Grind.
A factor that could be called a core game design aspect in all MMOs(Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs). How do you keep players in a persistent game world where rapid and constant content releases are impossible with today’s game design practices? The answer is shiny gear and the gold or time needed to get them. Need equipment? Need crafting materials? Chances are that the easiest place to get them is the convenient auction house or trading post located in your local hub or city. No gold? Grind it out or obtain it as a drop. If you can’t do any of those you are outta luck. The unfortunate part about MMOs is the amount of grind you need to be able to either play the content or afford/obtain the gear you need to do the content. The method of grinding can range from almost braindead boring(runescape) to entertaining but extremely time consuming(WoW).
Lets start with a MMO that many people have played at some point in time(including me):
An old MMO that is probably the most egregious example of a grind fest. Stat scaling in this game is exponential, with the amount of experience to level past level 70 or so in a skill requiring millions of experience points. Additionally, almost all non quest items could be bought from other players and later, the grand exchange, the game’s version of a trading hub. Consequently, most players grinded xp on high HP but low attack/strength mobs such as the famous rock crab and farmed gold from farming mobs with high value drops. A side effect of this was the rampant use of bots to farm gold, items, and experience for bored players. Things such as combat system, aging graphics and mechanics aside, the biggest problem with the game was the amount of grind required. At some point it just wasn’t worth it to play the game anymore.
The biggest MMO to date also suffered from grind issues, but in a bit of a different way than in games such as Runescape.
A key difference in WoW was that the best gear for players was primarily obtained as drops from dungeons and raids. Additionally, these drops were soul-bound or account-bound, meaning that once you picked up or wore the item, you could not trade it to other players. It was forever yours and yours only. The way item progression worked in WoW was that open world quests often gave you white(common quality) or green(uncommon quality) gear as a reward. Chances are, once you reached the level to do 5 man dungeons in the game, you were geared in this quality of gear. 5 man dungeons were a big step up in terms of difficulty from open world solo questing and as a result dropped greens and blues(rare quality). Once you were max level, the endgame goal were raids, the most difficult content in the game requiring 10 or 25 people. The 40 man raid model was scrapped when the first expansion hit as it was generally considered too hard to organize a raid of that size. Bosses from these raids dropped purples(epic quality). This gear was considered the best in the game if the raid tier was the most recent and often had unique passives and additional effects for classes. Gold in WoW was still a necessity and could be used to buy mounts, consumables, and crafting materials. However it was possible to somewhat ignore gold grinding if a player was focused solely on obtaining gear. The biggest problem with this system was that it still required an enormous time investment from the player. Dungeons could only be completed for rewards once a day and raids could only be completed once a week.
A final MMO that I would like to talk about is Guild Wars 2.
A hugely advertised feature of the game was the “No grind” philosophy. Exotic quality gear could be obtained easily through crafting or dungeon tokens. Content in the game was easy enough that players didn’t have to be geared in the best possible equipment to complete PvE content. This however came with a few big side effects. After players reached max level, they discovered that there were no big raids waiting for them. The hardest PvE content in the game were a set of randomized level dungeons called fractals. Thus players complained that the game had no “endgame”. The way the developers of Guild Wars 2 tried to address this issue was through the concept of a “living story”, a series of bi-weekly content patches. This worked well for a while, however as time passed, the trickle of content from these updates was not enough to hold veteran players for a long amount of time. Ironically, the easy of obtaining powerful gear and the relative availability of all the content made the game seem short of content. Even more ironically is that after gearing up in the best tier of gear, most players focused on cosmetics. But what was used to purchase these cosmetic pieces of gear you ask? Gold. The problem with the loot system of guild wars 2 is that drops are relatively unrewarding and are usually salvaged into materials. This is because of the extremely low drop chance of rares and exotics. Thus at the end of the day, the game literally relies on the gold standard. Almost everything in the game can be bought and sold on the trading post, including legendary items. The result is that the game has a very strange playerbase composition. It is the perfect MMO for casual players or players who didn’t have the time to actually play for long periods of time. However, people who seek to spend more than a few hours a week ingame don’t have very much to do. Often they pursue legendary or high cost cosmetic items by grinding gold. And thus ironically, the game arrives full circle back to the gold grind.
This is definitely a very controversial topic in MMOs and it continues to be discussed. In my experience, a game like this is subject to a “grindy” feel no matter how you approach the game. The fact is that the point of the game is to get from level 1 to the level cap and how do you do that? You grind. As a player of the original EverQuest back in 2000, I definitely became familiar with the “grind.” As you may know EverQuest is not based around quests as much as you would think. While there are quests for specific factions and class items, it focuses more on grouping to grind in one spot for hours killing mobs.
World of Warcraft arguably did away with the grind probably better than any other game as (hense its success). Additionally they went about the endgame in a new way that people had never seen. At this point though, I think leveling has become a joke. You could stand in one spot for levels 15-100 by just queueing for various dungeons. This has made the game boring for a lot. I think in order to be successful in this type of game, the game must definitely rid its players of the constant grind but at the same time you have to find a balance and not lose what the game is about in the first place. Leveling.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with grinding in MMO’s. Think of it this way: people in real life wake up in the morning, go to work, come home, eat/relax/etc, then sleep again. Now think of how you play your MMO’s, you log in/turn on the game, complete daily’s, run some quests, craft/learn a skill/etc, and then you log off. Drawing an analogy to real life, it creates an interesting idea of what grinding is. “Grinding” or “going to work” are very similar. You work and work, grind and grind until you make enough or get something valuable in which you exchange that for something else of higher value or you use it to make life easier. For real life examples, your paycheck can be exchanged for more valuable goods and working hard to get a promotion is something that can make your life easier to get more money to buy more rewarding goods. In the game world, you grind until you make money to buy gear or you grind to find good loot to make life easier for you to find better loot.
Of course, you hear people saying they don’t like their job just like you hear people saying that a particular game is a “grind-fest” and is awful. Then, do what people who hate their job do, find a better one or continue with it and drag yourself through it.
But there’s also people that love their job and in the same idea, there’s some people that love the grinding of their particular game of choice. But no matter what, just like how you have to work to make a living in order to do what you want and explore the world, you have to grind in MMO’s to do be able to do what you want later and explore the end-game. Grinding, just like working in real life, is necessary for MMO’s.
Grinding for me has always been one of the biggest turn aways for me in games. I could not make it to level 20 in WoW because of how boring I found the game. I had the same issue with every MMO I have played since, including GW2 and a few F2P WoW rip offs. The one MMO that hits the hammer on the nail with my friends and I however is Runescape. I have no idea what formula Runescape did to somehow remove the boredom from grinding for me, but the satisfaction of finally being able to wear some high level gear I had been eyeing since I started playing was some of the greatest satisfaction I’ve ever had in gaming.
Grinding can take many different forms, however, with some being less egregious and monotonous than others. I’ve played all three of those MMOs, along with a few others like A Realm Reborn and Everquest, and I can definitely say I lost track of time and what I was doing at the time felt like less of a slog than others depending on the game.
Runescape is horrible at this. It’s purely for people who love blatant, repetitive grinding. There is very little to no variation once you reach the most efficient XP/hr routes for each skill, and the player-created timewall formed from in-game gold only makes it worse.
In comparison, Warcraft’s raids are far less of a chore. Here, you are not alone. Here, you can spend time with fellow guildmates and work together, socialize and conquer challenges. Boss fights often don’t play out exactly the same every time you attempt them, and loot almost always varies as well, offering a level of randomness that has kept players coming back to the “King of MMOs” for a decade now.
Grinding isn’t inherently good or bad, it’s just how the game approaches, and the person’s unique taste, that determine whether you enjoy it or not.
I’m not sure why, but I actually enjoyed grinding for things in MMO’s, specifically runescape and WOW. I found something extremely satisfying about mining and smelting in runescape for hours on end. Not only mining and smelting, but I would actually enjoy killing cows in a field. In terms of WOW, I ended up spending massive amount of time collecting herbs to try and save up for a flying mount / paying for repairs. After hours of looking for and collecting herbs, I found it very satisfying to play the market in the auction house.
I agree with Sean. Games, especially for the MMOs, do have the problem of grinding. When I play the game like WoW, I sometimes can barely stand with the repeated tasks to complete to level up. And I think the game Adventure Wanted from our team has the same problem. Based on the feedback we obtained, the players complained about the game is not fun enough and the only thing need to do is to pick up the food and treasure. Also, they suggested that more unexpected elements need to be added in the game, which I totally agree. If the game designer wants to have the players engaged in the game, the grinding is necessary, but it should be balanced. The good stories and different mechanics need to be applied to generate different grinding tasks. As a result, the player will not get bored with the game easily.
First off, I think all games sort of have a grind. Most of the time, it is when you are stuck in the game waiting for some arbitrary numbers to go up, but this isn’t the only type of “grind-esque” wait that games have. Take GTA for instance: it is the current pinnacle of open world games, and yet if you play through the whole game, you will be sick of driving through from point A to point B by the time you are complete. Even the “make money” aspect can be very slow to progress, and yet this game is in no way characterized by its tedious elements.
This illustrates the simple point that games can have grind in their core gameplay, it just needs to be dressed up in a way that gamers do not hate it. MMO’s tend to get a bad reputation since they try to showcase the grind elements as the literal gameplay of the game. While the sense achievement that the user gets from completing these games is worthwhile, at times it is the only thing driving the player forward.
As a personal anecdote, I joined up with WoW for roughly 5 months around when Cataclysm came out. I had tried other MMO’s, but I always invariably got sick of playing them. When I started in WoW, I was amazed to see the higher-level, accomplished players and their gear. The only reason I wanted to progress on the massive level scale was to reach those levels of play; I almost made it to max level too, but I was so totally enthused with the game at that point that I stopped playing altogether.
I was so completely burned out from the boredom of the core game that I was disappointed with myself for even playing this long. When I think about people who have leveled multiple Level 1 characters to max, I am genuinely dumbfounded in this case as to why they have done so. I think I just do not understand what it is this genre has brought others so much entertainment. Sure, it is fun to play with friends, but even with a group of people, doing something for the eight-thousandth time is still going to be boring.
I personally believe with these massive RPG style games it is almost impossible to avoid a gold standard in some way. All of these games will have a type of currency and in order to obtain currency you will have to complete a task. These task will almost always take massive amount of time to become skilled at where they even make you a reasonable profit. Thus is why most games will always have a grind aspect for players that want to use gold in order to purchase items or trade in any means grinding will be a key part to a lot of these games. But with that all being said a lot of players where their grinding ability as a badge of honor for the amount of time it took them to accomplish their tasks.
Although some gamers hate the aspect of grinding in games, there is still an audience that enjoys grinding out in-game items. I believe that one of the main reasons many of us are engaged with repeating almost identical tasks for hours on end is because the progress we make is transparent. In other words, we can clearly justify our work and see how close we our to obtaining whatever in-game item we desire. Without this investment of time, the in-game items sought after would not be as worthwhile. It seems like the process of working towards getting the items is more rewarding than receiving them.
I think that grinding is a huge part of successful games. I wrote a post earlier about Destiny and its similarities to WoW. Destiny is a hard core grind game. The only way to get the best gear and weapons is to persistently complete raids or weekly strikes to get loot, then level up those legendary or exotic loot items you earned. If you don’t get the item that you want, then you wait for the weekly reset and do it again. Grinding is the only way to max out your player whether it’s playing just PvE or whether there is a special event where you get special PvP loot (Iron Banner). There are pros and cons to this approach in Destiny’s game model. The pros are that players will spend a massive amount of time trying to get the piece of armor they want. It also forces players to join clans or make teams of people to continuously do raids on a regular basis. The cons include repetition and lack of game content. Doing the same strikes and raids over and over again gets boring. I suspect that for some seasoned WoW players, this may also be the case. I never played Rune Scape or Guild Wars 2 so I’m not sure if the same thing applies. I suppose after some serious thought, my point is any game whether it be MMO or not, that contains some sort of hierarchical item or level system inspires the grind which is why a lot of games implement them.