After 12 years, why do people still refer to grind as "content"?

[lightofdawn]

It doesn't have to be this way. The G in MMORPG stands for GAME, not GRIND. It is the players fault for letting developers get away with not even trying. Keep asking for prettier graphics though, gameplay hasn't evolved in 20 years but at least our models are shiny!

the game is also awesome. people complaining about a little grind is ridiculous. the davelopers werent lazy, they just dont want people blowing through content in a week

[Kul Tiras]

the game is also awesome. people complaining about a little grind is ridiculous. the davelopers werent lazy, they just dont want people blowing through content in a week

Lol, then that's the fault of the content and the developers, not the players'.

Most of WoW's content is filler anyway, i.e. trash pulls, filler kill me/bring me xyz things, repetitive back and forth traveling to places you've already been just to pick up a new quest.

For the price we're paying, at the end of the day, if you took all the worthwhile content in an expansion, i.e. story advancing lore quests/events, new dungeons/BGs/Raids, you probably don't even get 1/3 of what a game like Witcher 3 offers, which is an RPG, minus the MMO part, and which doesn't cost a monthly sub.

If your content is so little and that it's barely worth replaying twice and you need to time gate it with forced tediousness to make it artificially longer, once again, that's not the player' fault. They even forced ground mounts these past 2 expansions, they were so desperate.

I wouldn't buy Mass Effect 4 if I could only advance another 1/5 of the story every 3-4 months, gated by intermediate grind daily quests, dungeons and raids.

MMO: massively multiplayer (and the redundant online)
RPG: Role Playing Game

Once again, I don't see where the Grind and Gated content factors in those initials.

[Deleted]

We are not grinding thin air...

[SirCowdog]

the game is also awesome. people complaining about a little grind is ridiculous. the davelopers werent lazy, they just dont want people blowing through content in a week

Also known as, "We can't figure out how to make content that's actually good enough to last on its own merit, so go ahead and repeat the stuff we've already made."

That's pretty damn lazy from a design standpoint. And it's 100% fueled by the subscription business model.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

Mats farming
Rep farming
Artifact farming
Level farming
Gold farming
Gear grinding
Achievement farming (the pointless shit, i.e. anything almost everything not PVP)
Daily farming
etc

Any action which consists of repetitive actions which require no real personal skill (aside from knowing your class combos and not to stand in fire) nor offer any challenge, which simply required time wasted to be completed.

Where are the in-game lore books, where are the parties of enemies attacking different outposts with different strategies each time requiring player intervention, where are the secrets aside from something to summon another mount boss, where is the new mounted/aerial/naval combat based on skill and not memorized rotations, where are the Wintergrasp style PVP world zones with different tactics to breach your enemies' keeps, like tunneling, ladders and flying machines?

It's been 12 years of the same, same grind, to the point I see people actually cheering for fucking REP GRINDS, like you didn't get enough of it during BC, and daily quests. Why are these grinds so LOVINGLY referred to by people as content?

I understand your point. But what you're asking is simply impossible to do. I mean, with our current technology.

What you refer at could probably be found in survival games, where players mostly dominate the game. But you'll never find that in a PvE mmo like WoW. We just cannot possibly create a sentient AI in single player games - so I don't dare imagine in a mmo context.

[ComputerNerd]

A grind is really a player creation, when the repetition extends beyond what they are comfortable with.
You can have something mechanically identical, but it only becomes a grind in the mind of the player when they dictate some arbitrary measure is too much for them.
Be that time, repetition, gating, etc.
Any content with the likelyhood of repetition being required to achieve a goal is a grind.

[Ravex]

Who said I was talking about you? Did I use your name anywhere in there? Must of seen some semblence of yourself in there then? Gee I wonder why?

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I wasn't the person ripping on the whole mmo player base was I?

Well you are talking about Internet thugs putting people down over the Internet. So yea you are pretty much talking about 99% of the population of the Internet.

[Deleted]

Until we have a self-programming AI as the core of a MMO (or any game genre) design, the grind will always be the nature of the beast. Because it's impossible for the developers to create new content faster than we consume it.

[Fojos]

Life is grinding.

What do we do to achieve things in life?

[Hexxidecimal]

Lol, then that's the fault of the content and the developers, not the players'.

Most of WoW's content is filler anyway, i.e. trash pulls, filler kill me/bring me xyz things, repetitive back and forth traveling to places you've already been just to pick up a new quest.

For the price we're paying, at the end of the day, if you took all the worthwhile content in an expansion, i.e. story advancing lore quests/events, new dungeons/BGs/Raids, you probably don't even get 1/3 of what a game like Witcher 3 offers, which is an RPG, minus the MMO part, and which doesn't cost a monthly sub.

If your content is so little and that it's barely worth replaying twice and you need to time gate it with forced tediousness to make it artificially longer, once again, that's not the player' fault. They even forced ground mounts these past 2 expansions, they were so desperate.

I wouldn't buy Mass Effect 4 if I could only advance another 1/5 of the story every 3-4 months, gated by intermediate grind daily quests, dungeons and raids.

MMO: massively multiplayer (and the redundant online)
RPG: Role Playing Game

Once again, I don't see where the Grind and Gated content factors in those initials.

Wait...did you buy WoW then?

Anyhow, Witcher to WoW is a terrible comparison for a lot of reasons. Online vs. Offline is a ton of code in and of itself the amount of time that goes into creating an online environment is substantial. Class Balance, now for both PvE and PvP (which is an ongoing process), not to mention just pure design differences that go into a multiplayer environment vs. a single player environment. Plus the constant on going support for the game far exceeds that which you get for the single player games in both amount and regularity. Granted a lot of the smaller patches are bug fixes and what not but it's still effort put forth.

Fact is a large portion of the the "online experience" is this sort of addictive grinding that happens. This is because you aren't supposed to ever reach the end.

When you finish the Witcher you are done, you just stop playing till more DLC comes. With an MMO you can "finish" the leveling experience and perhaps go defeat some dungeons and raids at the highest difficulty. That little bit of game play takes up, what, the first month or two of an expansion? But they want us to keep playing. It's just impossible to for them to create a whole other fully fleshed out experience in the time it takes to crank these expansions out. So grinds and time gating is introduced to artificially lengthen the experience.

[Ryzael]

Until we have a self-programming AI as the core of a MMO (or any game genre) design, the grind will always be the nature of the beast. Because it's impossible for the developers to create new content faster than we consume it.

Difficulty * Quantity = Consumption Time

The goal is to make Time to Develop < Consumption Time
This is only impossible when Difficulty or Quantity = 0, like Difficulty is.

It's not that hard, simple math. You're wrong, but go ahead and keep on parroting developers like you know what you're talking about, they'd never lie or make mistakes.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Content means things to do in a video game.
I think its "grind" that you misunderstand though.

Based on your definition, life is a grind. What's the point in anything you have to do multiple times in order to get a result, right?

[RenegadeXan]

Mats farming
Rep farming
Artifact farming
Level farming
Gold farming
Gear grinding
Achievement farming (the pointless shit, i.e. anything almost everything not PVP)
Daily farming
etc

Any action which consists of repetitive actions which require no real personal skill (aside from knowing your class combos and not to stand in fire) nor offer any challenge, which simply required time wasted to be completed.

Where are the in-game lore books, where are the parties of enemies attacking different outposts with different strategies each time requiring player intervention, where are the secrets aside from something to summon another mount boss, where is the new mounted/aerial/naval combat based on skill and not memorized rotations, where are the Wintergrasp style PVP world zones with different tactics to breach your enemies' keeps, like tunneling, ladders and flying machines?

It's been 12 years of the same, same grind, to the point I see people actually cheering for fucking REP GRINDS, like you didn't get enough of it during BC, and daily quests. Why are these grinds so LOVINGLY referred to by people as content?

uh you do realize pvp also has farming achievements, who the hell are you...

[Ryzael]

So you've cleared all the content ever? Even if you did, only about 1% of the playerbase actually does so. Clearing LFR and saying the content is easy is a pretty piss poor argument.

That doesn't make the math wrong, or "it's impossible to make content faster than it can be consumed" right.


In fact it looks like you've changed your argument from "Content can't be created faster than it can be consumed" to "Most people never clear all the content" so pretty contradictory here.

[Siq1ne]

Mats farming
Rep farming
Artifact farming
Level farming
Gold farming
Gear grinding
Achievement farming (the pointless shit, i.e. anything almost everything not PVP)
Daily farming
etc

Any action which consists of repetitive actions which require no real personal skill (aside from knowing your class combos and not to stand in fire) nor offer any challenge, which simply required time wasted to be completed.

Where are the in-game lore books, where are the parties of enemies attacking different outposts with different strategies each time requiring player intervention, where are the secrets aside from something to summon another mount boss, where is the new mounted/aerial/naval combat based on skill and not memorized rotations, where are the Wintergrasp style PVP world zones with different tactics to breach your enemies' keeps, like tunneling, ladders and flying machines?

It's been 12 years of the same, same grind, to the point I see people actually cheering for fucking REP GRINDS, like you didn't get enough of it during BC, and daily quests. Why are these grinds so LOVINGLY referred to by people as content?

Go play a non-MMO and leave my genre alone, PLEASE. For the love of all that is awesome quit complaining about what makes an MMO an MMO and go do something else with your time. MMO without a grind isn't an MMO because the best part of an MMO is the "endless" feeling you get of not just beating an end boss and finding a new game to play.

[lightofdawn]

Also known as, "We can't figure out how to make content that's actually good enough to last on its own merit, so go ahead and repeat the stuff we've already made."

That's pretty damn lazy from a design standpoint. And it's 100% fueled by the subscription business model.

if it bothers you, quit. plenty of people enjoy a bit of a grind. myself included...
I don't know of an MMO where there is no grinding

[SirCowdog]

if it bothers you, quit. plenty of people enjoy a bit of a grind. myself included...
I don't know of an MMO where there is no grinding

Some people enjoy eating fat and grease-laden fast food. That doesn't make it good.

[Dequanacus]

Any action which consists of repetitive actions which require no real personal skill (aside from knowing your class combos and not to stand in fire) nor offer any challenge, which simply required time wasted to be completed.

What are video games. You're free to argue that [insert video game here] is challenging, but people could say the same for WoW

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So you keep telling me you enjoy seeing your screen of 1-20 characters every day and thinking about how you "enjoy" logging into each one and do the same shit you've been doing for the past 30 days and that nothing whatsoever will change in today's experience from yesterday's, but don't claim that's what an MMORPG should be about, because last time I checked, RPG didn't stand for Role Playing Grind.

What you think is "epic" and "exciting" is what other people laugh at and call casual slop. Try not to have an inflated ego when all you're asking for is to replace repetitive gameplay with repetitive gameplay.

[StationaryHawk]

Why would anyone stick around for 12 years of the "same, same grind" if they don't like it? You know what you're getting each time.

[Dequanacus]

Witcher 3

Is a game that is full of repetitive tasks and that many people mock for being shallow and bland. Again, you come off as the kind of person that would tout around beating Dark Souls as an achievement. Witcher, Mass Effect, Dark Souls, all games that are commonly mocked for the first being a shitty RPG, the second having a shitty story, and the third being overhyped for difficulty.

I'm not saying anyone is at fault for enjoying them, but you're speaking in a condescending tone towards a game while defending your self with games that have been picked apart numerous times. You're not in a position to say what is objectively bad with any sort of validity.