MMO Mentality: Farm 6 Hours To Save 1 - And Love It

Said this way, World of Warcraft Classic's elite raiders seem caught in a bizarre scheme. They'll happily grind for six mind-numbing hours to save maybe 1 hour off a raid clear… The math makes no sense. Obviously, for these players the raid isn't the point – it's just their victory lap. The real endgame? The relentless pursuit of perfection itself. These are the folks who track world buff timers, who execute rotations with surgical precision, who refresh Warcaft Logs obsessively to see where they rank on tonight's parse. The satisfaction isn't in the loot that drops; it's in the process of optimization taken to its logical (or illogical) extreme.

The Optimization Rabbit Hole

The gulf between casual and hardcore WoW players isn't just wide; it's a different dimension. While casual players are satisfied clearing content with whatever gear they've scrounged together, the hardcore crowd treats efficiency like religion. 

(From WoWIsClassic)

This isn't just a WoW thing. Final Fantasy XIV speedrunners spend weeks practicing the same boss fight, just to save off a few seconds. Old School RuneScape diehards will grind for months chasing a single upgrade with a drop rate measured in fractions of a percent. EVE Online veterans build spreadsheets more complex than their company's quarterly financial reports – all to squeeze out a few extra ISK per transaction. What connects these behaviors isn't the reward – it's the chase itself.

"You're Playing It Wrong"

Not everyone gets it. Reddit is full of casuals (of course, there's no pejorative connotation to this term) wondering why anyone would farm 30 Gnomeregan runs a day for a few percent DPS increase. But for the farming faithful, there's something almost zen-like about the grind. A feral druid hunting the Manual Crowd Pummeler isn't just chasing an item – he is perfecting a routine. 

When Pointless Pursuits Become Passions

That's the weird beauty of MMORPGs - nobody tells you what "winning" looks like. Guild Wars 2 players will blow obscene amounts of gold on glowy weapons that do absolutely nothing except make other players whisper "where'd you get that?" EVE Online has actual accountants who've never seen combat, running virtual corporations from spreadsheets while drinking real coffee. And those Classic raiders? They treat 20-year-old content like they're shaving milliseconds off Olympic records.

Look, to “normal humans”, this all sounds batshit crazy. Why would anyone farm the same pixels for months? But man, there's something almost transcendent about it. My favorite MMO, and has been for a very long time, is Guild Wars 2. I love mass PvP, especially Realm vs. Realm. GW2's take on it is far from perfect, but it's good—good enough that it keeps a small but passionate community going strong. And what really keeps me coming back is the combat: tab-targeted, yes, but with just enough action baked in—cleaves, ground-targeted AoEs, directional skills etc.

That’s where Guild vs. Guild comes in. It’s not an official mode—never has been—but for over more than a decade now, we’ve made it real anyway. The GvG scene in GW2 is entirely community-run. We organize our own matches, set up rules, and at the beginning even used terrain that ArenaNet never really intended for it. I was part of a tight-knit guild for a few years. We’d log in some nights a week, spend hours fighting other guilds in coordinated 15v15s. No rewards. Nothing to gain. If anything, it cost us—gold, time, consumables. But we kept showing up, week after week, just for the love of the clash. Only in an MMO do you get dozens of strangers, building a scene out of thin air just because they can.

In my mind, it’s not that different from the marathon runner who destroys their body just to beat their personal best, or the chess nerd who memorizes obscure openings nobody's used since 1973. The trophy isn't the point. The finish line isn't either. It's about becoming the “crazy” person who perfected something nobody else cared about.

What Actually Matters

All this bickering about "efficient vs. inefficient" gameplay is completely missing the forest for the trees. MMOs aren't just games—they're digital playgrounds where spreadsheet nerds, parse-chasing tryhards, and fashion-obsessed transmog collectors all get to be the heroes of their own weird little stories.

As Vanilla WoW lurches toward its 21st birthday and the same forum disputes recycle for the ten-thousandth time, maybe the only real truth is this: fun is whatever the hell you decide it is, and getting really damn good at something—anything—feels fantastic, even if "something" is farming Dire Maul until your eyes bleed.