Grinding in games

Why do developers put grind in their games?
From everything I've seen, it's almost always a frustrating or boring experience for players to waste time be able to progress in a game. For some games, that's going to be most of your playtime or even most of your content. So why do players accept it?

Does anyone truly enjoy grinding?

pad out the time it takes to complete the game by magnitudes

i think you'll find they don't allow you to grind and explore these days.

You just do quests, dungeons or raids forever.

oh and time gate shit so theres lack of incentive to keep playing and force you to login once a day.

It's an easy substitute for having any sort of meaningful progression. People who like it ascribe more significance to the numbers than what the numbers represent, because what they actually represent is hours of repetitive boredom and they have to convince themselves that they're having fun.

for filler to add more play time
the people who play those kinds of games are too retarded to notice how redundant it is
retards with no taste and normalfags who only play games to (((waste time)))

Wouldn't that count as grinding? I have played WoW up to like level 20 and most quests were the same. Go there, kill 10 of these, come back. I'd imagine raiding would be similar if you want the boss to drop your desired item. It becomes routine the same way as mobbing in RO, except you have less choice on where to go I suppose.

Yes. I enjoy the feel of slow paced progression.

But you can have that without grinding.

Fetch and kill quests are just an easy way to develop quests, it takes more effort to make a turret battle or an invasion mode. I really do wish that there were more fun quests in games though, where you can play minigames and do things totally unrelated to combat.

I guess i started MMOs before WoW fucked up the whole industry.

Grinding to me is an enjoyable activity where you go out into the world explore and kill whatever you want, there's no quest involved, you're allowed to have fun from the get go.

I played Ragnarok Online heaps. My daily activity was to go to whatever area I felt like to grind. Grind for any period of time between 10mins to 3 hours (There's no dungeons or quest, I am incharge of my game time.) . Teleport back to town, vendor trash and then sell useful/valuable stuff to other players.

The social/mmo aspect was partying with random people either before or during grind. Selling, bartering and socialising after the grind.

Not the kind of slow I'm talking about, I'm talking mind bendingly glacial autism. MUDs where months of in-game time would net you a mid-level character at best. The repetition is part of the comfiness, but you could never create enough fresh content to pace something out that long anyway.

I'm all for player freedom. I absolutely agree that MMOs are in a very bad spot.
I think, like you said, it's the stuff around the grind that made RO interesting. But when I played the game again with Holla Forums a few months back I just found myself thinking "holy shit just let me level up so I can job change" every time I was grinding.
Eventually I quit because I barely managed to group up and felt like I was wasting the days I had off. The server was pretty dead so WoE wasn't going to be fun and the market wasn't exactly bustling.


I can understand that to some extent, but most games that are built this way are repetitive from the get go. I can see myself having fun progressing that slowly if the meat of the game was challenging and had a decent amount of variety. But for most games that go on for that long the combat seems to be pretty passive and not very engaging.
Mabinogi back when it was relatively new kept me going for quite a while and never had me bored. The combat was pretty active for an MMO and required strategy. There were also lots of genuinely fun systems, ways to gather things and places to explore. But it was bogged down by cash shop shit and all the old content has become practically obsolete over the years.

Because grinding is fun.

Autists.

Not me, but there's always been a bunch of people that level their characters to level 999. The thing is that people that like it really fucking like it.


> normalfags who only play games to (((waste time)))
Not seeing this as a normalfag friendly mechanic at all.

Yeah, but why do some people like leveling to 999? What makes it worth it?
Also normalfags do play WoW.

maybe in early vanilla when it was still an EQ clone. By cata it was max level in a weekend and press-A-to-save-world themepark nonsense.

To artificially lengthen the game.

Filler, but also pacing.

One of the core factors of MMOs is being better and telling everyone else how better you are. The harder something is, the less people there are that can do it and so the better you'll feel at having done it. Part of the joy of grind is getting to the end and calling everyone else a limp-dicked fagnut for not being nearly as glorious as yourself, and then you run around the lowbie areas flashing your throbbing beefstick to all and sundry, so they know your majesty and get inspired to reach your level.

That aside, it's definitely to make a game longer. The faster you beat a game, the faster you'll ditch it. Of course, the more petty bullshit that's in a game, forcing you to do the same shit constantly, the more likely people will just stop out of frustration and boredom, so it's a fine line.

But, ultimately, if you want a game without grind, go play an arena shooter; if you want a game with less grind, play a 100x private server and get bored after two weeks or play an ASSFAGGOTS where the grind is broken up into individual matches.

ITT:instant gratification faggots

Are there any fun grinding games? I just want to listen to a lecture and be able to focus on the words instead of devoting all my attention to the vidya

Then someone comes along with a bot or IRL shekels and buys their way to "success" rendering it moot beyond your own sense of satisfaction at grinding, which completely negates any possible dickwaving because the simple existence of people cheating makes anything you've 'achieved' immediately suspicious, Grinding needs to go the way of the dodo and be replaced with something that requires just as much effort and dedication without being so susceptible to automation.

Leveling doesn't need to be a grind. Merely implementing fun ways to gain experience can alleviate the boredom of grinding.

FOR THE EMPEROR!

...

I'm ok with grinding because it lets me try out the gameplay mechanics and some new stuff.

It's the RNG system that is the problem. There is no upside to at all. Saying it gives you a sense of reward is utter bullshit. The only thing when I finally get the item or whatever I'm looking for is just relief and
nothing else

Does anyone truly enjoy the RNG? Because it must be objectively better to not have to waste time because that is what you're doing when you don't get your desired reward for your time+work. It's the equivalent of fighting a monster in Freedom Unite but losing at the 49min mark and getting nothing at all for failing.

There is nothing of value to be gained from having a system with the potential of you being RNG's bitch, whether it's favorable to you or not.

(I don't play warframe anymore but it has taught me a lot about how RNG loot systems are "unfun" in every sense of the word)

I can enjoy grinding, just not when it is necessary to "beat" the game, or if the grinding takes double digit hours

There are games that give the player room to experiment, explore, and have fun. And then there are games that just gate content behind a grind wall because it allows shitty developers to artificially extend play time to a point long after it ceases to be fun and make a game seem huge when it has only a tiny amount of actual content. It also gives them an excuse to shoehorn a cash shop into the game, of course.

This dog shit works because it tricks people into thinking they achieved something when they did repetitive tasks to increment an arbitrary number for 40 hours and now have to do a similar task for 95 hours to reach the next level. Congratulations, retard, you're a fucking robot. Instead wasting time doing menial bitchwork in an MMO, you could have spent that time doing menial bitchwork at a burger joint and getting paid real money so you can buy better games that are actually fun instead.

I used to enjoy grinding as a way to kill time when I was crippled and depressed. Anything to take my mind off the situation.

Nowadays? Once a game makes me grind I just put it down.

As long as people have robots and programs, nothing is beyond their ability to cheat through. The best you're going to get is either an East Berlin-level of moderation to keep people from cheating and botting or to ditch the while thing outright and just have match-based games where there's no in-game progress and so there's nothing to really grind except your own skill at the game. Even with that, there's still aimbots or macros to be used; ultimately, the problem is people.

The only grinding I ever liked was runecscape grinding. I don't know why but it was just so comfy. It was like an MMO was supposed to be. Where you could literally just sit back and people watch. If you just sat a tree cutting spot or a fishing spot you would see thousands of stories unfold. Some were funny, some were just sad, people would tell stories. Hell if you were lucky you'd even come across a living legend one of the top 100 players and maybe even chat with them. Now a days everyone is just autistic about their MMOs you can't wonder up and talk to people because they will just ignore you or be AFK forever. I think that's why people liked runescape.

I like how in DDO you have to grind entire dungeons instead of grinding quests.

I like the Thief-games grind with gathering loot. Forces you to explore the levels to find loot and shit.

When you think about it, everyone but the most casual of casuals likes grind to some extent. without grind, there is no progression, you just get everything handed to you immediately. There are certainly games that work like this (arena fps come to mind), but those are a type of game where the "grind" is really progression in the form of skill learning, rather than making a number bigger. So it seems that progression, and thus grind, is one of the driving factors behind our enjoyment of a game. If it's a game where there is no room for either numerical or skill improvement, then we quickly lose interest.

The questions then seem to be: How much grind is acceptable, and should any of that grind be artificial (i.e. forced by the developers rather than a natural means of getting gud)? I think the answers to those questions vary based on the type of game you're trying to make. Ideally, any game is going to make you play a ton before you can git gud and compete at the top level, and one way to provide you an experience while on the path to gitting gud is to force you to grind to unlock skills and the like, which makes you become proficient with skills in a determined order and ideally exposes you to more complicated skill rotations or combinations in a controlled way. This only works if the actual gameplay itself is engaging enough that you're motivated to learn to use those skills along the way though.

tl;dr: Grind can help ease your access to skills and gitting gud while simultaneously providing a sense of progression.

...

The simple, most honest thing THAT DEVELOPERS DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW? It's so they don't have to make more assets,unique dialogue, and levels.

Skinner box

Honestly it's only new games that feel like shit with grind because they're all built for cash and rarely for enjoyment. The gaming industry and most industrialized markets don't care about their products instead they just care about the least amount of effort and the most payout and kids now are all just retarded and will call anything good if it's popular so companies will just market it and get some popular youtubers to play it then they get rich and have no incentive to make something good. Old runescape actually made grind fun because there was so much to do and often even when you just sat around and did the same thing over and over it gave you goals like a new quest but it also had grinding in a number of different places with a number of different activities and minigames like fishing trawler, stealing creation, blast furnace, and tai bwo wannai clean up. Old world of warcraft (wotlk and earlier) were also good but people started getting shitty in wotlk and got obsessive over gear score despite the fact your character might be out preforming theirs when you have a much lower gear score also they fucked up the burning crusade area with wotlk and entirely killed the game for most old players with cata. Maplestory also got pretty fucked when nexon continually changed the map over and over and messed up farming spots, not it just feels linear but it actually grinds a lot less (maplestory has always been kinda fucky though).

Can he money related, since more grind means more people playing longer, which means more dosh. Also pads out a game to feel longer and add artificial difficulty since its your level that is keeping you down and not your ability to play the game.

I agree with you, but for the love of god please learn how to use full stops and commas. That was eye-cancer to read.

This is the second time someone has said this in 2 days and the other time was on a steam review. There's like a million people who don't use any punctuation and don't even spell right and I don't know what the fuck im doing wrong. A comma is a break and a period is a stop and I put them in places where you would break or stop in your speech. You're a nazi.

Grinding is always necessary, but there's a delicate balancing act. When you get at a certain stage of a video game, you have to grind shit to keep you at the current "stage" of the game. Grinding makes sure you know how to handle what the fuck is going on before graduating to the next part of the game. Some games however use it to drastically pad out gameplay time and instead make it a snoozefest.

Grinding is good if I can steal the fruits of someone elses grinding. Not enough MMOs worth playing have world pvp

Also fast acquisition and leveling

I like to watch TV or YouTube while I grind in Borderlands 2. I turn the game volume all the way down aside from sound effects and shoot things. The story is garbage, the guns are garbage, the maps are big and lifeless, the loot is fucking trash, and the game itself is a lifeless shell of shit. But I like to shoot things with guns and watch numbers and CRITICAL fly off of them while I watch shows.

I would never say a grinding game is a good game, but that doesn't mean I won't play it. Grinding games are "fun" in the same way reading a Dean Koontz novel is fun: it's not about the journey or the destination, you're just filling time. Am I wasting my time? Yeah. Am I enjoying myself? Moderately. Could I be playing something better? Yeah, but I'm mostly watching TV while I play so I don't waste good games on TV time.

Well, I'm playing Rogue Galaxy andit has a grind that is sometimes fun and some other times frustrating, especially when I want to hunt some particular monsters for certain quests that only appear once every half an hour.

I just love fusing things over and over again.

For me, grinding is as good or bad as the gameplay itself.
On one side, we're playing games which means there must be a ballance between progression and stakes. In the past we'd have games with a set number of lives. Losing them all meant going back to the beginning of the game. I think jrpgs popularised the idea of not having to go back to the beginning in case of failure, but we couldn't just remove the stakes of failure entirelly. Enter grinding, not really punishment for failure, but "punishment" for not applying to the game.

Enter modern games. Grinding can be as fun as playing a normal session. Frustation from not getting what you want or not leveling as fast can be aggravated or alleviated by gameplay.
Myself, I like warframe's movement system and overall feel. I don't mind grinding for days or

For me I guess that I'll say that grinding is bad depending on how much you depend of it and how the game uses it.

Monster Hunter is, basically, a game about grinding yet it is so fun to hunt and butcher monsters.

this tbh

There's essentially three reasons:

1. Because Skinner Box is enjoyable to some extent.
2. To stretch out content in order to make players feel they got more value out of their game.
3. To forcefully elongate the player experience to increase people buying DLC, microtransactions, subscriptions, etc.

The reason we see so much grind is because casuals have started to find shit monetization practice acceptable under the "hurr it doesn't effect me" guise, and games are being designed these days to capitalized on those monetization practices.

Your grammar is barely above nigger tier. Learn to use your English better.

You have no knowledge of grind my son.
2.5k hours of grind and it's still in early access

Like I said, skinner box is enjoyable to some extent.

Legion's AP system is grindy as fuck, though.