as fine as City of Heroes diverted me from RL heroic causes. Still, I and others sure miss the fun we had in virtual space. Hats off to you, sir.
/em holdtorch!
/em holdtorch
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
"Then you too can sit back and think, “You think THIS is grindy? Back in MY day we had to...”"
And as a result, to prove to yourself that you were just "better" because you had to "work harder", the inevitable happens...the newer players are lazy and entitled, want it all handed to them...yes, we know these lyrics, we've heard the song before.
My example: 1994--the "janitor" only cleaned the corpses out of your "room" once in a great while, as long as the room segment never "unloaded" (because players were in it).
After a three hour "hunting" party,
>Look >You see (room description) >You also see: a gnoll (dead), a gnoll (dead), a dagger, an axe, a gnoll (dead), a gnoll (dead), a dagger, an axe, a gnoll (dead), a gnoll (dead), a dagger, an axe, a gnoll (dead), a gnoll (dead), a dagger, an axe, a gnoll (dead), a gnoll (dead), a dagger, an axe, a gnoll (dead), a gnoll (dead), a dagger, an axe... Jimbob, Billyjoe, and Thundercask.
You get the idea. Two or three players standing atop a pile of corpses and worthless, ignored gear. You could gather up all of those dagger and axes (asuming you were low on encumbrance and good at writing gathering scripts), to sell for a copper each (assuming you were good at writing sell scripts)...
This wasn't "grinding" (to my knowledge, that expression had even been invented yet); it was the one and only way to earn experience and progress a character. This was state of the art, there was nothing else.
It took the "Korean Grinders" to teach us what "Grind" really meant, in the mmo universe.
Took another few years to hear "quest griinding". The "badge grinding" "reputation grinding" "daily grinding" et al.
1994 me? I wasn't "working" any harder. Still pushing buttons on a keyboard. What I was doing was experiencing the most minimally user-friendly game environments ever concocted by closet coding sadists... And by far the least variety of options (as far as character advancement went). If you wanted to advance in levels, you went out and you killed mobs. Period.
And it was a long, long trip to the cap, too.
Which may explain why we took so much time out to roleplay (and other archaic concepts).
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Agreed, CoH was the best MMORPG I ever played, and it ruined me for other games by raising my expectations to the highest level possible.
/em holdtorch!
"Well sure, the FrinkiacVII looks impressive - DON'T TOUCH IT - but I predict that within 100 years computers will be TWICE as powerful, ten THOUSAND times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them." -Prof. Frink
> I’d like to pose a question for you all. What motivates you still playing your character when you’ve reached the level cap?
Playing alternate characters is pretty much the only thing that will keep me playing an MMO once I've reached the cap (dungeon runs, dailies and pvp just aren't enjoyable to me in any form). In order for alting to be worthwhile to me, though, the game needs to have enough variety that I'll be able to have a sufficiently different experience leveling up again. Ideally, that means new races to play, new classes or skills to try and new areas to explore. Realistically, just one or two of those three would probably be enough; the more variety there is, however, the longer I'll probably stay.
Agreed. End game is the end of the game to me, as another poster stated. Time to play an alt, but only if I don't have to retread the EXACT same content. Otherwise? On to another game. There are certainly plenty of MMOs these days to move to.
For me once I hit level cap unless the world is big enough to have a bunch of stuff that I did not get to see on the way or the lore is deep enough that there are other questlines to follow that I missed or the most rare that I found a group of players that are on the same wavelength as myself to make doing group content or pvp worthwhile I just quit and move on to another game until there would be a signifcant content expansion released.
I really don't understand those who say all the questing and character development are either boring or a waste of time but raiding the same 3 dungeons 3 times a week for month's on end in hopes that enough shinies drop to outfit you character in gear that will be obsoleted as soon as the next raid comes out makes no sense to me.
What motivated me to play my character at the level cap?
In WoW it was only do world PvP, or to assist up-and-coming friends. Otherwise, it was parked in the garage, and I was working on alts.
In CoH, it was different. Somehow (possibly the heavy customization?) the game allowed me to really connect to my character in a way other games didn't. So it was easy to get a little lost in the roleplay as I went toe-to-toe with giant monsters or gangs in solo missions because I'd no idea if I'd win or not. The sidekicking program was great, too, for making me feel my character was young and fresh, and contributing beneficially to my friends and supergroup.
For me the grind (leveling up) never felt grindy. because i was grinding with others chatting role playing. it kept your mind of the grind. I had numerous alts back then.
Right now i cannot bear to actually level another character outside of my main. because the world where u venture in doing those quests again. makes it extremely boring.
Also grindign towards a certain goal makes the grind again alot less grindy. and if u after awhile finnaly acomplished said goal you where overjoyed happy as can be. Now with our fast pace leveling and easy gear mechanics there is nothing to make you overjoyed.
to the question what motivates me to keep playing at level cap. Currently my real life friends. Pull them out of the equation and i will disapear asswell.
I played City of Heroes for a little over four years up to the 3 a.m. shutdown time, achieving numerous level-50-capped characters who went through the Incarnate missions, one of whom nearly maxed out what he could of those. For me, the end-game content meant digging further into the game lore that I'd missed coming up through the quests, and I found it exciting and enlightening. I also used it as a great excuse to dig into the Architect Entertainment system, writing and publishing 8 separate user-created arcs, the final of which (PENGUIN Part 4: Waddle On) went up at 8 p.m. Eastern US time on the night of the game's close, probably being the final Architect Entertainment arc that went live or close to it.
In the months before the game's close, I also had one other goal in mind for my highest level "toons," and that was to go through hunting down badges and tweaking out stats to get them as close to perfection as I could. I wanted my heroes to be the best that they could be, so simply reaching the end of the game's content didn't mean, for me, that I was through playing.
Contrast this with the PS2 version of The Godfather. When I finally beat that game through grinding out missions and endlessly saving, reloading, saving, and reloading to get the shortest, least-damaging run through the game that I could, the game gave me infinite ammunition for my weapons but nothing to challenge me. I was out of missions to run, so all I could do was street sweep all I wanted, or I could rob banks all day long and make general mayhem, having to deal with police chasing my Mafia don around town until I could go to a safe house. . . and sit there, waiting for the game's heat meter to drop so I didn't get obliterated on stepping out of my apartment in-game. Fun? Hardly. There was nothing to keep me engaged, sadly, so for me, the only recourse was to quit playing for a space of a couple of years before I wanted to roll up a new character and replay the game's campaign.
City of Heroes was my mmo of choice. Once my character of choice hit the level cap, or "end-game", the only thing that made me continue to want to play them was the fun I was having with other players. You hit "end-game" and there's no reason left to continue, that's why it's called "end-game". You've gotten to the end so there isn't much left to do except grind over and over for rare drops you can sell on the market for boat-loads of cash, if you even need that anymore.
To me, the character I was playing and the interactions I had with others made it all worthwhile. When I max'd-out I simply made a new character and enjoyed the experience all over again in a new way. In an mmo like CoH "replayability" was the name of the game. That's how I had my fun and really, if you aren't having fun then what's the point of playing?
If you make a game based on fairness, reasonable balance and respect toward the player then you're gonna reap the rewards. I hope the next City of Heroes follows those ideals.
Comments
I still pay PWI because I dont have much time up my sleeve and really cant be bothered learning a new game (I have GW2 but havent jumped into it yet for certain reasons). Although outdated by the sounds of things, I keep playing because of the promise and excitement of new things with major updates when they come along. The OP hits the nail on the head. PWI was really badly grindy from levels 1-80 until fairly recently, now grind type quests for those levels have been updated and are quicker and easier with much greater rewards. For levels 80-100 but, the grind is terrible and people just bypass those levels usualy with a particular system in place that defeats the whole purpose, but gets you to end-game reasonably quickly. There is now a call from players to similarly change those level 80-100 quests to make them worth doing also.
I have thought for some time now that player housing as an end-game activity should be more greatly developed. I think I was reading in Acheage (not sure) about the housing and tax to keep your house and such things and I think this is where its at.
I mean, imagine at end game everyone running around in the high-end op gear. At that point the only thing that might set people apart is a self build house/ship or something similar - something you cant buy - where a small structure shows little effort, but a castle shows great effort. I would love to see something like that. The whole mechanics of grinding proves to me that people WILL grind if the reward is worth the effort (think of somthing simple like Mine Craft). I would embrace an opportunity to build something big in an MMO if the effort directly correlated to the results and if they couldnt be overshadowed by the simple act of using real cash by someone else to get similar result to all the hours/days/weeks that someone else might put in.
(Off topic: When I jumped into WoW for the first time, I lvled up to 20+ just by killing mobs. Until I realized that these exclamation marks above the NPCs actually meant something :P For someone who used to wrap his keyboard with duct tape so that his toon could auto farm endlessly for days and days, quests were the best anti-grind thing ever.)
On topic: Imho, grind is actually something good, a nescessary evil simply because it' s vital for every MMOs success. Now before you start raging think about this: why WoW was such a big success? Yes it was innovative, yes it had great lore etc but it's secret weapon was the so called (and much hated these days) "hamster wheel".
Every P2P MMO needs a hamster wheel in order to make players play (and pay) for a loooong time. Which means that the hamster wheel (aka grind mechanisms) is actually what makes an MMO addictive and I believe addiction is the real reason someone will keep playing a game 24/7.
That's why I believe, modern MMOs fail to achieve the numbers (and longevity) of their predecessors. After all, grind is like nicotine. Every smoker knows that it's bad for our health, yet it's what keeps us smoking.
But maybe I m wrong. Gamers demand so much these days but are less and less eager to pay for it, so it could be that even we (the gamers) don't really know what we want . But it makes me sad that technically excellent games like GW2 failed to capture me for a month or two, while grind-fests like EQ or even vanilla WoW kept my interest burning for years.
in different mmoRPGs i had different "end game" experiences....
in DaoC it was RvR, MLs, Artifact farming, Grinding twinks, socialising....
in SW:G it was hanging out in cantinas talking to people while i dance for them, getting the latest rumors from crafters, spending hours and hours traveling the galaxie to find a new perfect outfit, designing hourses for other people, destroying that nasty star destroyer with my B-wing.....
in my short vacation in WoW it was raiding cause there was literaly nothing else to do anymore... people didn't meet to just hang out.... i made 0 friends in WoW with which i still play....
in COH/COV, CO, DCUO it was making great outfits for myself trying out new powers cause they look amazing.....
in my opinion grinding was one of the best experiences in mmoRPGs i ever had... spending hours and hours camping ML/Artifact spots in DaoC with a couple of friends so we can finaly get that damn item and hoping noone comes and steal the spot was amazing...
im a big enemy of those instanced raids/dungeons and quests.... not quests in general but how they are in mmoRPGs.... in p&p rpgs a quest was sometimes a weeklong epic task given by a stranger to do something that was challanging.... in todays mmoRPGs its kill 20 bunnys cause they threaten the world and the next quest is kill 22 frogs cause they threaten the world... and then comes to endless GRIND for items.... it doesnt matter to me how fancy you call it raiding questing farming or whatever its still a mindless grind killing the same boss over and over and over again....
i still remember an 4 hour long talk with some stranger in SW:G i had never met him before i at that time rented out my lots to make some quick cache.... and we spend hours running around to find a perfect spot for him to place his harvesters....
i sincerely hope that the coming mmoRPGs bring some of the old stuff back but i think the problem is less the game then more the player
I have bait and switched my play style! I am no longer content with the current "theme park" style endgame, i.e raids, dailies, gear farm. Infact in recent days I have returned to dark age of camelot and am enjoying keep taking and so forth. I am not a pvp'r by heart all I know is this is more fun playing with and against people rather than mostly alone or to a raid schedule with set time frames and time expected. I do sometimes like getting things done on my own or in small teams in short pockets of fun engaging content. I am not against PvE I just don't like where it is at the moment, such things as raiding and especially dailies do feel too much like work.
Although I will say I did enjoy the slight difficulty level and the time CoX raids took.
The grind does not bother me as long as their is a reward worth obtaining at the end. Folks complain about grinding now days, they don't remember swg. We had the holo grind for jedi back in the day, that was changed to grinding out xp to dump at the vialiage, not that was a true grind. A lot of the newer mmo's don't put in artificial grinds, however they forget to reward you. I will just point at swtor for instance. There was a grind put in at level 50 so you could get purple add on's for your gear, well the problem was well after a very short grind you were left with nothing but pvp.
That pretty much summarizes the grinding that's involved in MMOs. I look forward to the day when I can be the veteran looking back and sharing my tales to the newbies.
I think the appeal of endgame stuff for me is that I can really flush out my character's potential. Sure, in games like SWTOR I can get the best kind of gear of his or her level as I go through the motions of gaining experience and going through the story, and I can use their moves in the best way possible but it isn't necessary for me to do so to the full extent as doing end game stuff. When I reach the level cap, though, my sole mission is to flush out my character's abilities as well as get them the best of the best gear so they can live up to their potential. Hence why I like to raid so much and why I'm willing to grind my way through dailies and hard-mode flashpoints/dungeons.
what keeps me going is haveing a connections with my char.
tools to RP when i want to with friends without haveing to make do, with areas people arnt likely to harras us in.
content that is fun to go through even if not tuly rewarding, cause eventually i WILL get all best tweaked build possable and then whats left to do? wait for more ubber gear please no.
i do like collectables, things like badges, intuitive crafting for more then gear upgrades, vanity pets, that i get in game rather then buying off the shop of via constant grind, one time items for event. you know the show off dun stuff that dousnt actully affect game play.
. . . . . . . . .base editor with my base that i spent 5 years building. . . . . . . . ;_; i miss my base.
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to
Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
This one might be a multiple poster for me, as it's a long article and I'm taking things out as I think about them.
"The obvious problem here is content creation on the developer’s part. They just spent 4+ years making enough content to satisfy the leveling grind for at best three months, and at worst a marathon weekend bender."
First, spending four years or more on content to satisfy the leveling grind is unnecessary and kind of ridiculous. Put together a plan and stick to it, don't just make the same crap we've been playing with for fourteen years: FedEx, Kill, Gather, and Zone; the plan I'm talking about is developing story lines to flesh out, with short, medium, and long chains of tasks. Oh, and that's another thing: it's NOT a quest guys, it's a task, at best. A quest would be, potentially, thousands of what you call quests, now, which each are a single task the character is called on to complete and receive a reward for. It IS possible to have stories with substance and length, as well as being what grinder's and leveler's are looking for to move ahead. As long as they're making XP and getting goods from the game, who cares beyond that what they want.
Second, I could not possibly perform all tasks developed over four years or more in three months or less! If someone's incapable of spreading time out while playing this game, so they might enjoy it and take time to see all of the other things the developers busted their tails to put into the game, they have a problem far beyond completing tasks.
"Developers need a player to feel like they are constantly working towards accomplishing something, but don’t have the resources to create eternal gameplay. What they end up making is either “dailies” or something akin to a Raid: a mechanics-heavy piece of content that can be repeated (usually at time-locked intervals), giving out fractions of a reward for each completion."
How absolutely despicable this entire paragraph is; I know it's the truth, but I think this is why I've never "finished" an MMORPG. The closest I ever came was World of Warcraft, and I stopped playing that just prior to Burning Crusade, after I explored the last square centimeter of every bit of space I could get into, whether I was supposed to get into it or not.
It should NOT be the Developer's responsibility to come up with further content; the game is over, and a final task should be set for the player, a congratulations for winning, a great closing video, and that's it. Most players will have, by this time, played this game over the course of a couple of years, it's time to move on, anyway, so do so.
Dailies and Raids are the utterly despicable part of my statement, above. I'm one of those strange people who utterly despises PvP and WILL NOT participate in it, except in a game like MechWarrior Online, where it's something of a necessity and is magnificently done, and I likewise despise Raids. The idea of being a part of a small army destroys my characters uniqueness, ruins the way I prefer to play, and diminishes the immense power I have grown through the course of the game to almost nothing. Of the Raids I have participated in, and I avoid these like the plague, it has been this overblown, underbuilt, bit of crap that is only a larger instance, having monsters that are, except for their hit points, otherwise insignificant.
Raids and dailies should not be necessary, and I will not be doing them if I can help it. To make them a major part of any story line, as they have in Lord of the Rings Online, I'm coming to find out, is ridiculous. There are much better means of pulling off late to end-game content than these hustles and dodges.
. . . . . . . everything you just said you hated is pretty much what made up the meat of every MMO since they started comening out are you sure actully like MMOs as a genra
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to
Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
"What motivates you still playing your character when you’ve reached the level cap?"
Again, I've not reached the level cap in any of my current games, because I don't play those ridiculous placeholder events at the supposed "end-game". You said it best, there should be no level cap. Frankly, if levels were removed altogether, replaced by skills and abilities being raised individually, instead, and content worked so the types of opposition you and/or your team faces scaled for them, and gear was removed as a primary reason to play the game, and there were no requirement for grouping (which, right now, in EVERY SINGLE GAME, is group or die), but positive reasons to group were built into the games, then I could concentrate on character development and exploration, like I want to. The guy who wants to grind would have every reason to grind through all of the content, in whatever order and for whatever reason they wanted to. The person who wants to craft could get their crafting skills up all the way without the necessity of grinding through level-based zones. Then, we could really see a true advent of sandbox MMOs, instead of the hybrid sandbox/theme parks developers are trying to push through, now.
What kept me playing my maximum level characters (and not alts) in my fave MMO (COH) was the joy of playing the character. In that MMO (COH) rather than other MMO's I could "play down" or be "exemplared" (to use COH terminology) and thus able to partake in my share of loot, scaled appropriately for the team size and level. Later on City of Heroes developed an Incarnate system for maximum level characters--and like many people I plugged away at it, reaping the rewards. While in the In-Game rewards would be deemed "worth the effort" by many, what really kept me coming back was the fun of teaming up! Too bad, there's just no other MMORPG on the market today that has even 1/2 the creativity, fun, and puts players in the driver's seat at City of Heroes.
I really enjoyed reading your article, Mr. Miller. In fact, you are one of the reasons why I read MMORPG.com e-magazine at all. Since COH ended, I am just not into MMORPG's at all. Maybe that's just as well, since I do have other interests and hobbies, such as local grassroots politics, and I'll admit an MMORPG as fine as City of Heroes diverted me from RL heroic causes. Still, I and others sure miss the fun we had in virtual space. Hats off to you, sir. /em holdtorch!
That is absolutely correct. These are called MMORPGs, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, and they should live up to their classification; otherwise, rename them MMOCGs, or Combat Grinds. cRPGs are NOT, except in rare circumstances, such as with Oblivion and Fallout 3, related to role-playing at all. LotRO has come close, but there are still essential social elements that are left out, and it is not truly an RPG.
What kept me playing my maximum level characters (and not alts) in my fave MMORPG (COH) was the joy of playing the character. In that MMO (COH) unlike other MMO's I could "play down" or be "exemplared" (to use COH terminology) and thus able to partake in my share of loot, scaled appropriately for the team size and level, etc. Later on City of Heroes developed an Incarnate system for maximum level characters--and like many people I plugged away at it, reaping the rewards. While the In-Game rewards would be deemed "worth the effort" by many, what really kept me coming back was the fun of teaming up! Too bad, there's just no other MMORPG on the market today that has even half the creativity of, fun, and puts players in the driver's seat as City of Heroes.
I really enjoyed reading your article, Mr. Miller. In fact, you are one of the reasons why I read MMORPG.com e-magazine. Since COH ended, I am just not into MMORPG's at all. Maybe that's just as well, since I do have other interests and hobbies, such as local grassroots politics, and I'll admit an MMORPG as fine as City of Heroes diverted me from RL heroic causes. Still, I and others sure miss the fun we had in virtual space. Hats off to you, sir.
/em holdtorch!
/em holdtorch
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to
Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
"Then you too can sit back and think, “You think THIS is grindy? Back in MY day we had to...”"
And as a result, to prove to yourself that you were just "better" because you had to "work harder", the inevitable happens...the newer players are lazy and entitled, want it all handed to them...yes, we know these lyrics, we've heard the song before.
My example: 1994--the "janitor" only cleaned the corpses out of your "room" once in a great while, as long as the room segment never "unloaded" (because players were in it).
After a three hour "hunting" party,
>Look>You see (room description)
>You also see: a gnoll (dead), a gnoll (dead), a dagger, an axe, a gnoll (dead), a gnoll (dead), a dagger, an axe, a gnoll (dead), a gnoll (dead), a dagger, an axe, a gnoll (dead), a gnoll (dead), a dagger, an axe, a gnoll (dead), a gnoll (dead), a dagger, an axe, a gnoll (dead), a gnoll (dead), a dagger, an axe... Jimbob, Billyjoe, and Thundercask.
You get the idea. Two or three players standing atop a pile of corpses and worthless, ignored gear. You could gather up all of those dagger and axes (asuming you were low on encumbrance and good at writing gathering scripts), to sell for a copper each (assuming you were good at writing sell scripts)...
This wasn't "grinding" (to my knowledge, that expression had even been invented yet); it was the one and only way to earn experience and progress a character. This was state of the art, there was nothing else.
It took the "Korean Grinders" to teach us what "Grind" really meant, in the mmo universe.
Took another few years to hear "quest griinding". The "badge grinding" "reputation grinding" "daily grinding" et al.
1994 me? I wasn't "working" any harder. Still pushing buttons on a keyboard. What I was doing was experiencing the most minimally user-friendly game environments ever concocted by closet coding sadists... And by far the least variety of options (as far as character advancement went). If you wanted to advance in levels, you went out and you killed mobs. Period.
And it was a long, long trip to the cap, too.
Which may explain why we took so much time out to roleplay (and other archaic concepts).
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Agreed, CoH was the best MMORPG I ever played, and it ruined me for other games by raising my expectations to the highest level possible.
/em holdtorch!
"Well sure, the FrinkiacVII looks impressive - DON'T TOUCH IT - but I predict that within 100 years computers will be TWICE as powerful, ten THOUSAND times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them." -Prof. Frink
Agreed. End game is the end of the game to me, as another poster stated. Time to play an alt, but only if I don't have to retread the EXACT same content. Otherwise? On to another game. There are certainly plenty of MMOs these days to move to.
For me once I hit level cap unless the world is big enough to have a bunch of stuff that I did not get to see on the way or the lore is deep enough that there are other questlines to follow that I missed or the most rare that I found a group of players that are on the same wavelength as myself to make doing group content or pvp worthwhile I just quit and move on to another game until there would be a signifcant content expansion released.
I really don't understand those who say all the questing and character development are either boring or a waste of time but raiding the same 3 dungeons 3 times a week for month's on end in hopes that enough shinies drop to outfit you character in gear that will be obsoleted as soon as the next raid comes out makes no sense to me.
What motivated me to play my character at the level cap?
In WoW it was only do world PvP, or to assist up-and-coming friends. Otherwise, it was parked in the garage, and I was working on alts.
In CoH, it was different. Somehow (possibly the heavy customization?) the game allowed me to really connect to my character in a way other games didn't. So it was easy to get a little lost in the roleplay as I went toe-to-toe with giant monsters or gangs in solo missions because I'd no idea if I'd win or not. The sidekicking program was great, too, for making me feel my character was young and fresh, and contributing beneficially to my friends and supergroup.
For me the grind (leveling up) never felt grindy. because i was grinding with others chatting role playing. it kept your mind of the grind. I had numerous alts back then.
Right now i cannot bear to actually level another character outside of my main. because the world where u venture in doing those quests again. makes it extremely boring.
Also grindign towards a certain goal makes the grind again alot less grindy. and if u after awhile finnaly acomplished said goal you where overjoyed happy as can be. Now with our fast pace leveling and easy gear mechanics there is nothing to make you overjoyed.
to the question what motivates me to keep playing at level cap. Currently my real life friends. Pull them out of the equation and i will disapear asswell.
I played City of Heroes for a little over four years up to the 3 a.m. shutdown time, achieving numerous level-50-capped characters who went through the Incarnate missions, one of whom nearly maxed out what he could of those. For me, the end-game content meant digging further into the game lore that I'd missed coming up through the quests, and I found it exciting and enlightening. I also used it as a great excuse to dig into the Architect Entertainment system, writing and publishing 8 separate user-created arcs, the final of which (PENGUIN Part 4: Waddle On) went up at 8 p.m. Eastern US time on the night of the game's close, probably being the final Architect Entertainment arc that went live or close to it.
In the months before the game's close, I also had one other goal in mind for my highest level "toons," and that was to go through hunting down badges and tweaking out stats to get them as close to perfection as I could. I wanted my heroes to be the best that they could be, so simply reaching the end of the game's content didn't mean, for me, that I was through playing.
Contrast this with the PS2 version of The Godfather. When I finally beat that game through grinding out missions and endlessly saving, reloading, saving, and reloading to get the shortest, least-damaging run through the game that I could, the game gave me infinite ammunition for my weapons but nothing to challenge me. I was out of missions to run, so all I could do was street sweep all I wanted, or I could rob banks all day long and make general mayhem, having to deal with police chasing my Mafia don around town until I could go to a safe house. . . and sit there, waiting for the game's heat meter to drop so I didn't get obliterated on stepping out of my apartment in-game. Fun? Hardly. There was nothing to keep me engaged, sadly, so for me, the only recourse was to quit playing for a space of a couple of years before I wanted to roll up a new character and replay the game's campaign.
City of Heroes was my mmo of choice. Once my character of choice hit the level cap, or "end-game", the only thing that made me continue to want to play them was the fun I was having with other players. You hit "end-game" and there's no reason left to continue, that's why it's called "end-game". You've gotten to the end so there isn't much left to do except grind over and over for rare drops you can sell on the market for boat-loads of cash, if you even need that anymore.
To me, the character I was playing and the interactions I had with others made it all worthwhile. When I max'd-out I simply made a new character and enjoyed the experience all over again in a new way. In an mmo like CoH "replayability" was the name of the game. That's how I had my fun and really, if you aren't having fun then what's the point of playing?
If you make a game based on fairness, reasonable balance and respect toward the player then you're gonna reap the rewards. I hope the next City of Heroes follows those ideals.
Yes, I've read a poem. Try not to faint.