Grinding.

The thing is, games need the grinding part of the game whether you like it or not. It helps new players learn the ins and outs of the game and gives a chance to meet new people while leveling. Also, there needs to be an incentive to keep playing as well as motivation to buy things with real money to aid your level because the companies need a way to earn money as well. It sucks but it's necessary

 

Grinding should not be necessary. You should have enough content to get you through your levelling, and if there is not enough content to get you through levelling, then there is something systemically wrong with the game.

 

It just depends on how it's implemented. I don't think mindless, boring, grinding should be essential to leveling or completing the storyline of a game. But if you have to grind to get a special item or piece of gear, than I don't mind it. It's good to make people work to get rare items in the game.

 

Grinding is fairly essential to any MMO. Leveling, for money, grinding for gear. It'd be fairly odd if someone was an MMO player and didn't like the grinding aspect of the game at all. It's part of the gratification of playing an MMO to feel the satisfaction of grinding a rare piece of gear, or a mount.

 

I don't like grinding to level, but I do like grinding to farm/make money. Random encounters make grinding 10x worse since you can't really pick your battles, and after a while it gets tiresome. But, I do find it relaxing sometimes to take a max level character to kill monsters for loot. That kind of grinding I like.

 

I love grinding for farming mats or for money, i have a lot of fun perfecting my AoE skills in order to pull bigger and bigger packs of mobs and then take them down super quickly.

 

Maybe its not correct but i alwyas do it

 

^These. Most MMO i have played doesn't really require grinding to gain experience or to level up, but grinding is necessary in order to farm materials and money. It is almost impossible to be rich in MMO without farming unless you are the type who buy in-game currency using real life money from illegal gold-sellers.

 

Grinding is essential to some extent, otherwise everyone would have all the good stuff. It's all about how long and fun the grind is, if it's unbearable then the game will fail. I can grind for a bit, but after a while it really bores me.

 

Yeah. I've noticed that a lot of MMO players tend to be pretty judgmental towards players like me. I don't know why. How I play my game isn't really any of their business since I'm not breaking the rules. They give me shit because I prefer grinding to raiding.

 

I hate grinding I don't do it for the leveling, but for making money usually before I start grinding I switch to window mode and load up my playlist and start the grind.

 

I disagree completely.
I was addicted to Lineage 2 for over a year, yet I absolutely dislike the grinding part of it. Most (probably over 99%) of the players in that game agree with me. Grinding is not necessary. Yes, leveling and gain gears are necessary, but it is not necessary through mindless fighting on the same spot over the same a few spawn and respawned monsters over and over. It's called dumb lol.

In Lineage 2, at level 70+, you'd gain 1% XP of a level per hour if you can kill one monster every five seconds nonstop. Then you'd lose 4% XP if you die once to either a NPC or a hostile player. Isn't that dumb?

I don't really mind the "hard" part, as long as the process of killing monsters is fun... which isn't the case in 99% of the MMORPG. The only fun PvE I have seen was not in a MMO, but rather a RPG (Neverwinter Nights to be more specific.) It was on a server where dozens people constantly build new areas/dungeons and custom monsters and items. We had so many places to go to, and every dungeon/area was always built to keep going, and we never had the need to camp one spot to kill the same a few spawns over and over like in all the MMOs.

You must feel weird why I complain about grinding while I was still addicted. Let me explain. The actual part of the Lineage 2 made me addicted to it was the PvP. It's an open PvP game where everyone can fight everyone. Players formed clans and clans formed alliances. We had giant castle sieges during the weekends where hundreds players fight hundreds players at one place in a well organized fashion. That's what kept me going. The grinding in Lineage 2 was painful and boring, but it was the only way to gain level and gears and to become more powerful in PvP.

I just wish more MMORPGs can have fun PvE instead of boring grinding. Then again, since it's MMO, they need to have a lot more dungeons than what a NWN server had to offer before not every dungeon is overcrowded with players.

 

I don't mind grinding if it's engaging. I mean, if I'm working towards an attainable goal, and not just trying to grind to find some rare item that may or may not show up, I'm good with it. I think it's up to the developers to make the process interesting.

 

Grinding is a necessity. When I first started playing MMO type games its really all there was. And even back in vanilla WoW days getting from 40 to 50 was an absolute grind fest. But I made the best of it. What I don't like is figuring out the best grind routine and doing that over and over. I feel now the best way to grind is just to go from one area to the next, sure it might take longer than just grinding the same thing over and over, but at least its not to repetitive. That's one of the few reasons I cant play any of the Disgaea games as well, just grinding the same level over and over again.

 

I absolutely hate grinding, because I know that even if I enjoy the game's combat to a certain degree it all becomes the same after a certain amount of time. Grinding has an inherently repetitive nature, and there are very few repetitive things that are enjoyable.

 

Oh those grinds for rare random drops are the worst! At least it replaced an older trend in EQ2 for example: camping rare spawn mobs, that was even worse.

 

The problem with MMO is that... there are way too many players on the same server to allow you the leisure to go from one area to another. In Lineage 2 for example, although the world is pretty big by game standard (takes hours to run from one end of the map to the other), but there are tens thousands players on each server, and the areas fitting for your level is limited. You only gain good XP from NPC same or higher level than you. Not to mention that, players who already occupied one area will see you as hostile if you started to killing NPCs on their grinding ground. Remind you L2 is an open PvP game... so I guess there is no need to tell you what happen next if you start to make other players feel threatened lol.

Now, you can certain "enjoy" your grinding by doing it slowly by fighting any monsters (not just your own level) you want, and go from one area to another. This kind of insufficient leveling will leave you behind most of other hardcore players. In the case of Lineage 2, you will be weak and owned in PvP which is the main selling point of the game.

My point stands, I wouldn't even mind it if the leveling part is fun. But it isn't in most games. The only way to avoid boring leveling up is to have endless supplies of long trip/adventure style of dungeons/areas, which isn't the case with MMO.

 

I'm not really sure what your point is. Are you saying that grinding isn't essential or necessary for MMO games, or are you saying that its not grinding so long as its fun? I mean, basically most MMO games are one big grind fest, grind for gear, for gold, for levels, for rank, the list goes on. Even if you had one quest after another or doing raids that are fun, this is still grinding. My point being that grinding cant be avoided in MMO games, be it fun, boring, frustrating, or the best experience you ever had in gaming, its all grinding.

 

Depends on the game. It does add thousands of hours of more game time, so I think it should be kept in most games.

 

If grinding makes sense to the internal consistency of the game then I'm okay with grinding. Like EveOnline. Without grinding the economy sort of just goes belly up and there's not much of a game there at all. It's all about the mining. But on the other hand some games, like LOTR, the grinding just seemed to be there for the sake of grinding. You liked a four hour movie with a lot of chopping? Well how about four days of orc chopping! I never understood it, personally, and I don't think I ever will.