The Daily Grind: How much grind is too much?

Grind is there in nearly every game but the secret is that you don't notice it. The best practice for hiding the grind is to make leveling by quests and interesting ones.

Many mmo's reply too much on kill 10 or more of this for a quest which will help you clear half your level and then you know you got to grind the rest of the XP from mobs. This is clearly where Aion has it wrong and of course the XP given or required (however you want to spin it) is needed far more than compared to other mmo's.

Grind are things like Aiya, Aion and LoTRO (in the Lonelands Zone).

LoTRO gets a special mention amongst the Asian games as that one zone above all is amazingly grindy. Kill 10 boar, Kill 10 Lynx, Kill 10 Spider, Kill 10 Dwarves, Kill 10 Orc and Kill 10 Warg. (Mind you, those warg and boar don't really drop, so you actually need to kill about 300)

A good western focused game avoids the kill 10 boar methods and tries to hide it with story and purpose.

I prefer my game to make the killing hard. Not as in low drop rates but as in a challenge to get the mob. Now, that is excitement! (for me)

Grind doesn't bother me only if it is fun, and keeps me entertained a long the way. It is the grind where the entire game is just endlessly killing mobs for no apparently reason, no plot reason, just random mob genocide, that I cannot stand and do not find fun in any way. Too bad the entire industry seems to be turning into this though. For example just because the game has lots of quests doesn't mean those quests are in any way fun or interesting, i found this most prevalent in wow, not to mention the way the questing is set up makes all the towns robotic, because only the quest givers have anything to say and those are quests. Long past are the days of immersion running around talking to all the npcs, a lot of whom had interesting things to say even if it wasn't for a quest or advancement in anyway, just for immersion.

Ive pretty much had enough of "proper" grinding. If your enjoying proper content I dont count that as grinding, however when a game runs out of content ala Aion, and still expects you to produce 2.7 million XP before it allows you to access more content, thats when I refuse to accept it and the game no longer has access to my wallet.

I count mindless grinding in a game, not including enough content to be able to level up (if your going to have to have a leveling up system), as lazyness on the behalf of the devs.

I agree with you Bluefunk, I had really high hopes for Aion being a game I was going to stay with for awhile, but once the grind hit around lvl 39ish I just didnt feel it was worth the time to stay with. I (like many other people) dont mind some grind from time to time, but come on! its almost the year 2010 and people still are making mmos with intense grind in them. I can understand the first generation of mmos having grind but we are now way beyond those and gaming companies are twenty times the size they were in like 98', why do we still even accept grind in games at all?

Exactly, the quest driven grind mmorpgs are no different then the Asian ones, there is actually more grinding to do because you have to go talk to a bunch of random npcs that for the most part have nothing better to say then "kill x mob y times receive x y or z reward"

Too much grind? For me, I've found that "go out and kill this number of mobs 'cause you need xp" type games (those that are without quests) somewhat bothersome. But then again, there are those that are nothing but quests, but all those quests are essentially the same thing of "kill everything in sight 'cause you need xp, just come talk to me when you're done".

What I think games need in the ways of Grind is ways to make it interesting. Provide grinding for all aspects of the game. I've been toying with the idea of a skill-based system where you don't get skills from leveling up or anything, you get skill points for completing interesting tasks. These might include completeing a dungeon and killing the boss, making a certain amount of money in a day, or perhaps discovering something new while out exploring. Maybe you get a skill point for crafting something exceptional that day, or completeing a certain quest. How about participating in a successful city raid? Or city defense? Working with your guild to defeat a very large world boss to get skill points for the whole guild? Players need options that aren't the infamous "Kill ten rats".

Of course, for that to be viable, all of those options have to be fun and immersive and interesting to the player. Crafting can't just be the "collect x stuff, press button, wait x seconds". Add a mini-game to it that the better you do, the better your chances of crafting something "skill point worthy". Make travel and exploration interesting with interesting rewards, such as beautiful locales. That, to me, would be acceptable grind.

I think Guild Wars had it right. At times the quests got a bit strenuous, but they were usually interesting or they were different from the norm.

Another vote for Guild Wars - given zones are instanced and mobs don't respawn, "kill 10 rats" type quests aren't really there. Instead, many quests give skills for rewards, and the "hunt the named mob" type quests are often good for elite skills.

I don't notice the grind in LoTRO so much, even though there is a grind-esque component to raising certain virtues, etc. I notice the grind more in WoW but it isn't too bad for me.

Back in the days of games like Everquest we had lots of grind, but we accepted it because we didn’t have anything better. But then came the next 2nd and 3rd generation MMOs with more meaningful quests.

So here we are 10 years later and we still see some games with nothing but grinding. To me that’s just lazy and has that ‘assembly line’ feeling: kill 10 rats, then kill 50 rats, then kill 100 rats, etc ad nauseam, which shows no imagination whatsoever. I recently started playing Fallen Earth and really enjoy it. They mix a bit of grind with crafting quests, fedEx missions, Easter egg hunts, and downright interesting quests in a very open world where the player has the freedom to decide where to go rather than being dragged by the nose and funnelled from one zone to another. Thanks to this game, I love MMOs again and said goodbye to my loved ones for an ‘indefinite’ period of time. ;)

Sure ‘The Grind’ will never truly go away, but at least give us more than just grind. Show a little creativity.

I prefer minimal grind. One that allows you to feel like you're getting better at a steady rate. The general level 20 grind should be the standard speed for all levels. When it gets to the point that you're taking a week or two to see a level increase I get bored really fast. WAR was the latest game to dry me out in this method. I had also shown a lot of interest in Aion when it released, being a Guild Wars fan. But when I heard that it was a complete grindfest I completely passed on it, not wanting to repeat my experience with WAR.

IMO, the best "grind" comes from skill based games. My very first MMO was SWG. It started out a grinder because it was Dependant on equipment, so the combat toons had to wait for the crafters to get established. But once everyone got up to speed and top end areas of the game were unlocked, it was great. It had some serious grind effecting certain professions to be sure (I remember Rifleman, Bounty Hunter, and DE in particular), but overall it was a very fun grind... until SOE got WOW envy and decided to get all iconic. The last time I tried that game again it was taking over two weeks to go up one level at top end. Thats silly and a complete waste of my time. I refuse to invest that much of my life into such an unrealistic time-sink.

These days I'm in love with Eve. Many people are turned off by Eves real time skill training, but I think it's brilliant. It solves a great deal of problems in the MMO genre and allows you to focus more on what you want to do in lieu of what the grind pushes you towards. The primary thing people trying Eve out for the first time should remember is that they shouldn't worry about catching up to Mr. 50 million skill pointer. He can never use all those skill points against you. If you train smart you can be effective against multi-year veterans in just a few months.

Asian games like Aion are based on a customer base with limited play time or availability to high-speed Internet. In which case grindy games are the best method for keeping those customers coming back.

Customers with greater access to bandwidth and more leisure time are bat enticed by a goal driven design.

I think it might be all about the reward, based on some of the comments above me. Give me a kill 20 wolves quest, but not only reward me with xp and a piece of gear or other item, but give me something else to help with my character progression, as many mentioned Guild Wars does. Shooting for that skill you don't have, as well as being great for completionists, takes the bite out of killing so many mobs.

If all these kill 10 boar quests would add up to something more than just xp and gear, again, skills or traits or talent points, or like EQ2 with it's AA points, these are what makes MMOs shine and "hide" the grind. Anyway, that's my opinion and what I would like to see more of. Just give me more reason to do those kill quests than the standard xp/item reward.

I'm a big fan of both LOTRO and Aion, but it always makes me laugh when LOTRO fans claim the game isn't grindy. I mean, the deeds are literally "Kill 200 of X Monster", how is that not grindy? I haven't gotten to Aion's mega-grind yet (I'm only level 21), but at least I know the game won't try to pull the wool over my eyes. I'm not saying either one is right, but don't church up a grind with pretty window-dressing...just eliminate it altogether.

Ironically, I think this is one thing that WAR does right. Once you XP cap at level 40, the only thing left to do is grind your renown up to RR80 so you can wear the best gear. However, you must farm renown via PvP, which is a fun way to do it that makes the grinding an afterthought (much like gaining experience ranks in a first-person shooter such as Call of Duty 4). Even while leveling XP in WAR it's most efficient to do so via PvP, since both your experience and renown will go up at the same time (and you can have fun capturing battlefield objectives while doing so).

Grinding should almost be a meta-game, not THE game.

Like others here have agreed, 'grinding' is currently unavoidable in MMO's but can be disguised *and* be made fun, challenging, and goal orientated.

For want of a better example, take the recent changes in WoW.
Nobody could disagree that the ongoing desire to gain Emblems (in order to gain better items) is something that drives players. It's like a big juicy carrot being dangled in front of your toon, and it's in no way or shape anything other than a 'grind'.

But - that carrot is placed at an acceptable distance - the end goal is identifiable and relatively achievable for most players, and most importantly the grind is packaged in a large number of replayable instances that break it up into manageable, goal-orientated and generally fun bite sized chunks.

In other words, we're still 'grinding' for Emblems, but in the process we get to have mini-adventures and challenges with a differing range of players and content (thanks to the new dungeon-finder tool) and at the end of the day we get rewarded by being able to obtain new gear on a regular basis.

Yes, if a Wow player does heroics over and over and over and over and over again they're going to get tired of it, but thankfully in a game like Wow there's also a ton of other distractions to break up the experience.

To my mind, Wow has one of the slickest disguises for end-game grind on the market by packaging it all up into manageable runs (instances) that players can do once a day or chained together (if that's their particular cup of tea).

I see the new Lotro skirmishes attempting to emulate this - and I honestly do think they speak to that same desire of 'packaged achievable content' that Wow's dungeons provide (especially at a L80 heroics level).
However for Lotro they're still in their early days (I hope) as the skirmishes are nothing more than respawning waves of enemies - kinda like Serious Sam in Middle Earth. I'd love to see these evolve into slightly more complex/interesting encounters.

TL;DR: Package up the grind into achievable, bite sized fun chunks and it's 100% more palatable.

Anyhow, that's my $0.10
=)