Discussion about grinds

After having a discussion with someone on our Discord, it got me thinking about what our community wants grind to be like in Ashes of Creation.

I've got some questions for you all:
- What are your definitions of a good grind?
- What MMO had a good grind system and what made it good?
- How would you want grind to be implemented in the game?

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CROW3

Idk. WoW definitely had a pita pvp grind for base gear. A week of crap damage output and deaths to get a baseline set to be moderately competitive. One of the reasons I loved open world pvp in 2004 long before before resilience.

Noaani

Dygz wrote: »

Quests should not come to an end.

Developers simply can not make content fast enough to make this happen.

Even with all the social organizations and religions in Ashes - just as in any game with similar mechanisms - players will get to the end of that content before long.

It takes multiple orders of magnitude (bordering on factorial) longer to produce than to consume. Content that takes a developer weeks of their time to make (and this is just the content designer, not the art, sound, or background development) takes players minutes to complete.

This is why so many MMO's rely on repetitive quests - developers can spend minutes making a quest, and players can repeat it for dozens or hundreds of hours. Not saying I am a fan of this, just that it is all simple fact.

Noaani

JustVine wrote: »

I think making mobs 'trash' and making pve activities 'inherently lacking in player to player conflict out in the field' are some of the core mistakes in today's mmo design that make people bored with the genre.

I disagree almost entierly.

Trash mobs are an inherent aspect of MMO's. Since all a trash mobs is, when examined, is any mob that is not a named encounter, they are clearly an essential part of all MMO's. Now, I agree with you if you are suggesting that they don't need to be made as easy as some games make them. However, since players will call any mob that is not the boss "trash" - and developers would refer to as "base population" - and since such mobs are essential to an MMO that is not wanting to be purely PvP, I can't say I agree with that aspect as you have applied it.

As to the part about needing more player conflict out in the field - that lack is what has kept games like EQ and WoW around with such high (comparatively) populations for so long. It is why ESO is still live - if that game had it's PvP open world rather than confined to one section of the world, the game would have closed years ago.

Some people love PvP and player conflict. However, history shows that such people are unable to sustain a AAA MMO for long. On the other hand, players that are less inclined to such conflict have proven time and again that they can sustain an MMO.

Dygz

Balanz wrote: »

Dygz wrote: »

I think people who are PvE or PvE-sometimes will have the opposite response of PvPers.

If it weren't for the ambition of Ashes of Creation, I wouldn't even consider PvP. Now I am all-in.

I don't know what that means in regard to what I wrote.
Ashes has a lot of objective-based PvP I expect to enjoy. That does not mean that PvP will make grinding Harvesting feel more engaging to me. That will still feel as annoying as it always does.

Lyrienthena

Well, in my pov it´s a pretty simple question.
Good grind is, chasing the carrot:
-Hard.... Getting better and better at it skillwise per run but still able to fail by misplays
-being rewarded by playing better then average/expected
Bad Grind would be my current game Lost Ark:
-Time gated
-Braindead easy
-no special reward
-no other options

Most satisfying grind was Monster Hunter Freedom Unite reasoning as follows:
- Needed 6 rare items droprate base 1% i guess
- Destroying parts (aka playing good) increased Droprate
- misssteps could lead to death/fail (playing bad)
- toke me 270 runs Rank 9 2xNargacugas
- i never got bored since it wasn´t easy (1 run toke me 10-15 min)
- afterwards i had the hole set + 2 weapons

Dygz

Finally remembered the kind of questing grind I hate - from EQ2.
Where the quest is to kill 25 Skeletal Warriors. Only to learn that you have to kill 15 Laughing Skeletons in order to get 1 Skeletal Warrior to spawn.

Lyrienthena

Dygz wrote: »

Finally remembered the kind of questing grind I hate - from EQ2.
Where the quest is to kill 25 Skeletal Warriors. Only to learn that you have to kill 15 Laughing Skeletons in order to get 1 Skeletal Warrior to spawn.

Would be fine if this Warrior is hard to kill.
But let me guess it was dead after 2 spells?
Then yea its considered a bad grind

Nerror

Going off of the wikipedia definition of grinding:

In video games, grinding is the act of performing repetitive tasks to achieve a desired outcome. It is usually done for a gameplay advantage or in-game loot, but in some cases for purely aesthetic or cosmetic benefits.[1][2] The design of a video game influences the amount of grinding involved. The general purpose of grinding is to receive "experience points", or to improve a character's level. The behavior is sometimes referred to as pushing the bar (leveling up), farming (acquiring loot repeatedly from one source), or catassing (extensive play sessions).

(I have never used the terms catassing or pushing the bar before

)

My main thing for grinds is that they have to be challenging somehow. The fear of death from the activity itself (not from another player) for example. Or I need to be able to become better and better at it through efficiency and skill.

For short amounts of time I can grind easy mobs or run circles farming easy to get materials, but invariably i get sick of the game in the long run, and might stop playing altogether, if it's part of required gameplay.

Dygz

Lyrienthena wrote: »

Dygz wrote: »

Finally remembered the kind of questing grind I hate - from EQ2.
Where the quest is to kill 25 Skeletal Warriors. Only to learn that you have to kill 15 Laughing Skeletons in order to get 1 Skeletal Warrior to spawn.

Would be fine if this Warrior is hard to kill.
But let me guess it was dead after 2 spells?
Then yea its considered a bad grind

It might be fine if the Skeletal Warriors were trash that can be killed with two spells.
It's not OK when it takes 10 minutes to kill 25 Skeletal Warriors.

Noaani

Dygz wrote: »

Lyrienthena wrote: »

Dygz wrote: »

Finally remembered the kind of questing grind I hate - from EQ2.
Where the quest is to kill 25 Skeletal Warriors. Only to learn that you have to kill 15 Laughing Skeletons in order to get 1 Skeletal Warrior to spawn.

Would be fine if this Warrior is hard to kill.
But let me guess it was dead after 2 spells?
Then yea its considered a bad grind

It might be fine if the Skeletal Warriors were trash that can be killed with two spells.
It's not OK when it takes 10 minutes to kill 25 Skeletal Warriors.

A quest update that takes 10 minutes?

Really? Too much of a grind?

No wonder you play children's games

Lyrienthena

[/quote]
It might be fine if the Skeletal Warriors were trash that can be killed with two spells.
It's not OK when it takes 10 minutes to kill 25 Skeletal Warriors.[/quote]

Well woldnt dat be exactly what we consider a good grind (if it isnt braindead)
+ 10 min for a quest is way to short id say
+ a good quest is more then running from A to B and skiping throw NPCs
+ the longer it takes the longer it will be remembered and we all what memories
+ even stressfull or hatred ones aslong its origin is in the games world not the system

Grind quest i find okay would be:
-Collect a by defeating b
-b only spwans if lurd with a consumable c (@specific time/noone)
-c is crafted with gatherables d+e

here and there i found quest like this but always done in matter of minutes
make it a real hassle with need preparations and dedication

after collecting x amount of a u get a hefty reward and all the "suffering" will be remembered a long time

Dygz

Oh. LMAO.
Distracted by work and forgot which mobs I using as examples.
It might be fine if the Laughing Skeletons were trash mobs that can be killed with two spells.
It's not OK when it takes 8+ minutes to kill 15 Laughing Skeletons in order to spawn 1 Skeletal Warrior.
And then you have to do all of that 25 times to complete the quest.

Snowjade

Im a casual player. Grinding is ok for a while if I'm making progress. For the few hours a week I can play i like to feel I've made some progress. If its grinding monsters for levels, I would want to pair it up with skills related to my job (smithing/farming/etc.) So if I'm fishing and leveling that up, it would be nice to fish up a mob that I can kill for raw meat I can cook and eat later or sell to a cook. I like being able to do 3 things at once, makes it feel a lot more time worthy and fun.

Noaani

Dygz wrote: »

Oh. LMAO.
Distracted by work and forgot which mobs I using as examples.
It might be fine if the Laughing Skeletons were trash mobs that can be killed with two spells.
It's not OK when it takes 8+ minutes to kill 15 Laughing Skeletons in order to spawn 1 Skeletal Warrior.
And then you have to do all of that 25 times to complete the quest.

You are now not talking about any content at all in EQ2 - the game you claimed it was from.

As a fun fact, the only Skeletal Warrior mobsI am aware of in EQ2 are base population from a raid zone that is needed for the Prismatic Ring quest series.

I'm sure you are just adding names to create a scene for others to understand, but it makes it hard to check where you went wrong (because you have gotten something wrong here - what you are talking about has never been a part of EQ2's design philosophy as a stand alone quest update).

What I think you may be referring to here is when SoE added in a solo path to complete an otherwise group based quest. They did require you to kill a mob at the end of a ring event, but you only needed to kill four of said mob, and there were 8 locations where that ring event spawned.

If a player were to not have any friends and so opt to do this quest solo, and also not have a basic knowledge of the zone in question (Antonica, if you're are talking about what I think you are talking about), then said player may assume there is only one spawn location for this mob they need, and the ring event that spawns it is indeed on a 12 minute timer.

However, this is a failure on the part of said player. They are assuming the content is something other than what it is.

I would agree with you that needing to kill a large number of mobs that spawn at the end of a ring event (even if only a single wave event) would suck if you need to kill a dozen or more of them, and there was only one of such ring event spawns.

However, as I said earlier, this was never a part of EQ2 game design - at least not as you stated, and not in the time I played the game
.

Dygz

LMAO
You mean, as usual you don't know what I'm talking about.

Noaani

Dygz wrote: »

LMAO
You mean, as usual you don't know what I'm talking about.

No, I mean as usual you don't know what you are talking about.

The content you are talking about above is clearly hypothetical. As hypothetical content, I agree, it sucks. However, as you described it, it does not exist in EQ2 as you claimed.

Either you made it up, you are mis-remembering, or you simply didn't know that you were only working on a fraction of the mobs available to you.

I don't know (or care) which of the above it is, I just know it has to be one of them.

JamesSunderland

Q: What are your definitions of a good grind?

A: A good grind in my mind, is a grind that goes against its concept's main flaw, repetitivity.
What is the best counter against boring repetitivity? RNG!
May it be:
1°RNG in the combat(Monsters AI RNG patterns),
2°RNG in the loot-table
(A nice and big list of drops possibilities, ranging from fairly common drops to extremely rare ones),
3°RNG in the environment(Possible buffs or debuffs the area may provide from time to time),
4°RNG in variation of monsters types spawns, possible even elites to shake things up sometimes,
5°"RNG" of the constant possibility of random encounters with other players aiming for you or your spot.

Q: What MMO had a good grind system and what made it good?

A: Lineage 2 had a good grind system, it had 1° but quite limited in term of monsters that had it, it had an amazing 2° in general, very few areas had the 3° but those were pretty cool, Sadly only a single area had the 4°, the 5° was a given as it probably will be for Ashes.

Q: How would you want grind to be implemented in the game?

A: I would want the grind to have as many as possible of the RNGs factors presented in the first answer.

Noaani

JamesSunderland wrote: »

Q: What are your definitions of a good grind?

A: A good grind in my mind, is a grind that goes against its concept's main flaw, repetitivity.
What is the best counter against boring repetitivity? RNG!
May it be:
1°RNG in the combat(Monsters AI RNG patterns),
2°RNG in the loot-table
(A nice and big list of drops possibilities, ranging from fairly common drops to extremely rare ones),
3°RNG in the environment(Possible buffs or debuffs the area may provide from time to time),
4°RNG in variation of monsters types spawns, possible even elites to shake things up sometimes,
5°"RNG" of the constant possibility of random encounters with other players aiming for you or your spot.

Q: What MMO had a good grind system and what made it good?

A: Lineage 2 had a good grind system, it had 1° but quite limited in term of monsters that had it, it had an amazing 2° in general, very few areas had the 3° but those were pretty cool, Sadly only a single area had the 4°, the 5° was a given as it probably will be for Ashes.

Q: How would you want grind to be implemented in the game?

A: I would want the grind to have as many as possible of the RNGs factors presented in the first answer.

To me, this isn't a grind at all, it is a rough outline for an end game concept.

The very notion of a grind is performing a specific task in order to achieve a specific outcome.

Some aspects of the above are fine for a grind, but if you are after a specific item (say, bear hide), you absolutely do not want to be grinding in an area where bears are only one of many possible spawns, nor do you want multiple potential drops from the bears you are grinding on.

On the other hand, if you are just playing the game, then having mobs randomized to a degree, and drops randomized to a degree are both perfectly fine. However, that is not a grind.

JamesSunderland

Noaani wrote: »

To me, this isn't a grind at all, it is a rough outline for an end game concept.

The very notion of a grind is performing a specific task in order to achieve a specific outcome.

I mean, it's still a specific task even witrh all the RNG(killling monsters) in order to achieve a specific outcome(acquing certain drops and/or exp). This 'very notion' is malleable, and still works under RNG aspects.

Noaani wrote: »

Some aspects of the above are fine for a grind, but if you are after a specific item (say, bear hide), you absolutely do not want to be grinding in an area where bears are only one of many possible spawns, nor do you want multiple potential drops from the bears you are grinding on.

On the other hand, if you are just playing the game, then having mobs randomized to a degree, and drops randomized to a degree are both perfectly fine. However, that is not a grind.

How about different type of bears?

I would assume a basic material like bear hide would probably be the most common drop on their loot table.

Songcaller

I'm not convinced. I have 2 combat models in my head - professional combatants or just button mashers.

I would prefer the pve to require forethought and planning. At the same time I have to protect solo play.

In my mind, Steven is correct to prevent grinding. Grinding a a cancer because when a player can't complete a quest chain or kill equal level mobs they will still gain max level by killing anything at all (wow panda boar reference).

A grind should not replace challenge and a grind should not replace content. I also believe resources should have more than 1 mob it spawns on unless it is legendary mat, otherwise patches of the map will be empty and patches of the map will be congested.

System design is a wholistic process hence why you should design classes and combat mechanics before you complete the npc combatants.

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