Kilsin said:Tavern Talk - What is your motivation for grinding to max combat level in an MMORPG like Pantheon? #MMORPG #CommunityMatters
Because the highest levels are about the only levels I actually enjoy. Low level gameplay is boring AF. It is only at that point where my class is complete, with all its skills, spells and best available gear. It is at that point where gameplay is actually fun. For me, it's the destination and not the journey. I don't go on a trip with the primary purpose to drive across Kansas or Nebraska..I just want to get through them as quickly as possible so I can arrive at my destination.
EQ is the only game I have played were it felt like a grind. In Vanguard I consistently used the turn off experience gain just to slow down leveling. It is hard for me to say if I even have a desire anymore to be max level. When I played EQ it was all about trying to keep up with others mostly my friends. But my play style has changed immensely since then.
I no longer have any interest in most end games. I do not like PVP, or raiding for that matter. I have found a good dungeon with friends is fun at just about any level and so I focus on just having fun and if at some point the game changes and I am no longer having fun a roll a new alt and wash and repeat until I get board with the game.
My hope is that Pantheon will take a long time not so it will be a grind but so that the journey will take longer.
I have no motivation for grinding. I have nothing to prove and will leave a game if I have to grind to max level to start enjoying that game. I use to like raiding and was happy to reach max level. But "GREED" and the drama that always follows that greed in guilds has killed any enjoyment I use to have in raiding. So again I have no reason to grind and I'm not going to do it.
Grinding can be fun with good company! i spent days and weeks grinding for exp and faction in EQ, but we had so much fun with my friends! and it allowed us to keep up with the rest of the guild! at least we knew what we were grinding for! and even when i was soloing with my bard it was fun and challenging, grinding for fun and purpose!
Lately i've been on NW, grinding there is no fun at all, spending hours for a chance to receive 1 item that has 1 or 2% chance to drop, that's aweful!! no balance between effort and reward!
I have every motivation not to grind to max level, even with alts on the backburner and friends who raid. I've come to think of each bubble of xp and camp of a zone as a scene in a film or paragraph in a book. If I fast forward or skim through to the very end, that ending won't mean a whole lot. My character might have best in slot gear but without any history behind that inventory window, it will feel impersonal.
Players more or less bought xp on p99 years ago by lining up for Chardok AE groups. In tells, they would always express feeling dirty about it afterwards, but that didn't stop anyone from paying the plat and sitting at the zoneline semi-afk, leveling up. I went to watch those zone pulls once, because it really was a spectacle, but never bothered joining for the experience. The mad rush to endgame can be fun, and progress can be addictive, but so much is overlooked in the grind. There is of course challenge in trying to speedrun through an MMO, and that can create a game within the game, but the world isn't there only to be conquered ASAP imo. That would be like watching the Star Wars trilogy but only for the battle sequences and then replaying the ewok celebration at the end of RotJ over and over. Or only watching the highlights of a basketball game. I'm not trying to min/max the potential for nostalgia at a later date, taking screenshots in every obscure corner of the world, but at the same time, the majority of my best gaming memories were not made at max level.
I do not...I enjoy the journey and look to make friends along the way.
Or what Leevolen said above.
I never have 'ground to max level' because I never have made getting to max level my goal. I have, however, spent countless hours grinding.
I spent years in my first MMO, Asheron's Call. That game could win an award for how much grinding was required. When it opened, max level was 126. By the time it closed, max level was 275. While the world had a rich supply of quests, all of them together didn't make a very big 'dent' in the amount of XP needed for max level. Thus, leveling came from grinding.
What I learned early on there was that the Friends I played with were the single most important part of the Game. It took a while, but once I found good friends whose company I truly enjoyed, I could grind for hours and days in a group with them. The XP/Loot was nice for sure, but without the fun we were having together I would never have maxed my Main and gotten 2 other characters well past level 200 before the end.
As you might expect, that early experience is the foundation of why I have followed Pantheon for so long.
It is one of the few things that gives me a sense of accomplishment. It also one of the few things that continuously contributes to that edge of your seat trepidation. (trepidation in the sense that it causes me to be much more cautious after any period of grinding, because I don't want lose what I have achieved) This amplifies the trill factor, especially as encounters get tougher and tougher throughout the course of the game. When you take down some really tough mob, knowing that the stakes are high, you get that "F*^% yeah!", feeling that otherwise just isn't the same.
In a way, you could say that although there can be some tedium involved in the grind itself, it is the awareness of the things that it brings to the table that motivates me to push through it.
Kilsin said:Tavern Talk - What is your motivation for grinding to max combat level in an MMORPG like Pantheon? #MMORPG #CommunityMatters
I start with a drive for hands on knowledge. Grinding is originally just a reflection of my strong motivation to build a knowledge base. I spend the first half to full year of a game just processing everything as fast as I possibly can until I have re-written all the tooltips into a more advanced form for my own edification, and the whole raveled game system is unwound and organized. So that is where my grinding motivation starts, knowledge.
After that, creativity becomes the driving force. I use the accumulated knowledge and spiderweb of clearly defined connections of potential power as groundwork for powerful theorycrafting. Once these ideas are fully formed there is a heavy amount of work to be done to collect and achieve items, levels, more specific knowledge. This new tasklist now motivates my grind.
Ultimately this all boils down to access. I grind strictly for access and when I have reason to achieve access to something then I will go at full speed, ergo grind.
Almost nothing. I will probably play as many hours as anyone else but I'll be the last to hit max level. There will be so many things available to do that don't necessarily contribute to my adventuring level, and I plan do spend time doing those things. The obvious things like crafting, perception, exploring, hanging out with friends, working the market, etc. But also the not so obvious stuff like "I bet I can swim across this lake" or "I'm sure I can climb to the top of this cliff" or "That mob looks cool, I bet I can take him!!" ... all ending in something that actually gets me further away from max level, hahah.
I'm not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for but I find it hard to commit to things in games if I know the game is "short term". Almost every game will have its periods of grind, where things stop being simple, or easier, or come quickly. Grind can be different to everyone, but at it's core it's something you need to push through for a reward.
I find it very difficult to endure any sort of grind if I know I'm not going to play the game in a month or two. I'm playing on EQ TLP and have been leveling and enjoying the game for a few weeks, but I'm at the point where leveling has slowed down so now I need to "grind" to get exp. I can not convincen myself to do it because I know I wont be playing EQ next month, this playthrough was always a temporary time killer for me.
Compare that to FF14 where I have almost nothing left to do before the next expansion. I can still get on and find the motivation to do menial "grindy" tasks because I know in a few months the next expansion will come out and I'll be back into it.
So what motivates me to grind? Knowing that I'll still be playing the game in a few months to make the reward from the grind worth it.
So what motivates me to grind? Knowing that I'll still be playing the game in a few months to make the reward from the grind worth it.
Well said, that's true for me too. That's why I'm finding it so hard to get into any new games right now, everything I play feels temporary haha.
My 1st answer was specifically "grinding with the purpose of getting to max level" I'd like to also answer for just "grinding" in general.
If by "grinding" we're talking about grouping up and fighting mobs over and over, to me the only motivation to do that is because it's fun. What will make it fun in Pantheon? This is yet to be seen, but my hope is that combat is challenging enough to keep me and my group on our toes. We have to pay attention, communicate, work together, otherwise things go poorly. The other fun factor is simply hanging out with people in an online world. If that was fun in other games, I can only imagine it being more fun in Pantheon *if* combat is more in depth than older games. So, the short answer is "because it's fun."
Ranarius said:My 1st answer was specifically "grinding with the purpose of getting to max level" I'd like to also answer for just "grinding" in general.
If by "grinding" we're talking about grouping up and fighting mobs over and over, to me the only motivation to do that is because it's fun. What will make it fun in Pantheon? This is yet to be seen, but my hope is that combat is challenging enough to keep me and my group on our toes. We have to pay attention, communicate, work together, otherwise things go poorly. The other fun factor is simply hanging out with people in an online world. If that was fun in other games, I can only imagine it being more fun in Pantheon *if* combat is more in depth than older games. So, the short answer is "because it's fun."
See my earler short answer. ;)
I always think back to other games I've played where they lead you around by the nose from quest to quest until you're max level. Sometimes that's fun and I feel like I could do that forever, but then I hit max level and keep doing it for a bit only to quickly become bored and realize that just doing the quests (even if they're good) isn't really fun enough without that additional carrot. Then I try to group up and "grind" some of the other parts of a game and realize that they've become so asocial that I might as well still be soloing everything. Join a guild? Sure that helps a bit but the dungeons and group content and even most of the raid content is specifically designed not to be challenging. They're designed to just give you rewards so you can hit the next tier and get slightly better rewards. People call it the "gear treadmill" but I see it more like a "gear conveyer belt" because if you're on a treadmill you're at least doing something. Conveyer belts just deliver the gear to you and all you have to do is pick it up.
To me, games like EQ 1 & 2 were like hopping on a treadmill while binging a good show. If you were just running on the treadmill, you'd probably jump off after 30 minutes or less. But you put on a show you love, slow things down to a walk and next thing you know it's two hours later, you're exhausted and more than a little sweaty. The show is what kept you on the treadmill. To relate it back toward games, you were spending time with people and engaging your brain to distract yourself from the repetitive actions of pull, kill, pull, kill etc. For some reason other games thought they should take you off the treadmill... and also put the TV in another room where you can't hear it?
I think my analogy kind of ran away from me there. My point is that the games I most enjoyed grinding in had the slower, more repetitive, lengthy grinding scenes but you were forced to spend time with people to do it and that's what made it great. You didn't blitz your way through a dungeon in 30 minutes and get your reward. I quit those games after just a couple of months. But on EQ I'd join PUGs just to chat with people. Jump into groups with guild mates because I liked talking with them, etc. You farmed just to farm even if you were rich/max level because it was enjoyable.