Grinding means, killing monsters just to get a higher level. It's the most boring thing that foreigns don't like in MMOs. Grinding out levels is like grinding coffee beans. It takes so much time just to get one cup! Today let`s talk about the Grind, below is the Ryan Shwayder's "The Grind".

Why do I have to spend so much time and effort to progress? What's with the repetitive, uninteresting gameplay? Why can't they come up with anything but kill quests? Familiar words to many of you, I'm sure. I've read those words. I've said those words. Why does every MMO in existence have a grind? Why don't they just get rid of it so I can get down to having fun?

Because you have fun grinding. Yeah, I said it. You enjoy grinding, whether you like it or not.

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Any game that involves progression has a grind. What do all MMOs (worth a damn) have? Progression. Of any sort. No, not just levels. Not just skills. Not just items. Not just money. Anything that can be unlocked in any way. Removing levels and skills and gear and money from the game wouldn't even get rid of the grind, unless the game is completely one-dimensional and boring (yes, I am oversimplifying things for the sake of my own rant. Deal with it).

The point is, what the heck do you expect developers to do? I'm sure many people who complain about "the grind" are simply talking about the time it takes to gain levels. Okay, so you make levels go faster. But you can still grind them. Grinding is self-imposed. It's almost masochistic for some people. And, for almost every person who has ever complained about the grind, it's inevitable.

So let's go back to making levels go faster. How fast? How about 20 hours of play time to the max level? Okay, cool.

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Note about topics I was going to cover but didn't because I got carried away with the story of Leetsauce Doubleoseven:

• Do developers intentionally make things take time? Yes. Is it their fault? No. Players want to play these games for hundreds and even thousands of hours, which means you have to try to give them thousands of hours worth of things to do (or they'll complain that there isn't enough to do to keep them interested). It ain't easy. The fault is when that content is not cohesive and/or sucks.
• Players will often stick with the familiar. Meaning, if they can either Kill 10 Rats or Search for the Buried Treasure after Discovering the Location of X, they are sometimes more likely to just kill stuff because they know how to do it and know that it's quick. I firmly believe that MMOs NEED kill quests, and a lot of them, I just don't think they should be the only quests (or even called "quests" for that matter).
• Most games do have a crapload of interesting things to do, there's just less of it than what a lot of people call boring. It doesn't take long to drop 25 mobs in the world. It does take long to create a scripted event. So, there will be some scripted events that are awesome, but a lot of mobs that just use their normal AI. If we just had the compelling content in the game, players would complain about the game having no content because resources are finite (and they'd kinda be right).
• What I and many other people REALLY complain about when referring to the grind is that we don't have as much time as the next guy, or that we have wives and lives that prevent us from playing more than an hour a day and we can't progress as quickly as we want. As I said in the post, grinding is usually self-imposed. You CAN play an MMO casually as long as you don't expect yourself to advance quickly¨Cyou have to set realistic goals and expectations or the game will absolutely feel like a grind.

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There it is, my commentary on The Grind. It's one of the four-letter words of massively multiplayer games, and I'm pretty sure my stance on it is going to be controversial. Luckily, I don't care.

You can check the full version from here.

Source[Via Ryan Shwayder's Nerfbat]