Grinding.

Grinding is boring, but it has its usefulness. If you're wanting an entertaining and engaging experience, then grinding is obviously the farthest thing from fun you can get.

If you however just want to unwind at the end of a work day and don't feel like playing something that requires a lot of thought (and you don't like shooters like CoD) then grinding is frankly relaxing. I like to call Minecraft the ultimate grinding game because it is repetitive and monotonous, yet it is one of the most relaxing games you can play.

I don't consider grinding to be inherently bad, but I hate it when an MMO builds its gameplay around grinding as the primary activity. It should be built as an optional activity you can do if you just feel like leveling. It should NEVER be required, unless you want your MMO to be boring as hell.

 

That's a really good point. Some people drink and zone out. Some people smoke. Some people grind (perhaps while doing all the above?).

 

As someone said earlier in this thread, grinding cand also be fun, but it's all up to the game makers if they can make a task that seems so boring to actually be fun.

 

Grinding is necessary to fill in the vastness of an MMORPG. Without it, people will cap level too fast. There is also not enough time and manpower to create every quest with unique and interesting elements.

 

Grinding isn't really all that fun to do, but it usually is rewarded in the end. I like to just watch a TV show on another monitor while I grind in MMO's to keep me entertained. Grinding does serve a pretty necessary function in this particular genre, though I hate to see it in a lot of others. Take the new Forza for example. Yeah no.

 

I actually don't mind grinding every once in a while because it can be a nice change of pace. Too much grinding can be extremely boring though.

 

it makes no sense but thats why we all love it, but really there is no point

 

It's lazy development in my opinion. With MMOs they want people to spend large amounts of time playing. The best way to do this is to set up a grind. Can you have a good MMO without grind? I'm not sure. I think that if you make the core gameplay good enough then people shouldn't realize that they are grinding. I've only played one MMO that came close to doing this, which was GW2. The PvE wasn't great, but playing WvW was amazing for quite some time. I played all the time and it didn't feel like a grind because it was so enjoyable.

 

The content of an MMORPG doesn't have to end once you reach the max level though. In fact, modern MMOs focus way too much on levels and leveling anyway, when they should be trying to incorporate player skill more into the gameplay.

Right now we see a ton of games that both focus heavily on leveling, aka grinding, but have the bulk of their content unavailable until you hit the max level. You could just cut out levels entirely and make a much more fun game.

 

It's almost a annoying as leveling. I am much more interested in endgame content and keeping enough on hand for gear repairs. I don't mind if I'm trying for a piece of gear, but even that has its limits.

 

I think it is not always needed if you really balance your gameplay. Sometimes we just like to do a quest and not stop during the quest to pick some plants.
If you would collect stuff and kill animals during your quests, I think you don't need to grind.

 

Some grinding can be really fun. Runescape is my all-time favorite MMORPG and the reason I've always been so addicted to it is because of all of the skills that you can level up. Grinding is basically one of the biggest parts of the game, but they make it fun and exciting. It feels so good to reach your goal after hours of grinding.

 

Those quests annoy the hell out of me. People farming the same small patch for a bunch of wolves that don't spawn nearly as much as the population would suggest. I'm sure that's a conspiracy and want to say that in BC days the spawns took forever.

 

As long as they make it interesting I am okay with it. But I believe the reason we all keep doing it is for a sense of accomplishment. You got that superior feeling when you stats or skills is better than the rest.

 

I really have to force myself to grind just thinking about it makes me not want to do it most of the time I just rather just pvp people or just talk in general or guild chat.

 

I don't enjoy grinding especially if the combat is nothing to shout about but if it's what it takes then I'll do it. I won't grind in one session though, I'll probably split them up to ease the process. I think grinding in games isn't as prominent now as it was a few years back.

 

Excessive grinding is what usually turns me off from an MMORPG. Those "Kill X critter, bring back X pelts" quests are really boring and annoying, imho, and they are exactly the same in most MMOs except a few ones, and those are usually really good, like Guild War 2.

 

No I don't think it should be a requirement, but at the same time I'd not like to be just given massive amounts of experience too easily, I think that it isn't just there as a result of time wasting, more so it seems to me that it is more a case of the developers not wanting the game to last 5 minutes before a character reaches the max level, which in my opinion is actually alright, especially in regards to games like Guild Wars and that where its not free to play.

 

I think Guild Wars got it right because the side quests are all very varied and have meaning to the different quest givers. You save a farmers daughter here, reinforce a homestead in the middle of the tundra there, its all very different and you don`t feel like grinding it out with the same quests over and over again. And that game lasts a full 2 weeks until you get to max level, if you just play along the different questlines and the main quest, without using powerleveling at all.

 

For me grinding is all about the carrot dangling from the end of the stick. If I am doing it for a reason, I am OK with grinding, but there is a limit to how much I am willing to do for that carrot. I really dislike situations where I am forced to grind out an objective because other content is gated behind the grind. Fortunately it seems that the games I play have grinds, but they can be done, or not done, without a great impact on the rest of the game.