General Discussion

Used to be (in earlier MMORPG's), you joined a group, grinded experience, and socialized.

Now (in newer MMORPG's), you solo endless petty quests, and socialize far less.

But the grind is still there; just a different form.

Thoughts?

agreed. I think that the flood of npc interaction in modern games is wayy more boring than  deciding what you want to do in the game yourself, and the order to which you want to do it in. I like games where I never have to kill a monster to level up .. it is so much more fun to kill players .. you never know if they are going to fight .. or run off screaming. lol

You just hit the nail in the head. 100% agree.

Originally posted by pencilrick

Used to be (in earlier MMORPG's), you joined a group, grinded experience, and socialized.

Now (in newer MMORPG's), you solo endless petty quests, and socialize far less.

But the grind is still there; just a different form.

Thoughts?

"Now (in newer MMORPG's), you solo endless petty quests, and socialize far less."

Personally, Ive never been fond of either option.  If youre going to have long, repetitive mob grinding, you better have more exciting combat, and better AI than what MMOs have had in the past.  On the other hand, if youre going to have a quest based game, you better have some thing better than static, "petty", themepark style quests. 

Quest grinding is a choice really. I usually quest some, then dungeon group some; just really depends on my mood. But yeah questing is very tedious at times, and can really kill the social aspect of mmos.

i also think it's all depend on yourself... you could choose some of them to do and complete. others you could give up...never mind...

They aren't even quests anymore. They're just mindless kill tasks. I'd rather slaughter a camp of mobs with random people, and talk to them while I do it, than play follow the leader, run to a quest hub, click the guy with the giant immersion breaking circle or exclamation mark over them, then run along the dotted line to the monster, kill it, and run back without ever reading the story, which is usually bollox anyway.  They're just kill tasks.

I want to go back to the days where you could talk to guards and ask them about available kill tasks. Sort of randomly generated, sometimes they had them sometimes they didn't. For QUESTS, you usually had to talk to a few people, hear a rumor of something brewing, find the NPC, talk to them for a while, then they would send you on a story driven worthwhile actual QUEST that has some significance. You'd be rewarding with an item, maybe some money and xp. Now quests are all money and exp and generic suits of armor that everyone ends up wearing. MMOs have fallen waaay down.

Originally posted by SignusM

They aren't even quests anymore. They're just mindless kill tasks. I'd rather slaughter a camp of mobs with random people, and talk to them while I do it, than play follow the leader, run to a quest hub, click the guy with the giant immersion breaking circle or exclamation mark over them, then run along the dotted line to the monster, kill it, and run back without ever reading the story, which is usually bollox anyway.  They're just kill tasks.

Originally posted by SignusM

They aren't even quests anymore. They're just mindless kill tasks. I'd rather slaughter a camp of mobs with random people, and talk to them while I do it, than play follow the leader, run to a quest hub, click the guy with the giant immersion breaking circle or exclamation mark over them, then run along the dotted line to the monster, kill it, and run back without ever reading the story, which is usually bollox anyway.  They're just kill tasks.

I want to go back to the days where you could talk to guards and ask them about available kill tasks. Sort of randomly generated, sometimes they had them sometimes they didn't. For QUESTS, you usually had to talk to a few people, hear a rumor of something brewing, find the NPC, talk to them for a while, then they would send you on a story driven worthwhile actual QUEST that has some significance. You'd be rewarding with an item, maybe some money and xp. Now quests are all money and exp and generic suits of armor that everyone ends up wearing. MMOs have fallen waaay down.

Vanguard had some pretty good quests that took a while to complete. All in all, the storyline could have used a little work, but at least they tried to bring back old school questing.

I see what you're saying, although I wouldn't exactly refer to it as a grind.  To me grind means short bursts of the repetitve act of killing mobs to gain xp.

Oh wait a minute, I misread the title, I thought it read "endless raiding".  On second thought, since most quests today seem to ask you to just go out and kill "X" number of mobs, then, yes, you are exactly right.  It's simply a grind wrapped up in the form of a quest.

Grinding isn't limited to MMOs.  Sure it seems apparent here, kill 20 of these, collect 10 of those.  But what is an xbox?  It's a grindfest.  People don't play games for them to be games, they do it for the achievements.  They grind for achievements.  My friends played through King Kong.  Who would play that game? Only someone who wants easy achievements.  Even nonachievement based parts like Halo 3's online is just mindlessly playing the same type of game over a