Originally posted by Vesavius

Awful article. Really. Jaundiced and somewhat elitest, and I am being kind.

 

EQ, despite it's grind (I will be clear here and say I like grind, if it's the RIGHT kind of grind), very much felt like a world and very much offered me a feeling of adventure, and people RPed in it all the time. It was as much of a ROLE PLAY game as you wanted it to be.

 

I suspect the author did not even play the game and is only intererested in demonising it through second hand experience and assumption.

 

When you ask 'Why then is it that most of your time is spent killing massive amounts of 'enemies' without making a single dent in the storyline'? you show me you didn't understand EQ at all. Though it had a backlore, a pretty disposable one tbh, it was NOT about making an impact on an established story. This is you showing me again you fail to understand what you are blaming. 

 

Tell any guy that stood there at the moment of completing his epic he didn't feel like a goddam hero.

 

 

Agreed.

I think grinds are actually important in an MMORPG believe it or not. As long as they make you want to do it, no one is ever "forced" to grind, it is a players choice to grind.

If you want something, go get it, if it's hard, it should be worth more, if it takes a long time to get and is hard, it should be even more valuable to me in some way shape or form, but no one is forced to do it.

Casual players can play they want and avoid the grind if they feel its work or too hard or they do not enjoy it and hardcore players can grind for hours until their heart is content and gain a benefit from it.

The problem that usually arises is the casual players get upset and want to have all the shiny things the hardcore players have but are not willing to put the effort in and work for it, for a multitude of reasons, whether it be work, family, lazy...whatever but I believe that is the main issue and why games are so easy these days.

These days, everything is either spoon fed or handed to player and everyone is getting used to it and expecting it to be even easier and faster...

Originally posted by Fadedbomb

Originally posted by Vesavius

Awful article. Really. Jaundiced and somewhat elitest, and I am being kind.

 

EQ, despite it's grind (I will be clear here and say I like grind, if it's the RIGHT kind of grind), very much felt like a world and very much offered me a feeling of adventure, and people RPed in it all the time. It was as much of a ROLE PLAY game as you wanted it to be.

 

I suspect the author did not even play the game and is only intererested in demonising it through second hand experience and assumption.

 

When you ask 'Why then is it that most of your time is spent killing massive amounts of 'enemies' without making a single dent in the storyline'? you show me you didn't understand EQ at all. Though it had a backlore, a pretty disposable one tbh, it was NOT about making an impact on an established story. This is you showing me again you fail to understand what you are blaming. 

 

Tell any guy that stood there at the moment of completing his epic he didn't feel like a goddam hero.

Agreed, albeit i agree with his points about the industry becoming nothing but a cash-cow to be milked post-WoW. However, EQ felt 10000x more of a breathing world than SWTOR, WoW, Rift, aion, or TERA ever have/will.

I'm still holding out hope that EQ3 will be a return to greatness, but that's merely a fan talking out of his bum :(.

Post WoW I agree. I don't hate that game, never played it, but it was definitely the point where the move of the genre into 'broad appeal' started to kill innovation.

Originally posted by Lord.Bachus

The grind came with EQ, Tough we didnt mind grinding back then, as it was the first virtuall 3D reallity 

 

What? you should really know better. You usually have more MMO knowledge than this. :(

The first MMO ever was already in 3D,it was called Meridian 59 and released early 1996 (I played it). It invented stuff like the trinity and the skills on cooldown thing.

It also invent the grind, but I blame monthly fees.

And OP should also know better, both M59 and the realm (that released mid 1996) were over a year before UO and both clearly MMOs, both had in fact a lot more in common with modern MMOs than UO.

I remember my first MMO quest in M59, I was to kill 10 rats in the moat.... Did that a few times since.

EdiT: Lol, I forgot the whole point.

M59 invented grind, but I think most of it was because of the monthly fees, not anything else. The longer you play the more they earn, singleplayer games never had anything like that.

I don't know, let me ask you.

When did Call of Duty, playing the same 5 maps over and over again started to become a grind?

When did playing a Football game 100000 times become a grind?

 I work everyday, it's a grind.

Originally posted by nhat

I don't know, let me ask you.

When did Call of Duty, playing the same 5 maps over and over again started to become a grind?

When did playing a Football game 100000 times become a grind?

 I work everyday, it's a grind.

Yeah, but most people quit those games when they become a grind.

Work and MMOs start out that way and we continue with them anyways. But at least you get paid for work, who do we keep grinding gear?

Originally posted by Lord.Bachus

The grind came with EQ, Tough we didnt mind grinding back then, as it was the first virtuall 3D reallity 

Technically, it existed long before; several hundred single-player rpgs and several hundred MUDs.

There is no modern game set up with a decade as average time-to-cap.

The grind, I think, always existed to some degree.  Most people did not notice it until they were years into living constantly within the same game.  It is possible that games were just never meant to be abused by players to this extraordinary degree.

Is it the game aging, or is the player's tolerance for mid-90s (even late 80s) design standards?  How many wild boars must Cartman kill to make love, not warcraft?

Yet--Andrew!?  A thinly-disguised NGE rant?  Still ?!!!??!?!!!!  Just let it go already.

I love the grind as long as it is fun. It is about the jourmey not about how quick you can get things done. Played FFXI for many years, tons of grind in that game but oh the journey was so much fun. 

Oh look. Another "Sandbox good, Themepark bad" thread. How novel. 

I'm glad im not the only one out here with the same feeling.

I loved the grind, not because it was a grind, but because every mob i killed I felt like I was headed to something better. I've always believed that people that play more and work hard should be rewarded. I don't get this EQ2 feature that balances 2 different level characters to make them more even.  When I was in PvP and saw someone below me I wanted to teach them a lesson. Go level up and then come back.

As a classic DAOC player (oh god that game was a grind). I wasn't even aware there really were quests besides at lv 50.  But grinds never felt like grinds, and when I leveled I felt awesome.

WoW did a great job creating quests, which was a grind, but you got great gear and learned an amazing story.

MY Top 2 MMOs are Daoc and WoW because of their lore.  I love the Arthurian legends and I love how WoW have used all the stories from warcraft 1-3 to create its world.

I'm currently back to daoc playing, and I really don't see the age as much as everyone else does I guess.  My biggest attraction was the endgame PvP and your continued opportunity to be rewarded for kills with new abilities. (Daoc really has removed all grind to get to lv 50 and to get good gear which is really nice for new people).  Daoc is actually a lot more populated then you think. Maybe I just favor RvRvR, you should really try Daoc if you havent before.

I could really go back to WoW because of its great world and the new expansion ( I dont see why people think the panda expansion is so funny lol? A classic character from Warcraft 3 was the drunken panda).  It turns me off though because of the wild level disparity of trying to start over and go from 1-90?  And still the PvP.  

To get people to keep paying.

What a great article of why mmos today fail and they don't make it ......While I don't agree with everything in the article some advancements have been leaps in bounds as far as story lines and player mechanics and enviroments. Some of these so called advancements have done nothing but to spur a divided commiunity of trad mmos with casual gamers only intrested in turning single player gmes into mmos with no end game and rail tracks of where you have to be and how you have to do it....

In summary its about time some wrote a article about this and maybe this might be the tide where a dev actually goes bact to the roots of mmorpgs

I can only hope

Decent article. I agree with a lot of people here thought pointing out the hyprocisy of calling EQ/UO pre-grind games. I think the focus needs to be less on what the ingame objectives are and more the pace and playstyle of the game.

Take UO as an example, there was no real ability spamming, not rotations, heck most fighting involved doubling clicking something and anxiously awaiting the result trading blows back and forth with a goat (which was quite formidable and might kill you...). This created lots of empty time. Time allowed for social interaction... something that a lot of hardcore gamers often lacked in everyday life, and it was good. Social interactions and a slower style which allowed you to go off and fish for few hours without feeling like you are "wasting your time".

EQ capitalized on this spare time notion, making people band together (for the most part) to progress through the game. Downtime, slow kill times, slow attack speeds, heck I could text-chat between skill uses and never worry about my DPS going down. Complex social relationships were the real game, honestly more like an RPG-chat room of sorts. The ultimate social experience resulting in raids. 

But the biggest complaint which turned player away from games like UO/EQ was TIME. "Time sinks" were a household name, and "grind" was getting out there as a way to describe MMOs. Downtime, time to level, time time time. So Blizzard answers this all with reducing time, cut the downtime, cut the time between attacks, add more skills, and expand on other game concepts (quests, factions, etc.).

It was never anything deceitful by Blizzard to remove this blight of timesink from the genre, they answered the demand from the market and were rewarded greatly for it. But Blizzard was smart and realized people still needed to spend TIME in the game in order to collect on monthly subscription fees. Thus the endgame. Time was no longer distrbuted through the game, but focused on the end of the game to keep players playing... and AH the "grind" shows its ugly face.

TL;DR the article misses a key point in that the "grind" was more of a social experience and made it tolerable. Now there is more focus on actual gameplay and the "grind" is more apparent.

Shadowbane was a great game without the grind, unfortunately developers put forth a game with lag and crashing and despite the good game play it was killed because of that, Darkfall supposedly the spiritual successor to Shadow does not seem to have the game play.

A lot of people praise SWG but it had such a small pop why?

To me Vanguard is a bit less grindy because the fights are more engaging and with diplomacy and an advanced crafting system there is more to do.

Originally posted by Skyy_High

Oh look. Another "Sandbox good, Themepark bad" thread. How novel. 

and?

About the same time we stopped loving the grind. I remember when people used to say WoW was too casual because there was so little grinding. When did we stop loving the grind?

The big change in grind came for me when I started playing WOW after being in EQ for  a few years.  EQ was the king of all grinds for me.  I liked to solo, so I rolled a necromancer, and found myself killing the same mobs over and over and over again to level.  I enjoyed it at the time, because I had nothing to compare it to.  Then WOW comes along, and it became more of a quest than mob grind which I thought was an improvement.  However, being able to kill a mob in WOW with my eyes closed was a big turn off.  They made it way too easy.  Grind is part of the game in mmorpg's, if you don't like it, then don't play it is my take.  I happen to like the slow progression when it is somewhat challenging and fun to do.  The moment it becomes boring I move on.

Problem is that most/all of the current "virtual worlds" are grinds now too.

I haven't played a MMO where I haven't felt like at times I was just "grinding" since UO.

UO never felt like a grind.

Even the power-hour skeleton respawn killing for skill ups didn't feel like a grind because it was always a social experience.

EvE, SWG, FFXI... any of the old/current "virtual worlds" learned far too much from EQ and not enough from UO.

Well, EvE is the best by far but the isk grind and PvE grind are two of the worst Grind offenders in the genre, IMO.

But I don't pretend to be a master of EvE, not by a long shot.

who knows...

People called Darkfall a grind.. but i enjoyed the amount it took for me to develop my character...

I think for some reason most people that play MMORPGs these days are the instant gratification lot and anything that takes time to do is a grind..

Grind became popular when the ADD crowd started to play MMORPGs in numbers. Before the term grind most enjoyed the slower pace and socializing as they played.

Now its populated with terms skill and compitition...and I'm not talking about pvp. You see these terms thrown around like prosac. Before it was just raid content where you would see these terms come up. Then it was 5 man hard mode. Now its everywhere. Myself, I don't know what this compitition is but I am sure that someone is using it as justification to act like a tool.

And when I got my flaming sword it was the best thing. Many had got theirs before me but I wasn't thinking about them, there was no make belief compitition. It was just me and my sword. Also loved my Cloak of Flames and my Short Sword of Ykesha.