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Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to the grind I go
Lerxst
Member UncommonPosts: 648
Am I the only person who likes (and somewhat misses) the classic MMO grind? Whether it's grinding mobs for exp, grinding crafts for recipes or grinding skills for levels.
I always felt a closer connection to my characters in games that required grinding certain aspects and skills rather than the instant-gratification approach games are taking lately. Some speed up the leveling process so it goes by in a blur, while others remove the grind completely and set your skills on timers.
Honestly, these games remind me of dropping a quarter in an arcade machine, getting 3 lives, losing and dropping another quarter in. I have as much attachment to characters in these style of MMOs as I did the character in those arcade games.
It just makes no sense.
EVE, for instance lets you set skills on a timer. Great, go fight or do what you like and wait until the timer ticks down. Unfortunately, what you like to do at the moment is fight pirates, so you go and do that. Six hours later your timer dings and you can now mine a better quality of material from an asteroid. WTF?! How does fighting a ship improve your mining ability??
Meanwhile, back in UO, anytime I would go from 99.1 to 99.2 in a skill, I would feel freakin' accomplished! I was damn proud of myself! And as a result, once I reached 100%, I'd go around and show of my Grandmaster crafted gear. That's just something I don't eel with any of these games anymore. I couldn't care less if my toon lives or dies, I'll just resurrect and continue with my 2x Experience Weekend Event... and when I reach end game... now what?
Comments
I like the grind. I like experimenting and seeing how I can manipulate xp income and do it faster.
I'm not entirely sure, however, that EVE was the best illustration for your point. It's like you have two conversations there.
EVE is a poor examples and it's showing up more and more as time goes by.
The element of grind that you miss, I dearly miss as well but the element I miss is the demand to do it and a timely fashion of progress. For EVE if you don't PvP or aren't having it jammed down your throat (and to be honest that isn't happening in EVE very often) you now have no motivation to continue the grind. How many Impel do I need before I have too many? How many trillions of ISK do I need before I have too much? How many Black Ops Battleships do I need? If I am not losing them in PvP?
That all said, I loaded up FF14 tonight and gathered 500 lightening crystals. I can burn them off in a few hrs of crafting, desynth the stuff I make to level an additional aspect of crafting but I don't know how long I will keep at it. I'm seeing more grind than I might want there.
FF14 is one of many 'Asian grinder games'. The more I think about it, they aren't vastly different from the decay grind of SWG. I don't seem to do it with the old level of obedience though.
But if you want a grind-a-thon, there are plenty to be had.
Does it really make no sense that the majority of people that play video games considers them to be an entertainment product?
Do I get attached to a character in an entertainment product? Very rarely.
Hopefully the above makes sense.
It shows what PvP games are really all about, and no, it's not about more realism and immersion. It's about cowards hiding behind a screen to they can bully other defenseless players without any risk of direct retaliation like there would be if they acted like asshats in "real life". -Jean-Luc_Picard
Life itself is a game. So why shouldn't your game be ruined? - justmemyselfandi
Like you, OP, I miss the "connection" that a grind gives me with my character. I never played UO, but what I disliked in EQ was the "inter-connectivity" between skills and abilities.
I tried leveling crafting (any craft) and found that I had to level up in order to progress some more. I think WoW also had a crafting cap based on one's level.
What happens in these kinds systems is that one can not concentrate on any one thing. If you do the beginning crafting or skills, you eventually reach a point where something else must be leveled in order to progress further. These systems did not allow "pure crafting", so to speak. You either had to make money (by killing mobs) to get the higher level ingredients, or become higher level so you could go gather those ingredients yourself.
In WoW, I used to make my melee characters use every available weapon to keep them maxed out between levels. Now, WoW does it for you (I think), whether you use that weapon or not. I miss EQ's grinding the skills as you level. You had to cast Evocation spells to level your Evocation skill. You had to use a bow in order to level your bow skill. Using your broadsword would not level your longsword skill. Yes, I miss this
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I think Darkfall was the last game I played that had a built in grind to the game. Unfortunately, everyone had that same grind so it wasn't exactly unique to each character.
With F2P becoming popular, I've noticed a disturbing trend in games (especially the Korean types) to offer ways to avoid or speed up the grind through spending money or special events. I'd say the biggest problem here, is that you have 2 separate set of gamer types all playing the same game; the paying power-levelers and the free grinders. It's basically like combining the instant gratification first person shooter crowd with the slow but steady RPG gamer crowd. I mean, I like them both, but when I feel like playing one, I don't really want to be forced into playing with people from the other.