The Daily Grind: No grind?? No pre-order!!

What's annoying about all the negative reaction is that another, popular game does the exact same thing, and no one flips out. EVE online forces EVERYONE to advance at the same rate with nothing you can do about it, due to the real time training aspect. Everyone is okay with this, and it's a lauded feature of the game.

I think people are too focused on grinding. All the counter-reaction is focused on not being able to level. If the game is anything like FFXI there will be so much to do that even with a limit you can spend a lot of time in it.

it was a testing ground so hush up.

In a "charge to the end" system, there is a penalty to characters that take time to explore multiple aspects of a game. Beyond unpleasant interactions with "min/max" players, the "explore/create" crowd faces a reality in which content development focuses overwhelming on raid material.

A fatigue mechanic will inevitably reduce the population of "min/max" players who take up the game. Their absence becomes a selling point for a different set of players. Fewer "min/max" players means fewer unpleasant interactions, and content development can go into what the "min/max" crowd refers to as "trash:" everything about a game that does not involve the drop of "epic loot."

Square has been very forthcoming about designing XIV to attract a "new kind of player," and that does require a new kind of play. For the old kind of play, I look forward to Cataclysm, and will quite merrily romp through "trash" for the next tiers of purple. However, I also look forward to wandering around Eorzea looking at the scenery.

Why, it's almost as if Square planned the fatigue feature as one way to allow XIV players to switch back and forth between it and "some other game."

A very ignorant title for an ignorant article, never thought i would see this from you.

Tells me advertising or endorsments have some play whether to Massively directly or its parent company indirectly.

Damage is done, word of mouth is spreading, and you folks at Massively are siding with the wrong folks trying to setup soapboxes to calm the masses in your infinite wisdom.

The problem is that this system doesn't fix the issue at all. This is like someone complaining that they have to work 60 hours at a terrible job per week to put food on the table, and then the boss saying "don't worry, you can just come in for 30 hours and get paid for 30 hours time". That doesn't solve the person's problem, what really needs to happen is to improve the quality of the time they spend at the job.

It should be fun to play the game and advance for long periods of time, not just a grind-fest that is artificially capped.

I Think the Furor over this is not so much that people want to grind in an MMO, it is more that with the current understanding of the system, it is Punishing people for playing more then what the Developers believe they should play.

Having a system that punishes a person for playing your game is a bad idea. It's like punishing someone for working unpayed overtime.

Now if they had built the system smiler to the Rest experience system used in some of the newer MMO's that would still benefit the Casual players, while not punishing the people who may have a good chunk of time they can spend.

I mean even a Casual gamer can sometimes pull a all day play of a game. Do you think that they would like the system, even if they don't normally encounter the Punishment?

I will admit, I am a grinder... That being said, I only grind when its entertaining to me. Faction grinds in WoW... not fun. Killing monsters over and over again in a game where combat is fun and interesting... fun.

I am one of those Final Fantasy XI loyalists that finds the party grinding mechanic entertaining. XI had a good, complete and decent threat mechanic system which allowed this to be enjoyable. Switch over to Aion which has a similar requirement for party grinding and it was not fun at all because of the lack of a decent threat management system.

The bottom line comes to this though, "People are not angry that they cannot grind, people are angry because the devs are basically telling us how to spend our time playing the game." Its not the fact that people love grinding, its simply the fact that they are telling us how we are supposed to spend our time in the game. Instead of having many options like an MMO is supposed to have, we are given options with an overall limit. We have to change what we are doing in game every few hours or we hit a weekly wall.

The sad fact of the matter is though, that if Square-Enix had half a brain (or a decent PR department) they would have been able to spun this system. As it is now, it is a penalty that scales up over time and the game SHOWS you how much you are missing out on. If the developers had thought it through they could have done the opposite thing. Giving us a "bonus" for the first 8 hours of play per week and then hid the "penalty" as you receiving no bonus. Its unfortunate that its too late now to get the "penalty" system back in the bag.

It's not so much the issue of no grind, no pre-order. I love exploring the rest of the game. Seeing all the added bonuses is what makes a world feel alive.

I commend SE for trying to make the game more casual friendly, but I think they are taking it the wrong way. And many people don't like to be dictated as to when they can play when they are paying a monthly fee.

As a casual player, I may have an hour or two a day to play at times and that's fine. I work and I go to school, but from time to time I like to shut out the world and just completely veg out on a video game. But if I did that with the current system then it means that big growth spurt I was hoping to achieve one weekend wouldn't be as much as I had hoped, especially if I played a few hours throughout the week.

People leveling at different speeds is just going to happen, you shouldn't prevent it. I don't harbor ill feelings towards the guy ten levels ahead of me when we started at almost the same time. It's just the way things are. If you want to give people the boost to try and level the playing field eventually then give resting bonuses, the occasional quests with fairly decent xp, etc. Don't limit the grind, that just hurts everyone regardless of your intentions. As long as there's level caps, we'll all catch up in time.

May have already been said, but I think the key thing to look at here is what they plan on doing with surplus xp. Since I'm not in Beta I don't know entirely how it works, but several people have stated that the less normal xp you get, the more surplus xp you get. The devs say they haven't really decided what to do with it, and I think a rewards system using that surplus xp for new abilities, lower recast timers, etc. (similar to Merit Points from XI) could actually keep some people leveling their favorite class even after the hit the 0% xp point and still feel like they are progressing. Again, not in Beta, so if something is wrong here please correct me.

Also, to all those who have said they cancelled their preorder and will never play it, I'll say this: Cancelling is all well and good, but don't throw this game off your radar just yet. They still have time to save it and from what I've seen they are already listening more to their fanbase a lot more this time around then they did with XI.

For the record, I'd like to say that Jef is the most provocative, interesting writer on this blog. It's rare that his pieces don't provoke strong reactions, and I'm always fascinated by the gamut of outlandish responses they generate. I think here the wicked grin on the writer's face came when he decided to use the nominally negatively connoted 'grind' as a shorthand for a variety of other ideas which could equally also be positively phrased, but which would a) make the piece twice as long and b), lead to him being accused of the same nonsense anyway. Like throwing one peanut at twenty monkeys, the ensuing furore is a thing of raging splendour. Awesome! :)

I'm not a fan of grind, but I also don't like systems that say "Okay, no more leveling for you till next week". I'd rather they remove grind by making the levels just come faster. And failing that, I'd prefer UO's powerhour system where for the first hour in every day that you log in you get mad exp, so that all a casual has to do is log in for an hour every day, but if you really wanted to, you could keep going after that.

i don't think the XP dimishing returns are a game breaking issue. in Beta 3 they greatly expanded the XP window and i as someone recently unemployed played a good 6-8 hours everyday between two classes and I never saw the dimishing returns on XP. I do agree that you shouldn't limit your most fanatic players, the core of almost every mmo are those 12+ hour a day players. they are the people pioneering new content, creating strategies that the entire gamebase community will use and discovering things that have been placed out of sight. Limiting the amount of time that your hardcore fanbase can put in is a recipe for disaster imho.

I love FFXI and FFXIV is a blast too. I still think they need to increase the soloability. There is too much variation in power between mobs of the same type. at Lv6 I spent 2 hours running leve's (which I hate by the way, the leve aggro works strangely so when leve mobs spawn, healers or whoever is weakest generally gets aggro first and dies) and 2 hours killing fireflies, beetles and moles. its not uncommon to kill 5 or 6 moles, regen to full health and be killed by a freakishly strong mole. in WoW if your kill something, the next time u fight it that same mob type has the exact same strngth as the one before it. In FFXIV, a strong version of a weak enemy type could be upto 30% (just an educated guess) stronger.