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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage Guided, short-term, mundane quests are an easy way to direct players toward a high-yield, "productive" play style while providing a steady stream of victories for them to achieve.

This is a good point. I quit WoW for a long time because of various reasons, and started back again after my friend told me about a mod called "Quest Helper" that basically tells you exactly where you need to go for nearly all quests in the game. I had been spoiled by Warhammer Online which tells you a general area in which you need to go to complete the quest, and thinking about having to do several quests in a row and figure out where to go and the most efficient way to complete them with a vague idea of where to go, so you end up wasting time wandering around the same place for hours. Don't get me wrong, I like exploring, but only to a certain point. WoW became fun again with Quest Helper because it made longer quests into what you described - short-term mundane quests that I could move through.

However, I'm level 67 now and everything has slowed to a crawl though, so I think the OP has a valid point, I did 3 quests in a row to kill 30 monsters each. Thats 90 monsters. I only got like 1.5 bars of XP (20 per level for those of you that don't play) for those, and then guess what...I got another 3 quests for killing 30 other different types! That's just completely ridiculous. It's no longer a "fun game" at this point, its a technique to extend the length that you play in order to get more money. All I want to do is PVP and get epic pvp gear, which I thought I could do at 60, then thought I could do at 70, but now it seems like I'll have to get 80 because they keep changing the battleground level brackets to stragetically force me to pay more money to waste time grinding out levels.

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You'd have to seriously restructure the levelling idea in order to make a non-grinding system viable. The grind is like building a brick wall: Sure, it's a monotonous, repetitive task, but every time you step back, it's a little higher, a little better. That's enough to keep people playing, and paying for MMO subscriptions.

As I just mentioned, there are limitations here. I think the users need better expectation from their game companies, cause this grinding crap is getting ridiculous. But hey, if we're paying them, and they're keeping clients, why would they change their design?

I feel like theres a few levels of grinding in MMOs; theres like fun grinding, where your making your way through mobs and quests and its evolving and changing, this is early to mid stages of the game, and then you have your "gaaaah theyre just squeezing money out of me" grinding, where your like 2/3 of the way through and you just want to reach that goal of level X or certain gear or to get to that cool instance or whatever, and you have to kill 90 critters to do 3 quests that gets you 5% into your next level. It starts to feel like the amount of work you put in isn't giving enough short term rewards.

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In fact, you could probably make an entire fun video game out of some WoW quests that take ten minutes to complete. What's that? Kill nine Crimson Legion Captains? Heck, Altair spent the entire Assassin's Creed game killing nine dudes.

Ha, amusing observation.

Also, don't get me wrong, I think WoW did a lot of things right and they have an amazing creative team. It's one of the better MMO's out there...but its not as perfect as some people think.

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Original post by Cambios My basic premise is this: quest heavy advancement is no better, and in many ways worse, than the "mob grind" system it was designed to replace. MMO designers would do well to re-examine this design concept, and scale back on it so quests can once again become interesting story elements rather than boring, workaday, mindless to-do lists.

I agree with you. I think the new quest heavy advancement system (as you call it) is actually worse than grinding up. I honestly hate it, and am really tired of games taking that route. I quit playing LOTRO because I got tired of messing around with the quests. You spend more time having to read quests and figure out where to go than you actually spend playing. I think somewhere halfway in the middle .. mix grinding with some longer, more 'questy' feeling quests would be the best. The problem is, in these games, questing is by far the most optimal way to gain levels, that you would be a moron to not grind quests.

In response to the previous comment, quest and grinding would be designed with the following distinct roles. I am not saying that it is not done. It is how some games work (including WOW). This is just a highlight of their differences.

Quests: Quests are possible paths to advance the story. Everytime the player selects a quest, the player is selecting a certain direction of change in the story. Completion of the quest objectives causes the desired changes.

Grinding/Training: These are free-roaming sessions where the player trains the character to be stronger, or to be more adapated to the environment, so that the player character could complete quest with their desired level of preparation.

In general MMO design where the game world cannot actually change, I think it is easier to replace Quests by Tests. The player character earns recognition/batches for completing Tests. In this context, there is no illusion where, "That npc got helped in epic proportion 1e6 times, and he is still needing help." Instead, it becomes, "My character must pass this test to advance to the next stage." There is no illusional need of "heros". The designer does not attempt to create the illusion that the world changes due to the actions of the player. Instead, it only attempts to create multiple ladders and scale for the players to place their characters. It does not attempt to let the player change the game world, but to let the player develop their characters.

The following is an example. It is how some games work as is, or at a meta level.


Game: Olympia

This is an MMORPG in which the player character begins as a lowly soul. The point of the game is to advance in the Epic Ladder by proving the character's ability in all sorts of conflicting episodes drawn from history and mythologies. Olympia itself is at peace. It is the place where souls return to chill out after they had re-inforced the roles of Epic events.

A soul can only increase in Epicness by selecting an episode and leaving Olympia.

A soul returns to Olympia by completing the episode it had chosen, or by getting defeated in the episode.

When a soul returns from the episode, it will attain the Epic level pertaining to how the episode was completed. Epic level of a character is not accumulative: You cannot play the wolf and eat Little Red Riding Hood multiple times and hope to increase your Epicness. Your Epicness would remain 0.1 regardless how many times you did it.

When a soul returns in defeat, the soul's Epic level would be capped by the level the soul was attempting. For example, if a Epic Level 5 soul somehow got defeated by the LRRH, the soul would become Epic Level 0.1 until it redeems itself in another attempt at the LRRH forest. If the soul was attempting a Level 7 episode, the soul would not get any reduction in Epicness because its current level is already lower than the level attempted.

Some episodes accept multiple player characters. In that case, the players would team up and enter an episode together.

Sometimes I feel like I have way too many small jobs to tie up, and it's hard to keep track of them. Every play NWN's official campaign? You have a journal full of this stuff, and it's like a bug tracker. It feels like you always have 25 'open issues' to tie up at any time.

But on the extreme other end, you have my first RPG, Dragon Warrior on NES. The story is basically 5 paragraphs of text, with 10 hours of grinding nonstop in between each one.

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Original post by Cambios This is an issue I am very passionate about. I blogged about it a few weeks ago, and then worked my post (and some feedback) into a detailed article I published yesterday: New Grind, Just like the Old Grind: Quest Heavy Advancement My basic premise is this: quest heavy advancement is no better, and in many ways worse, than the "mob grind" system it was designed to replace. MMO designers would do well to re-examine this design concept, and scale back on it so quests can once again become interesting story elements rather than boring, workaday, mindless to-do lists. I realize this is a very extreme and unpopular stance, but I think I make some good arguments. I'm very interested to hear what you all think.

I generally tend to ignore MMO threads.
But I have to comment because you've hit the nail on the head here!

My friends made me try WoW a year or two ago ... and that is exactly what bothered me about it. I was still grinding ... I was just grinding quests.

In many ways it was more annoying than grinding in a game like Lineage 2 ever was because I constantly had to drop what I was doing just to run back and forth between quest givers for half an hour. Most definitely not an improvement IMO.