Hello! I'm putting together a list of reasons why people these days are disgusted with 'grinding'. I am a college student aspiring to be a video game designer, and finding pros and cons to current games will help me a lot in the designing process. Please feel free to add or comment on any of the points below!

( Problems listed in red and subproblems underlined. Possible solutions in blue.)

People hate 'grinding' in mmorpgs because they...

-Do not feel attached to their character
Small ammount of character customization
1. Abysmal choices for physical attributes at character creation screen
2. Have to replace their character when making a new class, severing many connections with player and character

> Interchangable classes avalable for every race

3. Too few races to choose from, causing players to settle for a race they dont really identify with, too many and flavor or specific races are lost

Armor while leveling is un-attractive and makes people feel those levels arent important
1. Epic end-chain quest/low level pvp rewards or leveling instance gear looks mediocre at best and should be more visually satisfying
2. At high levels, class armor looks decent but similar. Dyes are a bandaid fix

> Armor that grows with weapon or spell skill levels?

-Arent submerged in the game world
Tired of mobs with the same model only different levels and names
>If reusing mob families, add to their baseline appearance. Cute crab at level 1 =/= spikey, monstrous pincer-snapping crab from hell at lvl 50 in both look and abilities they use

Players have little reason to explore, or little benefit from exploration
>Add rare items for gathering professions that grow/spawn in out-of-reach areas
.Mob AI too predictable
1. Little to no mob intimidation on a global scale (inteligent humanoids or dragons need to raid player and npc cities)
2. Little to no reason to return to an area after leveling past it other than to gather materials or power level a friend
3. Zones with no flavor and/or not at all breathtaking

-Are fearful of gear becoming outdated with another expansion or new tier
Repuation/fame grinds for factions becoming useless
>Should take time to level and rewards need to scale with current content (patch or expansion)
>Repuation factions should always carry 1-2 items/form of upgrades (gear, spell adjustments, crafting items etc) players feel they *need*

Tier gear, be it from raids, instances, crafting or pvp being completely replaced

>Impliment an upgradable relic system. You need to gather gear from tier 1 to advance gear to t2
[Epic quest line (in the form of pve or pvp depending on how gear was obtained) for players who already have t1,t2,t3 etc on one class to bypass this rule for another class they decide to take up. Item is bought from npc vendor at a very high price, which aslo acts as a tool to hamper currency inflation]

-Feel crafting is monotonous under most conditions
Items are created by the hundreds in order to skill up
1. People use the most cost-effective items to level with because the products they make are useless and vendored

>Emphasis on products created with X craft needed in Y craft to make items possibly used in Z craft
>Durable products made from crafts need to be comparable at the low levels to be near equivalent to quest/pvp/instance rewards of the same level

Items made by high level crafters are sub-par to any if not all tier gear
>Every craft type should have at least 1 durable item that players feel is irreplaceable, or extremely hard to replace
>Every craft type should have consumables used in high level activities that cannot be purchased from vendors
[In essence, every craft type should find be able to find multiple niches in the market to fill in order to make money]

Work in progress. Will add more and analyze points later

(reserved)

Interesting. I selected these out of interest:

2. Have to replace their character when making a new class, severing many connections with player and character

[b]That isn't too much of a problem as you can still invite the new char to the guild or to friends-list with a note or something. It is nice though sometimes to know just one identity like FFXI has multi-jobs for one name or whatever.

.Mob AI too predictable
1. Little to no mob intimidation on a global scale (intelligent humanoids or dragons need to raid player and npc cities)
2. Little to no reason to return to an area after leveling past it other than to gather materials or power level a friend

[b]1) I agree with that, it would make things interesting/more dynamic.
2) I agree with this also, it is easier in a very linear way to have all the same lvl mobs in one area, but it can be nice having different levelled mobs in an area. (In Everquest spectres and gryphons in low level zones so you had to keep an eye out)
3) "Mobs AI" in itself I'm not sure can be improved unless the game was made skill-based or fighting multiple mobs at a time is more standard- and have an interplay how they will kill you.

I'll add to this and say combat could be more dynamic. Vagrant Story you could junction abilities to buttons and if you pressed the button as either you were attacking or defending you could intiate a secondary ability.(this incorporated an element of real-time skill as you needed to time these abilities and could have strategic significance)

The game could have key gameplay additions upon levelling to certain levels- maybe this could mean an increase in status(with a new title) and more important quests or roles in the game. Perhaps for instance you could now be a defender of a town(when mobs or players attack). (or an important messenger- once only chance and it's an event all players know about- whether this players succeeds or fails)

Crafting as you say is pants. Its a nice system when it's gives random rewards(with random stats) and everything is actually sellable to players.

Going back to the mob AI point, there needs to be more fun. For instance, in mmorpgs it's very standard that woo you go to a new area, woo you get a new mob type doing exactly the same thing as every other mob- attacking you and you're engaged in the same old ocd routine of killing it. What about mobs who maybe sneak behind you and pickpocket you, or beckon you over and maybe trick you.

The whole thing just needs more variance than watching your xp bar move up and performing the same combat sequence over and over. It just gets too apparent the game is wanting you to waste hours on very little actual gameplay.

I might be just a crazy person talking here, but why have classes and levels? Why not remove them? They seems to be the source of the whole problem.

I agree with Daarco.

Who said your game would have to be an EQ-clone?

LoL because then it isn't actually a mmorpg anymore :D

Neyon:

what you wanted to say is: "then it BEGINS to become an MMORPG"

as much as alot of people dislike vanguard, its the largest game ive ever played. theres a ton of places to explore and many things to see in this game. the character customization is rather decent and theres a good number of races and classes to choose from. i agree with daarco as well. get rid of the class/level system and go back to the old kings quest days etc... where you had to practice the skills you wanted. if you wanted to swim you had to go swim and raise your skill in it etc...

I'm with Daarco too. Excellent summary especially the part about Retarded AI mobs that just there and wait to die.

I hate:

1) Static mobs that never invade the town or do anything cool. They just exist purely to waste my time and make me grind

2) Lack of custimization. I look like everyone else. What is the point? Why do you need me to grind out some character that will look like 50000 others

3) Lack of Choice. Why does every single game have to be Class based? Why can't I make my own and why are Devs just now looking into this (Fallen earth, WELL, Champions, DFO, etc). We should have had more classless options all these years I'd like to play something else besides EVE

4) Static worlds where pvpers cannot invade towns and cities.

I also hate (yes looking at you sandboxes)

1) Being stuck on one character. Please put in a cap or make it viable for people to make different alts. I like to try different races, etc or be like City of Heroes where you can be any look you want on your character.

2) Want a true skill-based system where I can be anything I want. Like Fable game series has or Elder scrolls

3) Want some fun content. Grinding on mobs all day long is not fun. One thing WAR did right was allow people to progress via PvP

I like grinding, gives me time to perfect my fighting style and play with different ways of fighting.

I loved grinding in EQ, hate it in WoW.

It's not the concept of grinding that's the problem... it's the way in which it's presented.

I would like to throw in the, Dependence on other players, I think people hate grinding now b/c they dont have to interact with others while sitting in a field killing 100 rabits.

At the start people would grind and camp for hours at a time, and didnt mind it b/c it was 1) new and 2) they were doing it with 5 other people, and they would talk and BS in chat with eachother ie: socialize with people they would never meet or talk to in Real Life.

Newer MMOs place no requirement for the player to interact with others, and the 2 factors that made grinding / camping fun are no more. We have been doing it for 10 years now, its a bit boring without other players.

You can throw in the social aspect being taken out of every aspect of the current MMO, no longer do you need to make friends and find people to grp with outside of your guild.

~HappyGaming

I believe all of you have great input. Some seem to condradict one another though, so I might make a new thread to gather 100% non biased information from about what what exactly their dream mmo would be like. Deffinately keep posting here though. A second rough draft list of problems is in the works.

One question I might ask the population is if they feel the typical 2 major factions per game, played as good vs evil is overplayed and if adding a third or fourth faction to the mix would bring anything interesting to the table? I think by the time I'm done with college and have gotten enough footing from a current successful company, servers will be able to handle loads of 50k + people online at once. I think having 3+ factions would give people the option for faster que times for mini games, more danger lurking at every corner and at least more diversity.

Originally posted by Krogg

I like grinding, gives me time to perfect my fighting style and play with different ways of fighting.

          I think it depends on what game your coming from......When I started in EQ1 I never thought of playing my character as grinding, even though it would take quite awhile to gain levels at times...... To me it was time to hone my casting and weapon skills, to learn how to use new found spells, to make money for future spells and gear, to explore new areas where Id never been before.......

---

I think having 3+ factions would give people the option for faster que times for mini games, more danger lurking at every corner and at least more diversity.

---

Originally posted by nomadian

 

---

I think having 3+ factions would give people the option for faster que times for mini games, more danger lurking at every corner and at least more diversity.

---

suppose it depends on the game but my problem with this it divides people up. I mean lets take WoW for instance, at some level ranges there is few people that maybe you wish there was a double count of people(ie. without the divide) However, with a skill-based system I suppose this isn't a problem if anyone is perhaps able to group up but then that could be being overly idealistic how such a system could work.

 

Do you feel such system would only be beneficial if there was FFA grouping regardless of faction and FFA pvp but with repremands for killing your own faction?

hmm this reminds me I actually made a suggestion on the WoW forum amusingly once that players could decide to be neither affiliated and be sort of outcasts-meaning they could leisurely go in either city and group with whoever. It was an interesting idea though perhaps defeats the purpose of the game.

Anyway, to your point when you're saying ffa grouping. I think generally when two factions are war it doesn't make sense them just grouping up. Unless you're saying everyone can kill everyone type thing in a pvp, that would sort of make more sense and with the penalty thing certainly.

I believe there is room for some grinding in MMOs. Grinding does give another option to leveling up other than just doing quests. You can do as much or as little at a time that you want. Stopping in the middle of a quest because you have to log off breaks the immersion. It also helps if you have a worthwhile reward for doing the grind (increased character attributes, armor . weapons, etc.). Grinding just to level up can be extremely boring.

Star Wars Galaxies implemented a collection system. Part of the system is the 'kill collections'. For these collections you must kill x amount (around 500) of creature x. The reward is a character title. This reward is insufficient. Very few people are grinding these collections.

On the topic of crafting, do you guys feel crafts should mainly produce consumables and leave the gear up to pve/pvp activities, or do you think they should be on par and/or occasionally exceed their pvp/e counterparts? (but with a high material cost of course)

Originally posted by Nixish

On the topic of crafting, do you guys feel crafts should mainly produce consumables and leave the gear up to pve/pvp activities, or do you think they should be on par and/or occasionally exceed their pvp/e counterparts? (but with a high material cost of course)

The crafted stuff should exceed lootable items in some areas but be less good in the other ones.

Make it so that good crafters will be famous in the gaming world. Maybe some complicated experimentation and stat system? I know I would like it.

Also put in item decay or a way to lose items. This will result in a true player economy.

Well

Better character customization is always good, in both abilities and appearence.

I don't like characters that switch between classes or can access all skill because they lack any identity and seem too generic.

Better looking gear is also good, more customization (statistical and aethetic) would be even better.

But these do not effect grinding.

What makes something a grind for me comes from how fun the action is and what I am grinding for.

To make actions more fun they need to engauge the player more.

Combat for instance could stand to be faster, not in faster deaths but faster ability execution so that players have to be more attentitive.  Making it smoother would also help, if I press three abilites quickly then it would feel much better to have my charater smoothly perform the attacks as if thery were a combo.  Making combat more flexible would also help, abilities should not be one trick ponies, they should have different effects when used in certain situations, like the target is stunned or on the ground and also in a combo with other abilities.  Variety in abilities is also a big plus.

Crafting would be more fun if the player did more than combine regents or followed recipes. Being able to have more control over the statistics of items is useful but not really fun, the fun part I think would be in visual customization, designing a sword or piece of armour would make crafting much more fun, I don't think anyone gets a kick out of watching a bar fill up or getting that 3% increase in damage protection.

Gathering abilities should not require the player to make macros and walk off from the game.  The actual act of gathering is rather dull, instead of hitting a rock with a pick the fun part would be organizing a mine.  If you could hire NPC underlings to do the boring work then scouting new areas and creating mini mine dungeons to extract minerals, while also being able to help out would be pretty fun.  This applies to most other gathering skills because simulating manual labour isn't my idea of fun.

Mob AI also helps.  If mobs were more intelligent and had a wider array of abilities to use and different mobs had different personalities and tactics it would make fighting them more fun.  And if mobs were more proactive as in they randomly attacked towns or traveled around then it would be much more exciting.  PvP does this too, and if you combined PvP with more intelligent PvE then there should be much more interesting things to do.

Variety of action.  Realize that having crafting and combat does not always make for more variety, since they are not substitutes.  If you want to fight things there should be multiples way to do so, the big thing here is purpose, some people can enjoy aimless killing but I like more purpose.  you could incorporate more random events like bandit attacks or a monster infestation that randomly happen and do not immediately respawn when complete, this adds a more dynamic degree to the game.  Again PvP and battlefield objectives do this too, giving players the unpredictability of other players with the more purpose driven aspect of open objectives.  Crafting and gathering could also have random events for them to give dedicated crafters and gatherers interesting things to do.

Another aspect is what you are grinding for.

What I hate about most MMOs is that you are forced to grind to experience the game and not grinding puts you behind, this amplifies the already dull and repetitive activies.

There is a another way to do this, Call of Duty 4 for example, though not a MMO does have grind technically but it does not feel like grind.  For one shooting people is fun so that helps a lot.  But another aspect is that unlike MMOs if you do not grind you are not useless and you can still play with your friends.  In CoD4 you grind for little perks but there isn't much statistical advancement.  In MMOs you grind to get higher levels or skills and since the focus of grinding is statistical advancement not grinding means your character can not participate with players that are higher than them or they will auto-lose, infact there are many areas you can't set foot in because you auto-lose from being too low a level.  If the power gradient was smoothed and grinding gave players access to unique abilites and gear and more character customization then grinding would be something you do while you are having fun and not grinding would not be penalized.

As for crafting I think that crafting needs to hold much more weight, where player crafted items are the main source of items for other players, but NPCs could craft too and compete against the players for sells, to add variety.  Then again I do not like stat increasing items, it makes gear too important and creates too much power difference which has adverse effects.

There are real world economists and there are MMORPG economists.  I am the later.  I have spent several years identifing problems in the generally accepted F&D modle (see my sig).  I have also spent that time developing my own solution, though I have not made it publically avail I have shared it with a few people.

I belive that all MMORPG's start with a good economy and go from there.  The economy is the foundation on which any good MMO should be built.  SWG (ver1) was about as close to a "good" economy as I have ever seen, but we all know what happened to that....

If you're really trying to find out what people like and don't like, I think it's pretty important to find out information about what a players expectation is and fit them into several catagories.

How can you grind against in game support people making it a virtual world , I sahre hereby my experience in a recent F2P game called Atlantica Online.

Atlantic Online – A Critical Analysis.

I have been playing this game for a while now. Here is where I break down and critically analyze the game.

Graphics
Well not really remarkable but then again if you are using a low PC and you are not into good graphic options the game is quite alright. There are shadow textures and the strategy battle mode is kind of silly and it takes away the surrounding graphical resolution as all the battles are just a loading of 2 monster types similar yet different in Mdef and Pdef randomly numbered in a set from 6-8.

Community
It is pretty much as the free to play community of other free to play games. It is nothing much special. Every now and then you will find people using racism or slang and the chat filter kind of makes it more prominent. Some of the players have even found out a way to overwrite the filter by calling people “nab” than noob.
The community section is for accessing players and no matter how many times I have added people from the beginner’s column, I have found they are either placed there to be used by players or just kept online to fill the list. I have actually found a few players from the beginner’s column who leveled after being added into the guild.
In this section you will find crafters and I think it is more of a gameplay support system than a real mass of online game playing players.

Gameplay
Almost majority of the gameplay is solo stuff without much team gaming found. Team gaming forms the essence of the Mmo gaming and it completely lacks in it. Every now and then you will find over-leveled players spamming peer chat and trying to get a party to do some solo quest. By over – leveled players I mean players who have leveled but do not have good skills or armors or weapons to do the solo quest or continue with it. The most irritating portion of the game is the inventory system and the opening of the boxes kind of locks you. This is again an item shop dependent portion so we can well make out where the game is trying to make the money out of cash shop.

Monsters
The game has a strategy oriented battle system and the monsters generally form of a mix of two separate monsters. Strangely every group will have 2 separate monsters one with a high Mdef and the other with a high Pdef so as you have to select proper mouseclick to make the most damage.

Game-Balance
This is the best portion of any game that I like to analyze.
The game has auto battle option and auto battle is again limited to license and auto battle points. I have seen the worse use of this system throughout the Atlantic playfield. Sometimes it is so bad that many free league toons are also into auto battle and their geek armor / rings or their geek skills won’t allow you to proceed further in division.
So here we see that the game is ready to gear up for item shop based free games that form a bulk of population in mmo list.

Sorry for all the folks out there trying to make Atlantica Online a success , here is my review after playing the game and picking up tits and bits form what exactly is going on.

Guild / Town System
There is not much here but a chat panel and a few town buildings for making town grow.
You can make the town grow but if your guild is not active it can be taken away by another guild with more guild points. So the urge to make the town grow is limited to the cash flow from the tax payments and nothing more. The numbers of towns are limited and as such it is more likely that you will be bided out eventually from a town as you will loose guild points every time you try to save it.
I lost my town through guild point bidding as my guild had many support members of the game who didn’t join when we had to do training centre to keep the town. Also support people go offline after a point of time in guild and then the only way is to dismiss them from guild.

Market and Economy
The economy is quite nice and I have found that your stuff usually sells at quite a steady rate. I think it is mostly support controlled but you can still have the pseudo feeling that this is player controlled.

Crafting
You can craft but it is really no point crafting if you see crafted products are not special and they sell for lower gold than the amount of gold needed to craft. There are some special products that can well only be crafted but the stats in them is not that much appealing to level up your craft skill which is a very costly and time consuming process.
Support people will always have greater crafting level as to them they need it to make the Market balance.

Mini Games
You have the training centre and the treasure map hunting or the developer challenge which are pretty good and can be fun for some time.

Errors
The game is dependent on time. Each turn takes 30secs. So if you lag you will miss turns either against monsters or against opponents in free league. The game has many battle speeds and I have found that the same toon and the same opponents difficulty level rises or falls in free leagues with different battle speeds and thus I think the game is a bit dependent on the internet speed when it comes to free league. The game still lags a lot in it’s near to release from the days of CB.
There are few glitches for the exploiters. If you want to have skill increase in any crafting you go to taj and dismantle Walachia stuff for flame shrda , you will get craft skills up.

At-last and not the least, I have played the game again till 60+ levels and I feel kind of bored going further. May be it is the lack of team gaming that makes it more of a multiplayer diablo mix with the market and the chat to connect players.

All said and done I think from free leagues to the community with artisans and beginners this is all made up support of this game. I do not want to waste my time here anymore in atlantica online. I deleted my character at level 70ish and I am sure not going to give this game another try, reasons being lack of actual players and support community trying to control every part of the game this way or that way including all the towns. If you want Matrix in a mmo world, go ahead waste time with this game for sure.

Originally posted by Nixish

On the topic of crafting, do you guys feel crafts should mainly produce consumables and leave the gear up to pve/pvp activities, or do you think they should be on par and/or occasionally exceed their pvp/e counterparts? (but with a high material cost of course)

In my opinion crafted gear should be able to be better, or at least on par with, looted items.

Two of my favourite games ever are Diablo 2 and Star Wars Galaxies (at least up until CU). In Diablo 2 the stats on items were random and could vary alot. People sought after so called 'perfect items'. There were yellow items that had a lot of stats that potentially could be better than unique items or set items. In D2 these items were random drops but I'd like this randomness to exist in MMORPG's crafting where maybe the skill of the crafter also would determine how good an item was together with the quality of the materials.

Most systems today are quite lacking and boring and it comes down to who has looted the right receipt/plan/pattern/whatever rather than crafting determination. People also skill up their professions TOO fast. Imagine that to reach max skill level in WoW crafting it would take months playing as much as a hard core raider... now those people would be famous for their skills and everyone would like their armour.

The crafting system in SWG was superb, it was just that the armours/weapons etc was a bit bland... i'd like a game with SWG's crafting but loot like WoW with Diablo 2's randomness.

With every update to the game where the PvE loot gets better the possibility should also be to craft better gear... maybe with new materials released with the same update. And no, the materials should not come from the new raid instance. (I have the same opinion about world drops in WoW as well... there should be improved world drops with each content patch but that is another topic).

Sorry for the rushed answer... at work, don't have time to think what I write completely through! :)

Players have little reason to explore, or little benefit from exploration
>Add rare items for gathering professions that grow/spawn in out-of-reach areas
.Mob AI too predictable
1. Little to no mob intimidation on a global scale (inteligent humanoids or dragons need to raid player and npc cities)
2. Little to no reason to return to an area after leveling past it other than to gather materials or power level a friend
3. Zones with no flavor and/or not at all breathtaking

Exploration in thses games is something that I think really needs to be....ummmm.......explored?

There needs to be a reason for the adventurer to explore too...not just rare crafting items.  Maybe rare armor/weapons/clothing found in random camps with chests, a unique player title for exploring numerous areas......I don't know.

In WAR I took my zealot to every spot in every map....even to Order areas...and I got nothing.  I climbed a mountain, found an abandoned camp....and got nothing.  After a few levels of doing this it was like screw it....what's the point?

I love to explore, but if there is a risk of death...as there should be....there should be some reward also.