Who actually enjoys grinding?

[Skold]

I like grinding, particulary dungeon and group grinding. The problem with quest grinding is usually the results are sub-par gear and you really don't make as many friends questing alone. When you dungeon grind, you meet new people AND get new gear - It is also sometimes even faster to level through dungeons. I'm playing a Templar, so i'll be making lots of friends. :P

[Disrupter]

Originally Posted by Calindor

So is grinding taking a long time to level up or accomplish something, or is it repetitive play like giong to an area of mobs and killing them over and over for a few hours? Or is it both?

Personally I think it has to do with the style of play, and not the time it takes.

Grinding is essentially repeating the same or similar actions repeatedly. This INCLUDES doing quests similar to each other, whether they're in a different area doesn't mean anything its still a grind.

So while people are running around saying they hate grinding but love questing they're pretty much just saying 'Rename it and I'll love it'. Saying you don't like grinding AT ALL but love MMOs...

[Wontuan]

Played a lot of L2, so I'm used to grinding. Played some WOW after L2 and it did feel like it was too easy. It's all down to preference, but yea I actually enjoy grinding. I feel that it's more rewarding when you're one of the few capped players (at the early stages of the game), plus it makes it less likely for people to reroll numerous amounts of toons. You stood out & felt rewarded when you were at a high lvl in L2. Now if you're not one of the higher lvled toons, you were motivated to obtain that status, or at least I was.

Didn't play enough WOW but it felt like everyone was capped, including myself. I like it when players stick to one or two toons because it builds a better community where people build their reputation. Bad or good reputation, it doesn't matter, just feels better to see familiar names and watch how they've progressed compared to yourself. In WOW I felt like everyone had too many identities and capped toons because it was easy to do. I remember in L2, when new chronicles came out and benefited a specific class over another, people would reroll but fell behind greatly because it actually took time to catch up.

That's my opinion on grinding, either way I'm sure I'll still enjoy Aion...

[Lennalf]

If by "grinding," you mean completing a lot of quests and killing a lot of mobs over a long period of time before a character reaches full maturity, then grinding is essential to virtually any MMORPG. The longer the process takes, the more rewarding, so really the problem is finding a grind rate/length that most players like (not too fast, not too slow).

However, I think where "grinding" starts to become a problem is when it is extensively repetitive. For example, traveling to the same location to kill the same mob in hopes of picking up the same item 100 or even 1000 times is going to be pretty boring. It's going to be even worse if the next quest is the same thing all over again, except that the monsters have a different color palette and there's nothing else to do instead.

So how can we both (a) have a fun game that doesn't feel like too much of a grind and (b) increase the length of time it takes a character to reach full maturity? You need to provide a very large amount of content, and a large amount of diversity within that content. We can only expect so much out of our game developers in this area for the amount of money we are willing to pay. If they can only put together 100 hours of original content (way more than we'd expect from any other genre of game) but we want it to take 500 hours for a character to hit the max level, the price we pay is that everything is 5x as repetitive.

Obviously there are a lot of ways to add content other than just adding quests/monsters/areas. Even just allowing players to complete more than one task at a time in the same area (farming multiple monster types in the zone, for example) is considerably more interesting than making a player do those tasks separately. Adding "downtime" activities such as professions or an auction house provide diversions for players who want to tool around in the game but are growing weary of the grind. Personally, I'm all about the PvP, which never runs out of new content (human intelligence).

[Traize]

I've grinded on many a game and i gotta say that i don't enjoy it unless its in a group. I tend to get bored while grinding especially if i have to fight the same monsters for hours. Quest help with gaining levels but in many games you dont even need to read the quest at all.

[Amin]

Grinding can be fun if it actually leads to some worthwhile results and if the actual combat itself is enjoyable. However I must say that being forced to grind over and over to make any actual progress in a game gets very tedious and tiring, it ends up feeling more like a chore than a game and that just ruins the game for me.

Large amounts of grinding should be kept as an optional way of getting what you want in my opinion and should not be the primary way of leveling or progressing in the game .

[Shrooms]

Grinding is not too bad as long as it doesnt take-over the game your playing. In WoW, for example, there was three main ways of obtaining XP: Running and instance, Questing, or Pure grinding. Having a variety of ways to gain XP is essential.

[Riku]

I hate grinding for something mundane as just trying to gain the next lvl, It seams to go so much slower this way. but grinding for just to pure joy of it ( mostly on mobs 2 lvls lower than me) is fun if im in the mood for it. but the best is in a group or helping out some lower lvl friends. bottom line for me is its got to have content.....it cant be "GRINDING IS THE CONTENT" and that is all there will be...that is just boring.

[1/2]

For me grinding can be a great way to past time and have fun if your with a group of people and I never really found grinding to take long at lower levels. It's only once you start getting to the higher levels that grinding starts to get seriously boring but that's bound to happen in most games. Asides from that I thought there wasn't going to be any real grinding in Aion or something like that.

[Riku]

It should not be i dont think. 1) the cap will only be lvl50 at first and i dont think that will be too hard to reach. 2)Lotz of quest and that is where most of your exp will come from. Granted some classes may be harder to grind and lvl up at higer lvls, the classes that do lower damage will take a while, i think nukers and SM's will lvl fast when there skills mature as they lvl up. I guess it will come down to how they scale the exp for quest at higher lvl....You should get 10%-20% exp per quest at lower lvl, lets hope we don't get 3-5% exp per quest at lvl40, then where gonna run out of quest to do and have to grind forever to lvl.

[1/2]

Well...if they do kill off the exp from quests at high lvls then hopefully you found some good friends to grind with to pass the time.

[Ashen]

No one enjoys grinding, grinding is not something someone enjoys.

Anyone who disagrees does not realize there are alternative ways to gain levels without having to suffer through ridiculous auto attacks for hours upon hours.

Grinding is a method used by companies that forces players to continue playing because it requires a large amount of time to reach max level, and since it takes so long they are forced to pay monthly or quit. This method is a really easy way to make money, and since that is the goal when you make an MMO that is why grinding is so common.

NCsoft has relied on grinding in the past, pumping out lots of MMOs in short periods of time so that they can keep herding MMO fans unto the next game. I hope this wont be the case for Aion, and it doesn't seem to be.

I'm sure what I've said has been said before, but I'm not in the mood to read 22 pages.

[BaXx]

Originally Posted by Ashen

No one enjoys grinding, grinding is not something someone enjoys.

I enjoy grinding lol.

I love to just hang out with my friends IG and just talk on vent while you slice up monsters. But when you grind alone it's boring.

[Heinel]

Originally Posted by BaXx

I enjoy grinding lol.

I love to just hang out with my friends IG and just talk on vent while you slice up monsters. But when you grind alone it's boring.

Actually your second and third sentence agree with the rest of the post you quoted. Reading the full post helps.

[Endrance]

Then you don't seem to be an experienced one BaXx. I'm playing MMOs for longer than ten years and I've played many of them. In that time, I usually played together with friends @voicechat. So sure, it was cool at the beginning (about the first two-three years), especially when those friends were unexprienced and I had stuff to explain to them. But after awhile you just realize how ****ing simple and time-wasting grinding is. Actually, I've realized that after playing games together with them that actually required some player skill (which grinding usually... doesn't at all), wasn't monotonous and/or 100% repetitive. It was like, x10 more fun.
So, I'm not saying it's impossible to enjoy a grind, but ****, it's still one of the worst things you can do in the gaming world to entertain yourself. You could compare grinding to the bible. Both were probably decent at the beginning, but now they're friggin outdated.