Originally posted by scuubeedoo

I miss grouping with (almost) random people, without Ventrillo (how is that spelled) or the other similar thingy. I say "almost" cause in the "oldskool" days most people would knew the entire server quite a bit.

Agree.  Grinding is in every game, and I miss grouping up on a regular basis, even with total strangers and grinding out  a camp and just socializing while we did it. 

Had some great times, met many good people.  One of my favorite was playing healer to a group that spoke only Japanese except for a few basic words, like "heal" or "come"

We explored some very deep levels of a dungeon I'd never been off the top level, and though I had no clue what their chatter was about, we had a successful run and afterwards the group leader always sent me a PM saying hello to me when he saw me online.  We never exchanged more than hellos, but it added to the magic of the game.

Just doesn't happen anymore, I'm playing Aion now and so busy running my solo quests that I barely have time to toss people a few buffs and move on my way. (we used to do that regularly in DAOC too)

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by scuubeedoo

I miss grouping with (almost) random people, without Ventrillo (how is that spelled) or the other similar thingy. I say "almost" cause in the "oldskool" days most people would knew the entire server quite a bit.

 

Agree.  Grinding is in every game, and I miss grouping up on a regular basis, even with total strangers and grinding out  a camp and just socializing while we did it. 

Had some great times, met many good people.  One of my favorite was playing healer to a group that spoke only Japanese except for a few basic words, like "heal" or "come"

We explored some very deep levels of a dungeon I'd never been off the top level, and though I had no clue what their chatter was about, we had a successful run and afterwards the group leader always sent me a PM saying hello to me when he saw me online.  We never exchanged more than hellos, but it added to the magic of the game.

Just doesn't happen anymore, I'm playing Aion now and so busy running my solo quests that I barely have time to toss people a few buffs and move on my way. (we used to do that regularly in DAOC too)

 

I agree much with these two posts. I have played some MMORPG's were there was a lot of grind, but I did not nececarilly hate it IF i was grouped. Grouping seems to be what the old schooler's miss. I know from my DAoC days 90% of the time I was in a group because the game almost forced you to (but this was a good thing). I love being in groups with just random people even if it is just to go through a dungeon to kill the same mobs over and over again. First off it always seem to go faster (even if it actually wasn't) when you were grouping. They need to bring back grouping somehow with like bonuses of some sort so that more people are tempted to group.

As for grinding my only idea would if they want to put grinding into a game, then they need to make it beneficial. Someone on here said something about like variety in the grind would make it more exciting. I agree with that, such as what if you uncover certain kind of monsters then that should be bonus exp. Or how about if I kill 30 of these types of guys (without having a quest for it) then I should get extra experience. Things like that. Well that is my two cents.

By the way... Does anyone know of an MMORPG as of right now that deals heavily with grouping?

I also agree with I miss the grouping/social aspect of the old school games. Though I think pre cu had it right where you could solo properly buffed up (to satisfy the solo crowd), but you relied on others to buff you, slice your weapon, cure your battlewounds, heck even the 10 minute shuttle wait, so it made you actually go out and talk with others in the game instead of today's mmo's where it is grind solo til endgame, then get forced into groups through raids.

I am so used to the soloing game, that I find myself hardly interacting with anyone but my guild, unlike the old days where you knew pretty much everyone on the server because you grouped with most of them. Maybe that is why I can not find that magical new MMO to keep me entertained like the old days =/

Originally posted by Abrahmm

I miss the old mob grinding. Not because mob grinding is necessarily fun, but because we did it in groups. We grouped up, socialized, and even though we were doing a fairly boring task, we were doing it together and had fun because of it. Group mob grinds were and still are 100x more fun than a solo quest grind. I could grind in SWG all day because of the socialization aspect, yet I quit WoW because the quest grind was so boring I couldn't take it any more.

I don't miss the grind per say, I miss the social interactions and social inter-dependence, two of the biggest things today's developers seem to have forgotten.

I agree with you completely. Even though SWG didn't have any real quests and all you were doing was grinding the same lairs over and over again I always had loads of fun because of the group I was with, and it usually didn't matter too much if it was my guild or just random people. I think personally a lot was because of the combat queue, since it was easy enough to queue up a bunch of attacks and then have time to chat and be social while still fighting.

I changed to WoW after the NGE along with a lot of friends, but somehow the social aspect was never the same. People still tried to talk, but since WoW required a much more active playing style even for PvE then there just wasn't as much random chatting and such.

Then more recently I tried playing WAR and nobody there ever says a single thing. I actually thought the game itself was rather fun, and I enjoyed how easy it was to log on and just do a few battlegrounds when I didn't have a lot of time, but there was IMO no sense of community in that game at all. I remember playing through 5 battlegrounds in a row and nobody in the team said a single word, and then when finally someone did talk it was only to complain and whine.

So yes, what I miss most are the social aspects and sense of community.

Originally posted by Abrahmm

I miss the old mob grinding. Not because mob grinding is necessarily fun, but because we did it in groups. We grouped up, socialized, and even though we were doing a fairly boring task, we were doing it together and had fun because of it. Group mob grinds were and still are 100x more fun than a solo quest grind. I could grind in SWG all day because of the socialization aspect, yet I quit WoW because the quest grind was so boring I couldn't take it any more.

I don't miss the grind per say, I miss the social interactions and social inter-dependence, two of the biggest things today's developers seem to have forgotten.

It's like you're reading my mind.  Seriously, WoW felt about one thousand times grindier to me than EQ for these exact reasons.  Levels went by tremendously faster in WoW but it still felt like a worse grind because it was so unbearably BORING.

God, endlessly running moronic errands for NPCs...alone.  Run over there and get that and bring it back.  Go talk to that guy, spin around three times, clap your hands than talk to him again.  Go to the other side of this hill and pick 10 daisies for me.  Blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah blah.  God I hate that crap.  I absolutely hate it.  The rewards you get for doing it aren't temptation enough to make me do it because all that crap is meaningless anyway in the grand scheme of things.

I suppose I did a lot of "grinding" in EQ but it didn't feel like a grind because that's not all it was about.  It was about grouping with people and interacting with people.  The grind was just there to give us something to do while we grouped with each other.  In WoW and later games it's all about the grind and nothing else.

I prefer grinding with little questing mixed in.  What I really dislike is questing for the sake of questing, having full quest log of quests because you can't level without quest exp.  I also dislike when a group tells me they don't wanna go that way because they have no quests that way, or that they don't want to kill something because there's no quest for it.  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.... ffs

I find grinding fun personally. I like quests, but not overwhelming in numbers.  I like deciding where I want to go, not having my quest log decide where I should go everytime I login.  Unfortunately quest-on-a-rail is popular these days, so more and more MMO's are released with this design.

I can remember being approached by a couple of guys for a buff in DAOC. After the first got one the other said "Me 2". From that day on I have thought of people asking for buffs as the 'Me 2' crowd. :)

Old games had an element of difficulty that made you rely on other players; this in turn made them more social. You just end up playing a single player game if you have no reason to interact with other players, as a group, for buffing, for pvp etc.

The grind did add to the social aspect. The grind still exists but now we do solo grinding, so it has no redeeming features.
 

Originally posted by Alle90

Let's see, all the pre-WoW mmorpg's I have played had grinding..

DAoC - this game WAS a grind, there was kill quests up to lvl 20, and a few other quests but these were mostly for items and such.. I remember being in the vendo caverns with a spider group for hours at an end just killing spiders - at about lvl 20..
DAoC  was still fun as hell though and to me probably the best mmo experience i will ever have.

EQ - more quests, but still not to the extent of wow where you can quest every level, at all times, and never kill any mobs just for the exp without having a quest to kill it..
EQ was grindy as well..

SWG here we did combat missions, go there kill x number of sharnaffs/laris - everybody in a group took them and then off to the grinding.. killing 8-9 lairs and then epeat.. (this was old school SWG at release, and then at CU)
Pre-CU after the buffs got boosted and composite got added everyone did the same, but solo..
NGE came and there were ALOT quests, it sucked major balls..

Well the list can continue but i think the point is made.

Everyone complaining about Aions grind and all that.. I've always hated games with grind - or so i thought.. Thinking back after all these years of getting spolied in WoW, WAR, AoC, LoTRO with too many quests, I think I actually enjoy a little grind..
I'm not saying i want a game with no quests at all, i think Aion atm is perfect, many quests to do but there is also room for som old fashion grind :)

Wow have a lot of grind too, daily quests, faction grinding and so on.

But it isn't the lack or presence of grinding that makes a game good or not, it is how fun it is.

If a game is fun enough it can have a lot of grind or no whatsoever. And challenge is what is fun.

Grinding isn't a challenge. You just repeat the same crap over and over. That wasn't the point that made EQ fun and it wont make Aion fun either.

Personally I never really liked the grinding part and I been playing since Meridian 59. The great game had other good qualitys and also offers that wonderful feeling when you succeded in something that is really hard.

Wow, WAR, AoC and LOTRO are all comparibly easy. That is the problem.

But if you like doing the same thing over and over you could as well play Tetris instead, it is harder.

All MMOs have grinding.

The older games offered more competition and social adventures.  Wars to wage and loot to be had.  There was a point... and it was to beat the other guy.

A friend in our group got us all playing LOTRO.  I figured it was only 50 bucks to get the game and 3 months of play so what the hell, my friends are playing.  It's been a month and I'm bored out of my skull.  At first I had fun doing quests- they were new to me- as I've never played WoW.  Swore it off along with Tom Cruise, Twilight, reality tv and other such pop-culture turd nuggets over the years.

I'm pretty burned out now.  I don't see the point of leveling anymore aside to get to 60 so I can "finish" the game.  The crafting and housing aspects are extremely shallow, no play value there. 

PvE/Theme park games don't create lasting players.  They just create players who burn through the content and move onto the next PvE/Theme park game.  They come back for the expansions and the cycle continues.

You know what I miss? Mobs having  specific themes in specific locations. Now it seems like to get to whatever questing area you're going to you wind up wading through a field of insta-respawn trash mobs. You used to be able to actually clear a spawn or a dungeoun and know you'd been in a fight and the fight was over, at least for now. These days it seems like every time you step one inch off the beaten path your completely inundated with huge numbers of useless random trash mobs with no option but to grind your way through them or simply ignore the train you're pulling wherever you're going. I mean for Bob's sake wolves run in packs they don't stand evely spaced in fields. Not every inch of every road is infested with brigands. That's grind at it's worst. They were put there for the purpose of being able to kill the same mobs over and over never moving more than a few feet from towns.

What we need to remember is that back in those days the entire MMO genre in North America was made up of maybe 700,000 people, that's spread across all the games. Those of us who were playing  back then make up less than 1% of the current genre population. I would like to have those kinds of games back but we'll never see another since 99% of the player base can't even conceive of sitting in the bottom of a dungeon in 1 spot and pulling the same mobs for 5 hours to get 30% of a level.

Originally posted by Sain34

... I would like to have those kinds of games back but we'll never see another since 99% of the player base can't even conceive of sitting in the bottom of a dungeon in 1 spot and pulling the same mobs for 5 hours to get 30% of a level.

Can you really blame them?  Plenty of us oldschoolers can't tolerate old school gameplay anymore either.  At least everyone I know who started back in the 90s and still plays MMOs, which would be about 15=)  Not many in the grand scheme of things, but if everyone I played with can't tolerate spawn camping anymore, I'm pretty confident we're not alone.

What we need to remember is that back in those days the entire MMO genre in North America was made up of maybe 700,000 people, that's spread across all the games. Those of us who were playing back then make up less than 1% of the current genre population. I would like to have those kinds of games back but we'll never see another since 99% of the player base can't even conceive of sitting in the bottom of a dungeon in 1 spot and pulling the same mobs for 5 hours to get 30% of a level.

Thank GOD we are never getting that back. That was SO boring. We have MUCH better gameplay now.

I did that exact same thing for a long long long time in AC.

But there was one thing that made it fun to me.  Most of the monsters I leveled on had random drop items that I WANTED.  All great gear didn't come from some quest or instance.

You could go to a good level stop and find some really rare bad ass items off some monsters you just happened to be leveling on.  The monster also drop keys to chest rarely.  The chests were located throughout the game in different areas and every time you opened one there was some exitement to what you would find.

I also agree that the comminity has COMPLETELY changed for ALL MMOs I have palyed recently.

Back there everyone was wide eyed.  Everything felt more alive becuase it was all new you.

There was no global chat or ventrillo so when you met someone you tended to want to talk.  This also maded cities feel more alive because your screen wasn't constantly spammed when you were out of town.  There wasn't even a guild chat channel so when people wanted guild chat they actually all met up in game.

All of these improvement really have changed the way the game is played.

There also wasn't as much keeping up with the jones and rare item weren't just as common.  You also didn't have to have certain items to compelte.

Cheating was also much less mainstream.

But yeah the grind was there but for some reason it just wasn't as noticable the first few years of MMOs.  But  you got bored of it that boredem carried over for all other MMOs there after.