Grinding: the.. Grindinging.

Or hereby known as 'the black fathomless time sink into which all MMORPG's must dwell in.'

It occurs to me that I should probably start by explaining what the Grind is: MMORPG's are essentially large time-sinks with rewards separated out by individual requirements, such as experience costs, number of monsters defeated, or number of menial tasks performed.

For each arbitrary goal, the player is rewarded with some increased ability or the ability to perform some new action in the game, ensuring the player spends a pre-set amount of time in the game world exploring some aspect of it to ensure he takes the time to appreciate that portion of the world or does not prematurely exhaust his interest in the game.

However, one can imagine that for a game, the amount of content is necessarily limited. Therefore, the only way to stretch gaming hours is to enforce restrictions on pacing to such a degree that advancement takes an exponential increase in magnitude or risk the danger of the player burning through the game too fast. (And thus, not remaining committed to the game.)

The grind can be many things, but generally equates to the repetition of a certain amount of actions for a long duration of time for the sole purpose of advancement.

The fundamental problem with grinding is...

It isn't fun. It's work. No one ever wants to grind. They want the results from grinding. Much in the same way that a lot of people don't want to work, but getting paid possibly overrides their desire to not work.

I've heard of a lot of solutions to grinding, make it less extreme, have 'bonus xp' days, make it quest/story oriented... etc.

Example One: Fix the 'Grind' by reducing the amount of experience needed to level.

Okay, here's the problem. The amount of experience you need to advance in most games follows an exponential curve. That is, the amount of time invested will always grow way beyond control in relatively few levels.

For example:

Let's say that each level, you need to slay a mere 10% more monsters than you did at the previous level to level.

So at level 1, if you need to slay 10 monsters, at level 2, you need to slay 11.

At level 20, you need to slay 67 monsters.
At level 40, you need to slay 452 monsters.
At level 60, you will now need to slay 3,400 monsters.

To go from level 60 to 61, requires three hundred and forty times the investment as to go from level 1 to 2.

Anything involving exponential growth balloons quite rapidly, no matter how gently the growth starts at first, the compound effects soon make the requirements enormous.

But, surely that's expected! The more you progress, the more time you need to invest. You can't expect to go from master to grandmaster in the same time you go from novice to apprentice! That would remove all the thrill of accomplishment from the game.

Ah, yes. Of course. It's somehow 'justified' that such enormous time investments be part of the game. Even if that were the case, you have to consider the actual return on time spent. Let's say I paid you a thousand dollars every time you leveled. This will represent the 'thrill of accomplishment.'

So going from level 1 to 2, you made 100 dollars per monster you slew.
Going from level 20 to 21, you made roughly 15 dollars per monster you slew.
Going from level 40 to 41, you made roughly 2 and a half dollars per monster you slew.
Going from level 60 to 61, you made roughly 33 cents per monster you slew.

The rewards don't match the time invested.

Ah! But that's unfair! The rush of going from level 60 to 61 is far greater than going from level 1 to 2.

That is absolutely accurate.

Now ask yourself this, does it feel exponentially greater to go from level 60 to 61, than level 1 to 2?

Would you feel three hundred times more satisfied going from level 60 to 61 than level 1 to 2?

No, chances are, most people feel about the same level of happiness or even less. Going from level 1 to 2 in a new game is a novel experience. Going from level 60 to 61, we'll have the 'been there, done that' scenario where we've seen it all and all we want is some new skill, piece of equipment or a minor increase on the numbers we see on screen.

Example Two: Supplementing the Grind with alternative forms of experience.

This is an idea that most often takes the form of Quests.

Unfortunately, the most tried and true forms of quests are (Now, we can all say it together..)
Kill X monsters... Which.. is exactly the same as above.

And then comes the second one... which is...
Deliver package X to guy Y... Which involves lots of tedious travel.

The main problem with these kinds of Quests, is that it's overdone, and essentially replaces the main grinding of the game with an entirely new beast: The Quest Grind, where all grinding is forsaken to do even more mind numbingly boring quests. Kill 30 rabid squirrel badger weasel... orcs.

And hot on the heels of these quests are: Repeatable Quest Grinding!

Which makes sure players always have a quest to do by simply giving them the same quest to do over and over again... but make sure they have to do it more and more...

...which just makes it grinding again... doesn't it?

How could you ever argue that quests are bad? Would you really prefer pure grinding?

Nay! You misunderstand my point, fair citizen.

It is simply that most Quests are a different form of grinding. It does nothing to solve the main problem of the grind, it simply presents it in an alternative light. Instead of slaying 3400 monsters to get to your next level, you simply have to slay 30 of them, 10 times over.

It has some benefits: You achieve a mini-rush of satisfaction from completing the quests.

It has some costs: The amount of work required to implement quests could be quite costly to the game.

Cutting the grind up into little mini boxes and wrapping them in bow ties, doesn't actually change the grind in some dramatic way.

That and the effort of implementing a sustainable quest grind is literally massive. Think of how many quests you would have to implement to ensure that the player never runs out of quests to do and hits your behemoth grind... masked by the pretty quests that have kept him on his merry way.

So then what do you propose, if you think these are such 'bad' ideas?

I never said they were bad. They just don't change the innate nature of the problem.

Grinding isn't fun. There is too much time involvement for too little reward.

Then the obvious solution? Make the grind fun. Or at the very least, make the grind interesting.

Okay. Then how?

It really depends on who your target audience is... (to be continued..)