General Discussion

In this Community Forum Spotlight, Community Manager Laura Genender takes a look at whether or not the art of the journey is lost in today's mad scramble to hit max level.

Gaming today is largely centered around high-end content. Modern titles are giving us fast tracks to endgame raiding and PvP; max level in Guild Wars takes 2 days, World of Warcraft 15, and Lord of the Rings Online a whooping 27 days. In today’s MMOs, players are max level in under a month.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I love raiding and I love PvP, but what ever happened to the journey? Levels 1 through 20 or 50 or 80 are no longer fun; they’re a means to the end, and we look for the shortest path through the majority of game content. Even in games with longer playtimes – such as Lineage II, where the most hardcore need 100 days to reach max level – we have a mentality of speed over enjoyment. This is called the Grind, where players partake in a mindless, repetitive activity because it is the most efficient.

This week on the forums, user pur3.5ync started a thread “Alternatives for Grinding in MMOs,” looking for ways around this gameplay mechanic flaw. On seeing this title I was immediately intrigued; I, like many gamers, am guilty of getting caught up in the grind and forgetting the real goal of gaming: fun. Reading through this thread, I found it interesting how various users combat the daily grind of MMOs.

Read more here.

I think it's important to clarify that the "max level in Guild Wars takes 2 days, World of Warcraft 15, and Lord of the Rings Online a whooping 27 days" is actual GAME time... not just calendar days.

Why is this important?

Let's take WoW for example... let's say I'm fairly "hardcore" about my playing habits, but I have school/a job during the day, and some social life, so I do 4 hours a day Monday through Friday and 6 hours Saturday and Sunday.

That's 32 hours a week, and if WoW takes 15 days play time to get to max level (360 hours) it'll take me 11 1/4 weeks, or a little under 3 months, to get to max level.

Considering you'd have to pay the box price, + 2 months subscription costs... that's what, 70-80 bucks? 70-80 bucks for 360 hours of play time? That's $0.19 - 0.22 $ an hour. ROUGHLY

The game is only a grind to max level if you make it a grind to max level.

Guild Wars? You can start a toon at max level then buy a skill-pac to get everything you "missed" from actually leveling the toon. Shouldn't even be included on the list.

Point is, playing the same game 32 hours a week is very "hardcore." It's almost as if you are taking a second almost-full-time job. The game is only a grind to max level if you make it a grind to max level.

Guild Wars isn't a good example of fast tracking. Getting to lvl 20 is meant to be easy, as the whole point of the game is collecting the skills not leveling up.

I get your point though.

The reality is that it's far easier for devs to put in the usual bog standard quests and let the kids grind away, instead of making every single quest count and making every quest part of the journey.

Making quality content is expensive, but, personally, I feel it's the only way for future MMOs to make their mark. The only MMO I've played recently that hid the grind well was Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO), and  yes, I know that it had other flaws, which diminished this achievement.

I hardly ever had to repeat a quest in DDO and each one felt like an unfolding story. On numerous occasions I 'forgot' I was grinding and that's the pot of gold all MMO devs should be looking for.

I tend to think that most people play MMOs to experience something beyond their existence, at least that was probably their original motivation. I may be alone in thinking this, but personally, the whole point of an MMO is to be drawn into a fantastical world, where you get to be something that you aren't in reality and to immerse yourself in it to the point where your have a history of amazing experiences (whether by yourself or, often more powerfully, with other people).

MMOs should be challenging, not boring and grinding is the ultimate expression of a lack of imagination.

You could always try a game like Eve Online, where "max level" isn't entirely relevant, and the process of organizing a group toward goals (PvP or industry) is the definition of progress.

One of the things I loved and missed about SWG was the skill based system, rather than level based.  It meant that you got to argue and tune your toon, and try each revision against one another and the environment, where small increments would make small differences in different ways with different playstyles.

Yrs,

Shava

Part of the problem lies in the players hands too.  I know that I'm guilty of skipping past reading the whole content of a quest to just read the goals.  There's a lot of content in the body of the quest message, but players skip a lot of that, with the mindset of "Blah, Blah, Blah, just tell me what I need to do." 

In WoW, I've actually turned the quest scroll back on, so I watch the message being "written", forcing me to read the "why" of what the quest is set up for.  Even a lot of the "kill x <creatures>" quests have a reason behind them, and a lot of those reasons come up later in the game.  Playing an alt, that I've actually taken time to read the quests with, I'm finding a lot of the time I think "OH!  that's why they have us kill so many of these!"  It's not all about the devs making engaging content.  The players have to participate in it.  They can only lead us to so much water...

I have to hit this on the head: the point of Grind is to get to the "cool place of fun."  Whether that "cool place of fun" be the next Raid (even a mid-level one), having the next neat item, breeding the next neat monster, or what.

It is a tough balance.  People will rush, like Laura said...people will find the path of least resistance in any game to get to the "end" quickly, and those that do rush will then look around for other stuff to do (i.e., "the end game").  On the other hand, more casual people will try the "journey" and expect there to be a lot of stuff on the way to do.  Who to cater to is a point of endless contention in almost every MMO I have seen.

I really liked Guild Wars model where yes it was fantastically easy to get to max level, but you just mostly played the game forward going through the missions, quests etc. and ramped up almost flawlessly.  You didn't have to do X Mission 10 times in order to level up quickly.  You just enjoyed the fresh content and sallied forth.

WoW on the other hand, made me want to grind just so I could experience the dungeons or be viable in PvP.  I felt that I couldn't just flow forward with quests, and that I had to spend a bit of time grinding in order to get on that next step.  When I did get to a dungeon, it was over all too soon and only occasionallly did I really advance because of it.  So, I think WoW hit itself in two places: feeling the need to get to "cool places of fun" and then not really being advanced or rewarded for beating the "cool place of fun."

I think a lot more future MMO's (next gen, whatever you want to call them) will follow GW's steady stream more than WoW's hits.  LotRO, for instance, focuses on quest completion over repeatedly killing X... and makes it more enjoyable with greater-type quests (Fellowship/Story Quests).  WAR seems to be following this approach especially where the Tome of Knowledge is concerned.  I feel they are going to have some grind, but it will be mostly invisible in that you are either doing RvR, a PQ, or filling in your Tome of Knowledge and all of the sudden realis you are on the the next level to advance to the "cool place of fun."

I am sure there are a multitude of examples from other MMOs that I missed, and I would love to hear their comparison/contrast.

Thanks for the article.

It's the proverbial carrot on a stick. The best of the game is almost always waiting for you near the end. If there was no "end game" but just a continuing story that was interesting in itself, we could enjoy the journey more. A game I enjoy is one where when I hit another level, it surprises me because I wasn't watching for it, I was enjoying the game play. 

I enjoy a good group within a good guild, but it's so hard to find anymore, and I end up trying to solo through. I dislike pickup groups, also, anymore. Players rarely make an effort to get to know each other for continued playing together. The demographics of an online game have changed in the last few years.

Now, I really prefer a good single player game, if you can find one. I'm playing The Witcher. It has it's problems but it has a great story to immerse yourself in, and outcomes of your actions depend on your choices. Your choices aren't game breaking, but the game branches into three different storylines. We need more innovation like that in MMO's.

The problem with LotR is that it's too hard to have a continuing group unless that group all plays mostly at the same times. You can't do quests with each other unless you are all on the same page, the same step of the quest, because the quests continue on with each goal a step to the next. You basically had to end up with pickup groups, a bunch of strangers you didn't relate to and didn't even know what to expect from. It's hard to group like that without knowing each other's strengths and weaknesses, who you can or can't depend on. And then whatever the story is loses it's significance because some care and some don't.

I think you've pretty much nailed it, Brynn.

I think some game devs are responding to the kind of issues you're talking about and are going for a mix of offline and online elements. I also think that the trend will only get stronger. It'll be interesting to see what solutions they come out with. I'm thinking of ideas like Space Siege's co-op where you indicate a play duration and it creates a level for the time you have available to play and off you go. Okay, that's prone to feel like a horribly generic quest generator, but some good script writers working on building a large quest database and some considered coding might just make that work for an MMO. Combine that with something like Halo 2's matchmaking method and you could have something that avoids some of the common frustrations. Obviously, it won't appeal to everyone, but then it's not supposed to.