Grinding (in reply to Ceros)

[fate]

Ceros,

I have pulled this part out since it is a separate discussion. This is about the purpose, value, and problems associated with grinding. This represents my personal views and I am curious to hear how others think about this.

I think your attitude towards grinding and 'hard core grinding' is disturbing. While not everyone is going to poopsock the hours away grinding to level 99, at the core of the game you have grinding.

(Interesting verb there...)
Frankly, I find grinding to be boring, especially in the way that eAthena implements it. It's nice enough to relax for half an hour after a stressful day, but you can get dragged into it too much. I don't feel comfortable encouraging people to increment a bunch of numbers on a random (though well-maintained) Polish Server for the sole purpose of seeing them incremented.

There is about a week's worth of quest content (much of that is grinding, by the way - 'Bring me 50 Grass Snake Tounges", 'Bring Me 50 Bug Legs' etc) and after that you are left with pretty much just grinding for items you need with extremely small drop rates (or buying it from someone who has).

The 50 grass snake tongues is an isolated case that hardly qualifies as content. The 50 bug legs quest has already been tuned down to less (10 or 20, I think). But yes, I concede there is some amount of grinding, and it is part of the game. However, the quest-driven grinding we are talking about is limited in scope: it's part of some narrative and therefore ends somewhere. For the `heavy grinding' I am so nervous about, you don't have such a conclusion (unless you count reaching level 99). It would still be nice if some quests were a bit more balanced and had better intermediate goals, though I hope that the fatigue idea may help with that.

But the point is, after your week's worth of quests, your core game mechanic is grinding, followed by a lot of socialization. Someone once said that they considered TMW to be 'IRC with hets" [IRC with hats] - I would propose it is "IRC with hets (and grinding)".

Check last year's HMC events for examples of many other things that can be done in this game with just a small amount of creativity, without resorting to grinding.

Anyway, I don't want to discourage the occasional casual `grinding' session, and I probably picked my words poorly there in the original message. But I have often found myself stuck for four hours just killing snakes in a random dungeon. Now, we can't and shouldn't try to save everyone from themselves. But we needn't encourage this kind of behaviour either-- tmw is a game, it's meant to be fun, not a second (or third) job.

Secondly, while casual players are nice, the heart of any gaming community are the hard core grinders. Those people who show up every day and put in the effort. The people that log on every other day for 20 minutes and then go outside for a walk aren't your target audience here. No one knows their name, if you know what I mean. People like Sugar, freya, wayne etc who are constantly on and are constantly grinding are your core audience.

I don't know freya or Wayne very well, but Sugar isn't constantly grinding. The reason for why she is at the heart of the gaming community is rather that she spends significant amounts of time socialising and helping people out.

To summarise: yes, grinding is part of the game. We developers, due to lack of our time and technical constraints, have often found ourselves forced to use it in lieu of proper content. I don't know how the others think about that, but for me personally I consider the prevalence of grinding to be my greatest failing as content developer: it goes against everything I ever tried to do as paper-and-pencil GM.

-- fate

[Acegi]

I think that grinding to lvl 99 is only motivated by competition. You're right that a game should be more about enjoyment but that's not to say that grinding can be entirely tedious. I actually like the grass snake quest mainly because unlike typical warrior players I have to move around and stay awake (for those who don't know I'm an archer since I started to lvl90 now).

The only complaint for me about the grass snake quest is the lack of return. After completing that quest there is no reason other than to sell grass snake tongues to other players to stay there. The exp gain over time is actually remarkably low (thank you 4144 for the kill stats to help in verifying this!) in comparison to other deemed high level monsters which actually is due to the low respawn time. You can grind better by soloing continuous waves of other S-monsters (snakes, slimes, scorps, spiders in skull cave, snake pit).

I tried playing warrior style to grind and I just couldn't do it simply because of what you said. That in essence grinding by holding a button down literally sucked the life out of me. There was no fun at all but to be clear this is my personal opinion. Grinding in this way (pinching from the original topic that started this one) leads to botting.

My recommendation would be to either make another cooperative map (like snake pit) but with harder monsters that force more interactions than just the 4 skulls cave room where you can literally read a book whilst playing with your finger(s) on "x" or "Ctrl+A". Another alternative (or same idea) would be more grass snakes areas and higher exp/drop return. The other complaint (which I forgot) about grass snakes is that you can barely find them unattended then and players will often complain about how they can't beat higher lvl players like myself at getting the drops.

[Amun]

It's kind of funny you can goto the scorp / spider spawn on the first mine map at a high lvl and still grind faster exp than at grass snakes. The only benefit to the grass snake spawn is you can play a warrior caps lock and watch an online movie while still monitoring the game incase a gm pops by ;p and don't have to worry about people bugging you by louring monsters ;p