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I think it safe to say that we have established the main stream MMO as a "grindfest". there are some exceptions out there with good content and less grind but the majority are EQ or WOW clones. Instead of complaining about it lets try to think of new ways to make an MMO that does not seem like a grind. the first step is to ask ourselves "what about the 'grind' do we not like?" I have seen some people say that the play game X and eventhough it is a grind they still enjoy it. why do they like the grind why do others not like the grind. I personally don't like the XP/quest grind because it literally makes me fall asleep. I used to play FFXI and City of Heroes. It took me two years to get a character on FFXI to level 30 and about as long to get one to level 50 on CoX. with FFXI there just so much down time between battles I would close my eyes for a few seconds and end up falling asleep just to wake up to a dead character because something spawned next to me. on CoX I would go into a mission which was yet another abandonded warehouse to kill (er...capture) some criminals and I fell asleep during combat because my attack sequence became so mechanical I did not need to look at the screen any more to finish the mission. I guess in these cases the grind for me is the repetition. The longer I played the less engaged I felt and thus the "grinditis" set in and I lost interest. What we need is some kind of MMO that has as little repetition as possible. what about an MMORTS kind of game. think Starcraft MMO! There is always a battle to be fought. instead of having 1 character to control you comand an army. The opponent is always changing and so must your tactics. There is also Cities XL comming in fall which is city building with MMO trading. for those people that like SimCity games it won't be a grind. what else can you think of? |
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Dewm
Advanced Member
Joined: 5/29/09
You won't respond to my post, because you know i'm right. |
Originally posted by Scottc
Oh and also, I've done that quest at least 10 times and I enjoy it every time, I enjoy taking people through it. The dungeon's have traps in them which make them difficult. The actual quest is challenging, rather than time consuming and boring. I guess its possibly, I am like those I am critisizing (sp?) And I just dont' care for quest driven games because of the ones i've play'd. I guess when it comes down to it the point I was making, is in reality 99% of MMO's are based around combat and grinding. whether it be quest grinding, or just going out into the forest and killing stuff till you level. I'm just tired of people saying stuff like "I totaly hate grinding" because Devs miss read that and are like "Whoa, they want it easier. so lets make it easier" thats why WoW sucks (in my opinion) If at first the power of persuasion doesn’t work, use the persuasion of power. |
Originally posted by Dewm
That's an excellent point, I recently played through Halo again and even though it has a "lore" that makes you feel a part of the story, it's still a complete grind the whole way through. Being a part of the story doesn't make it any less of a grind, it might make it feel less tedious but it's certainly an extreme grind-fest. Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR |
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How are developers ever going to collect their monthly fee without it being a grindfest ? |
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Originally posted by SaintViktor
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Originally posted by Scottc
There are different things people consider fun though. I recently played "I Wanna Be The Guy", a platform jumping game like the old Megamans- and an incredibly difficult one at that. I'd say that most people wouldn't like the insane difficulty the game has, however I enjoyed every minute of it- even to the point that I think it's one of my favorite games of the year. RPG's should give different kind of fun than action games/shooters like Halo. That's how it was in the MMORPG world too. Now it's different though, as more and more players join in (from different genres than just RPG's too). WoW tends to be more of an action game sometimes rather than RPG, which enforces the fact. But what my point is, that basically if you don't find these kind of things fun maybe the genre isn't for you (yet). MMOFPS's are coming out and I'm sure other genres will follow the lead, which will give you the MMO-experience you're looking for, without taking away the MMO-experience that we who prefer the 'normal' MMO-style gameplay like. |
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Most MMO's are a grind fest because the developers dont have anything for you to do after you level up. So in order to keep you paying to play they keep u grinding to get to a very high level .. notice how games use to be level 50 cap back in the day .. now you see 80 - 100+ levels. They used to make it take months to just get to 50. I dont know if its because they lack end game ideas, raiding is a grind IMHO; or if its just easier and faster to put out an MMO where u just quest and level grind so they can start making their money right away. i used to think they just didnt have good ideas to keep us busy at the end of leveling a character up.
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Originally posted by Hyanmen
There are different things people consider fun though. I recently played "I Wanna Be The Guy", a platform jumping game like the old Megamans- and an incredibly difficult one at that. I'd say that most people wouldn't like the insane difficulty the game has, however I enjoyed every minute of it- even to the point that I think it's one of my favorite games of the year. RPG's should give different kind of fun than action games/shooters like Halo. That's how it was in the MMORPG world too. Now it's different though, as more and more players join in (from different genres than just RPG's too). WoW tends to be more of an action game sometimes rather than RPG, which enforces the fact. But what my point is, that basically if you don't find these kind of things fun maybe the genre isn't for you (yet). MMOFPS's are coming out and I'm sure other genres will follow the lead, which will give you the MMO-experience you're looking for, without taking away the MMO-experience that we who prefer the 'normal' MMO-style gameplay like. Another obvious troll, not even going to bother with you. Edit: If you're not trolling for some crazy reason, in I Wanna Be The Guy, do you enjoy constantly failing? or do you enjoy getting it right after such a large number of failures? There is a difference between the two. If it is the first, you are a masochist and not representative of most of the world's population. Also, it is not in any way comparable to an MMORPG, because there is a difference between screwing up many times in a row and having to constantly repeat a portion of a game before finally getting it right and having to repeat content constantly because you're hoping for a random drop. The former takes a lot of time to get right, but you've gained skill from it, you come out with better reflexes and timing, whereas the latter just siphons your time away, with little to no gain. |
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Originally posted by Mischiff It's not that they didn't have good ideas, it's that these types of MMOs are based on character progression, and if they stop giving the players any form of progression, how will they release new expansion packs or keep siphoning the 15 dollars a month out of these players bank accounts? |
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Originally posted by Scottc My point was, that I enjoyed it while I think that most of the world's population wouldn't. At the same time, you and arguably quite a lot of people enjoy the type of combat and skill Halo brings to the table and find it fun. What I'm basically disagreeing with you about, is that not only the reward or milestone is fun in an MMO, but the way there as well (for me). While what you say about the drops is true, in my case that was only a problem at the end of the game, and even then there were a lot of screwing up many times in a row before I finally defeated a monster/mission-moments. So, I think that I found my "IWBTG" from an MMO, even without it being an action/platform game like IWBTG is. |
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Originally posted by Hyanmen My point was, that I enjoyed it while I think that most of the world's population wouldn't. At the same time, you and arguably quite a lot of people enjoy the type of combat and skill Halo brings to the table and find it fun. What I'm basically disagreeing with you about, is that not only the reward or milestone is fun in an MMO, but the way there as well (for me). While what you say about the drops is true, in my case that was only a problem at the end of the game, and even then there were a lot of screwing up many times in a row before I finally defeated a monster/mission-moments. So, I think that I found my "IWBTG" from an MMO, even without it being an action/platform game like IWBTG is. Are you honestly telling me that you enjoyed failing repeatedly in I Wanna Be The Guy, and never became frustrated at all at the experience? |
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You are in part true. RPG’s at their core are nothing more then grinding xp or skill that is true, but not all grinds are created equal. Also the few that want to keep up with people without play as much are just that very few. What most people want is to get away from this elitest raid design that doesn’t reward people for time play but time played consecutively. At max level if I can play for 4 to 6 hours in a single sitting a week I can be vastly more powerful then someone that can only play 1 hour a day for the whole week. Even though they are playing more then I am. Playing 4 hours in one day is vastly more rewarding the playing 10 hours in a week. That is what most people want to fix. Where mmos went wrong started back with UO and EQ. Both games were very grindy. UO you have to use the same skill over and over and over……….. to hopefully gain a skill point once you got into the higher skill levels. EQ I have heard took a long time in between each level. Now most humans like to be rewarded for hard work and we like to be rewarded consistently. Look at how we are paid for work, most of us get weekly or bi-weekly paychecks instead of monthly or quarterly. The wrong path that developers took was instead of adding more mini mile stones they shrunk the reward cycle without giving a great deal of thought to what people would do at the end of the year when they felt unfulfilled. In storms the worst plan ever thought up on the short mmo history raids. Sure the core idea of raids isn’t bad but their implementation has been terrible. Forcing people to sit for multiple hours running the same instances over and over just to that those few low drop items so you can continue your character advancement at max level. Talk about a terrible carrot on a stick. |
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Originally posted by Venger Well said. |
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Eliminate grind huh?.... I guess I would do something like this. Actually, that article was pretty long so I'll sum it up for those of you with short attention spans. The idea is a strictly PvE Zombie MMO that contains no levels and no loot. The idea is that the survivors of a zombe holocaust have produced outposts within a city for the pupose of survival but those outposts have to be supplied in order to stay in operation. If the outposts don't have enough supplies or personnel (NPCs) then the outpost gets over-run and has to be taken back. The player's job is to go out into the city and scavenge for supplies in order to keep the outposts operating. What's more, each outpost has a specific role such as armoury, hospital, motor pool, etc. If your armoury goes down, you're going to have to scavenge for supplies and other survivors that will be donated to a given outpost. Outposts can also level up if their supplies and staff reach a certain level. Now for the ugly bits that none of you are going to like. You don't keep weapons between play sessions. When you log off, your character automatically drops everything. You can set up load out requests for outposts, and be provided with those requests as long as that outpost has those items in stock and you qualify to use them, but you don't keep those items when you log off. The only way to make sure that a certain item is available is to make it back to an outpost and donate your equipment back. Also, pemadeath is in effect. If your character gets taken out by a zombie, you'll play as a zombie for an hour. Of course, zombie characters aren't as powerful as player characters, so they drop pretty quickly. Oh, and there's no global chat. There might be shortwave radios and walkie talkies scattered about, but only the person holding the walkie talkie can use it to communicate with anyone within range of the walkie talkie. Radios will be confined to one place to you can't carry them with you. Instead of character advancement, the player recieves persistent achievements for completeing tasks in the game. These achievements unlock new content such as character classes and skills. These achievements can be everything from exploring a new area or killing X number of survivors to defending an outpost or killing the most players while infected. The catch is that the more achievements the players, as a group, possess the more rampant the zombie infection. In other words, as more players with more achievements log on, more zombies are spawned and they become more aggressive. Higher level outposts are also more prone to be zerged by zombies and therefore need more defending by the players. To twist the knife a little further, zombie spawns are completely random, there are no spawn points that a player can camp and no way of knowing where you might encounter a large herd of the undead. This makes grinding achievements an act of repititve suicide. So yeah... In order to remove the grinding bits of an MMORPG, you have to remove individuality and the concept of money and / or in-game ownership. Interestingly, this also solves the gold farming problem.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2if5GYXOGyo |
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Originally posted by Jimmy_Scythe Not true. Current MMORPGs are designed around the grind, you definitely don't have to remove individuality and the concept of money or in-game ownership to remove grind. The main cause of grind is the fact that your gear commonly becomes obsolete, or your current level is obsolete, forcing you to move up to the next set of tiered gear or the next level. TIered content is the main cause of grind. If developers introduced variety rather than tiered content by providing players with items that are interchangable for certain circumstances, then players would spend more time customizing their character rather than grinding it out, and variety also fosters trade. The other thing is that you can have skills and levels. One of the main group of grinders are the PvPers who are frustrated that player level and equipment determine who wins a fight rather than the players skill, they hate the grind, but they do it so they can compete with others. So all a game really needs is some form of player skill that affects fight outcome, along with having the more powerful end items and higher levels giving majorly diminished returns over something that's easier to get to. As for gold farming, removing money from the game might work for a zombie apocalypse game, but surely players would have some reason to trade with eachother? So some form of unofficial currency might arise, in a zombie apocalypse game, probably ammo, and so "gold farmers" would simply because ammo farmers, or purchasing items might be specific to a given outpost, since players no longer retain items. |
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Originally posted by Dewm
Step One: Play until it isn't fun. Step Two: Once it feels like a grind and you are no longer having fun, stop playing.
It really is that simple.
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MMO's are supposed to be about making characters and having them get better over time. If the dev company is enough of an ass to make that a grind then that's what you get. If the company insists on making their mmo a grind then they have to add something to help make it fun or else the game will probably fail, likewise, if they have less of a grind, they need a balance to keep you around. LotRO: Supergrind, balance is that it's a pretty game with a bad-assed IP and probably some pretty good storylines\writting(from what I hear). EQ2: Supergrind, balance is the large number of classes to choose from and half-decent pvp system. WoW: Grind, balance is that it's an extremely well made, and extremely fun game, with a pretty decent pvp system. I do hate the game but even I can recognize a good product when I see one. Shadowbane: Fully grindless, balance is the near 30 classes and the most advanced character creation and development system ever, resulting in years and years and years of making new toons and never doing the same thing twice(if you wish). Also, having the best pvp system to date doesn't hurt. 100% full pvp but only inventory drops, not equipped gear makes for a balance that gives risk but keeps it fun to engage in pvp, and the open nation vs nation siege helps to keep people wanting to play. Shadowbane was my fav mmo because they found a way to keep you around for years with no grind what-so-ever, I can't think of an mmo since that's done that. "It is in your nature to do one thing correctly; Before me, you rightfully tremble. But, fear is not what you owe me. You owe me awe." ~Francis Dolarhyde |
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Grind is filler. It keeps people playing. This has already been well established. The one thing that bugs me is the contention that developers are "lazy" for not including more dynamic features. As of now, the best dynamic features are live events with key NPCs being controlled by the game employees. This is a huge expense if you think about it. People have to be paid to play these roles, the planning has to be done, and implementation has to go off without a hitch. For a one-of event, this is a money pit. A more cost effective solution would be dynamic quest generation where you have some set types of quests, but the goals and paths to completion vary from player to player or group to group depending on some random variables in the programming. This way, it removes the themepark somewhat, and a player can rest assured that once he or his group alone has killed Bob the Tormentor of Village #152, Bob won't respawn for the next guy or group to come along and kill him.
That might not solve the need for grinds, but if done well, there could be more and varied quests like that to be filler to take some of the emphasis off the grind. One other thing I wish would happen is the removal of vendor trash. Make every item you get off a mob be useful in crafting. That way, instead of amassing piles and piles of useless gnoll spittle that sells for 2 copper a pop, you could get gnoll teeth that can be used to make jewelry, or something along those lines. At least you'd have something more to show for the endless waves of foozle genocide you have to go through to get that one quest drop. (the alternative being a drop rate of over 50% so you don't have to take forever to get said quest drop, but we already understand the reason for the grind being there.) "You'll never win an argument with an idiot because he is too stupid to recognize his own defeat." ~Anonymous |
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Dewm
Advanced Member
Joined: 5/29/09
You won't respond to my post, because you know i'm right. |
Originally posted by Zerocyde
And if its balanced I have no problem with it, FFXI I thought was tons of fun. Grind or not grind what I have a problem with is dumb people complaining about "how hard the grind is. and it takes to long, I dont' have enough time" crap like that. And then the Devs not being the smartest people on earth produce crap... We get games that should be MMO's and instead we get a single player game that takes a month to cap, and no comunity. Whether you like it or not a long grind, stuck in few area's produces a better community. If at first the power of persuasion doesn’t work, use the persuasion of power. |
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Don't kid yourselves. UO, EQ and AC were grinds too. Much bigger ones actually. Newer MMOs just make the grind more interesting. No group spawn camping the same mobs for 4 hrs(EQ), hitting a tree 2000 times(UO), or forced macro botting because leveling up is such a tedious bore(AC). Every MMO has a grind. All of them. Some are fun, some aren't. |
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Dewm
Advanced Member
Joined: 5/29/09
You won't respond to my post, because you know i'm right. |
Originally posted by Scottc
Oh and also, I've done that quest at least 10 times and I enjoy it every time, I enjoy taking people through it. The dungeon's have traps in them which make them difficult. The actual quest is challenging, rather than time consuming and boring.
This is true, but when a game can be finished so easily by those who will use the tutorial, it almost robs part of the experience (I know this is a VERY touchy subject) I think/feel that when a game gets to easy. OR when there is not much of a grind, and you can finish it. you get players that 1. arn't intrested in the community 2. they are more intrested in getting the best gear at whatever cost I dunno you'll end up with somthing like WOW......so when I hear people complaining about grinding.....I get kinda ticked off, because I blame YOU for the crap games we have on the market now. If at first the power of persuasion doesn’t work, use the persuasion of power. |
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Grind... Grind... Grind! Back where I come from, in Real Life, the term "grind" has a negative connotation. Doing the same thing over and over and not enjoying yourself IS grinding. Doing the same thing over and over and having fun was NOT grinding. We called it camping. Early Everquest, many call a grind. It was not to me. It was a social, massive, challenging world. Hell yeah, we killed the same mobs over and over, but we had a big group, we all knew each other, and we bullshitted while we did it! It was fun! That is not grinding to me! SWG, when the holocrons appeared, grinding for me began. Dancing in the cantina, bio-engineering, doing crap I didn't want to do to become a jedi - that to me was grinding. Pushing for an end result and not enjoying the journey is grinding to me. When you are having fun, it is not grinding. People these days race to the end game and forget to have fun on the way there. That is why the term grinding is so prevelant (sp?) these days. Race to the endgame! Grind, grind, grind... Stop and smell the roses! Go fishing! Get drunk and levitate off the wizard spires! Having fun kills grind. Everyone just flies through MMORPGs now and don't socialize (or screw around) unless they have to. Hence, the grind! Just my opinion. Yeah!!! Only good grind: Your girlfriend rubbing against you on the dance floor.
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Dewm
Advanced Member
Joined: 5/29/09
You won't respond to my post, because you know i'm right. |
Originally posted by ToteLeeLost
Agree 100% in FFXI my LS and I would spend 6 hours a day just grinding, it was fun we'd chat. Sure it took 2 hours to get a group togeather. and half of em would die along the way, but who cares. we where there having fun. and when someone died it was no big deal. Now days in most MMO's if you die during a raid *cough*WOW*cough* you get yelled at and cussed at and sometimes kicked out of the group. it just sucks and takes the fun out of it. And thats where I think a longer grind can actually be a better thing. if you have a average grind people get in and are like "whoa we can do this in a couple of months"....and then rush to the end. If you have a LONG grind, (9months to a year) then people look at it and are like "Wow.....well i'll go level get some skills, maybe today I should craft." and the longer you are stuck in certain area's the more you get to know people that level with you, just from being in the same zone!" In wow I capped, and the whole time honestly I only met/made friends with around 3 people from the zones. So I dunno, in my honest opinion....I think a longer grind/leveling promotes a better community all the way around. If at first the power of persuasion doesn’t work, use the persuasion of power. |
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They aren't supposed to be, but so far they all are. I don't think anyone has found an entertaining way to do a persistent world yet. I have the best solution for grinding ever. Perhaps the only solution. And anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. PERMA DEATH. Give every player 5 lives. Make escaping and running easy to do. Full loot open PvP no safe zones. Go! Notice how I didn't address leveling, which some think is the issue here. But the issue is end game. People grind to get to end game. Then they grind once they hit end game. Remove end game – remove grind. Add perma death – remove end game. Problem solved.
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Originally posted by Scottc
Please read my posts in this thread so you can understand why you're wrong.
I fail to see where I am wrong because grind is in the eye of the beholder. Plain and simple. If people continue to gind through MMO's maybe MMO's are not for them, or that MMO is not for them. Waiting for: Final Fantasy XIV |
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