MMO Farming - a Rant and Criticism

[Doctor Teo]

There's something that has irked me about MMOs for far too long that I have to get off my chest. It doesn't apply strictly to MMOs, but they are the worst culprit for this.

The idea of farming or grinding is pretty commonplace. If you want the rewards, you've got to work for them first. It makes sense on paper. Virtually every MMO I've ever played has always had this mind numbing slog where you have to kill or gather stuff over and over and over again to level up and get higher. I've done it, and I'd wager many of those reading this have done it.

My question is, why the hell are we okay with this?

Is it a leftover from the early JRPG days where they added grinding to pad game length? Why do we not react badly to the idea that we're going to have to grind?

It's not even difficult, it's quite the opposite actually - mind numbingly boring, repetitive button presses with no challenge, no effort, and no skill.

I was visiting one of my old stompin' grounds recently, a little MMO called Runescape. I looked around and told myself I'd try some mining and smithing, since those are the typical fantasy MMO professions. I had planned to set aside an hour, but you know what? I gave up - it was amusing at first, but all I was doing was picking away at lifeless rocks while listening to music in the other window. When it came time to smith, I'd gained so little experience that the bar barely moved, and I had created absolutely nothing of significant use - zero reward for a little less than an hour of nothing but slaving away. I ran a search for how to level smithing and earn cash - it turns out, I could earn more money if I just bought ores, let my character auto-forge, and just restock at a bank every time I ran out. I calculated if I did this for some two hours, I'd level up once while earning a little bit of gold.

I remembered why I left.

What kind of sick joke is a "game" so maddeningly repetitive that I can watch a movie in the other screen? Runescape is just an example, but this goes out to almost all the MMOs out there where the content is so mind-numbingly easy that I have to find different entertainment just so I can play my game.

You know why I liked Dark Souls? Because it was a game that didn't treat you like a frickin' idiot. Enemies didn't run up to you, shouting "For the Blackrock Clan!" and die while you were watching anime in the other screen, pressing a couple buttons while looking away; in Dark Souls, even beginner enemies can kill you, and most people don't start listening to music until they become extremely familiar with an area or are repeat farming an enemy for a specific drop.

And people wonder why MMOs have a botting/macro problem - when a game's content is so easy that the full attention of a person is simply not required, the task might as well be automated. It's not like trash mobs are an actual threat, or even require you to respond to their actions half the time. I'd say if a game is so simple that the process of 'playing' can be automated, there's an issue.

Oh yes, the cherry on the cake - when confronted with feedback, explaining that there's a clear flaw in the content, the typical response from most users is "but you're playing anyways, no one's forcing you, so nothing needs to change." If I try to explain that I do not play, quit, or am on the verge of quitting, the response is instead "well you don't play anyways, so nothing needs to change." It's infuriating; to them, if you play a game, then you are clearly enjoying it, and if you don't, your criticism doesn't matter. This is shockingly common, and I'm baffled; instead of defending something based on merit, many will elect to simply dismiss it and tell you to 'vote with your wallet,' ignoring what may be a valid argument.

Why the heck are MMOs made so darn easy? WoW, Runescape, ESO, all of them games where the majority of the content is so simplistic that people would automate it if they were allowed (and some do illegaly).

If I'm playing a game, I want to play the bloody game. No one joins a game and says "wow, this game is great, I'm going to be able to watch so much Netflix!"

[⌜NEW AGE PLAYBOY⌟]

i don't care about a grind if the combat is fun (example: warframe). mmos aren't just about gameplay, y'kno, they're also about socialization and, to some extent, events. they're meant to be social and if you're not going to be that way you're not going to have a good time.

[Xaelath]

Tldr
Dont play MMOs,
It tend to be cancerous and RPG tend to head p2w, rarely you'll find as good as World of Warcraft in long terms run.

[⌜NEW AGE PLAYBOY⌟]

also, some people get so used to doing the same ♥♥♥♥ over and over again that they stop seeing all the other things the game has to offer. community events are always fun, talking with people is always fun, dungeons and raids are also fun if your group is coordinated.

[Doctor Teo]

I do like the social element of an MMO - it's part of the draw, and it's part of why I stuck with MMOs as long as I have. Ironically, it was one of the things Runescape did alright for awhile: skills were dull, but there were hotspots where a lot of people gathered, and I remember fishing in Catherby for hours chatting to people. And yes, if the combat is fun, it's worth sticking around (I played Vindictus).

It's this expectation that you need to grind though, to 'slog through the boring stuff to get to the end' that irks me. Stuff like solo questing because the quest mobs don't have shared loot, or because your friends are all different levels or stages. It doesn't matter if it's Vindictus, WoW or Runescape, they all had their end-of-grind rewards where you got to go on a special quest or hit a milestone, but it's maddening the amount of repetition one has to go through to get there. It's more fun with friends, but god, they still haven't figured out a system that lets people of different levels play together, and when you're leveling alone to catch up to someone, it's just as bad as anywhere else.

Some games are about the journey and the experience leading up to the destination. In an MMO, the journey is the painful part you muscle through to get to the destination so you can finally start having fun.

[Lusus Symphonia]

I had this discussion with a friend recently on ffxiv while grinding the week cap on "tomes of creation".
He made some good points and said a system where RNG is better but I disagreed as I believe RNG ruins games.

If you can think of another way which can make players stay subscribed, not gear to the max and is fair, please share it.

As it is now, the tomes are pretty much the only thing that keeps suckers like me and a few other thousand logging in each week so we don't fall behind the playerbase.

[Szczureek]

KUPA

[Names Matter Not]

I enjoy grinding.

[Doctor Teo]

Originally posted by Red Monk:

If you can think of another way which can make players stay subscribed, not gear to the max and is fair, please share it.

As it is now, the tomes are pretty much the only thing that keeps suckers like me and a few other thousand logging in each week so we don't fall behind the playerbase.

I feel your pain on this one. I used to play Vindictus. If you want to gear up in that game, you're looking at running and rerunning raids and dungeons for about a ~2-5% chance at a fifth of a max-level weapon (it used to be less, clocking in under 1%). But since it's the only way to both earn money and gear up, people ran... every day. That's not even counting enchants which drop separate, or enhancement which has a chance of breaking your weapon the higher you go and making you start from zero. I still did it because, hey, I enjoyed the combat, but god, the grinding was absurd, and that's saying something considering I was lucky.

But here's the thing, and you brought it up, how else does a company get players paying 15 a month, or repeatedly logging in to spend money on their shop? If there's no reason to log in, there's no reason to spend money, and goodness knows you can't have someone "finish" the game by maxing out everything and leaving nothing to shoot for, because that's a lost customer too.

You can't even say that the supreme answer is PvP, because not every player even likes PvP. But creating enough fresh PvE content to justify a minimum ~40 hours a month would be ludicrous.

Whatever the solution is, the MMO genre has not discovered it yet. For someone to invest over 1k hours into a game, they have decided that some of that time needed to be padded, because trying to create 1000 hours of unique content that's not simply a hard mode of something else is an impossibility; you'd have to have writers working around the clock coming up with new ideas, a world large enough to implement them all, and a quality control team that could ensure every single one worked. It's just not possible, and yet that's what it would take to demand 100 hours a month playing. Some games like RIFT tried dynamic events, or Guild Wars with its world bosses, and yet despite genuine effort, there's still just not enough to do unless you make people do "daily" quests to pad time.

Procedural generation of questlines is the only thing I can think of. But trying to get an AI who can not only generate enemies, but also a plot is something reserved for science fiction at this stage.

[Radene]

Skinner box. Look it up for interesting reading.

[Doctor Teo]

Originally posted by Radene:

Skinner box. Look it up for interesting reading.

Oh come now, you don't play MMO's for ten years and not know what a skinner box is :p.

Heck, I wrote an essay about it five years ago in college.

[Lusus Symphonia]

Originally posted by Doctor Teo:

I feel your pain on this one. I used to play Vindictus. If you want to gear up in that game, you're looking at running and rerunning raids and dungeons for about a ~2-5% chance at a fifth of a max-level weapon (it used to be less, clocking in under 1%). But since it's the only way to both earn money and gear up, people ran... every day. That's not even counting enchants which drop separate, or enhancement which has a chance of breaking your weapon the higher you go and making you start from zero. I still did it because, hey, I enjoyed the combat, but god, the grinding was absurd, and that's saying something considering I was lucky.

This is literally my nightmare, RNG is probably the worst thing ever added to a game.
You can run the dungeon 1000 times, play for hundreds of hours and potentially never get that weapon/drop but then some beginner joins your team and gets it first try, how does that honestly make you feel? Especially since mmos are generally not made for the gameplay aspect and it's main stigma is gearing up/collecting items.

Originally posted by Doctor Teo:

But here's the thing, and you brought it up, how else does a company get players paying 15 a month, or repeatedly logging in to spend money on their shop? If there's no reason to log in, there's no reason to spend money, and goodness knows you can't have someone "finish" the game by maxing out everything and leaving nothing to shoot for, because that's a lost customer too.

You can't even say that the supreme answer is PvP, because not every player even likes PvP. But creating enough fresh PvE content to justify a minimum ~40 hours a month would be ludicrous.

Whatever the solution is, the MMO genre has not discovered it yet. For someone to invest over 1k hours into a game, they have decided that some of that time needed to be padded, because trying to create 1000 hours of unique content that's not simply a hard mode of something else is an impossibility; you'd have to have writers working around the clock coming up with new ideas, a world large enough to implement them all, and a quality control team that could ensure every single one worked. It's just not possible, and yet that's what it would take to demand 100 hours a month playing. Some games like RIFT tried dynamic events, or Guild Wars with its world bosses, and yet despite genuine effort, there's still just not enough to do unless you make people do "daily" quests to pad time.

Procedural generation of questlines is the only thing I can think of. But trying to get an AI who can not only generate enemies, but also a plot is something reserved for science fiction at this stage.

The only solution that I can think of is fun, a fun MMO where people can actually socialise on and relax, no restrictions, no gear advantages, just pure skill but I believe a pure skill MMO would require a superior input method depending on the genre.

Pvp in global skill cooldown mmos are usually terrible, it's not fun, at all and of course a lot of classes are extremely unbalanced, some can push you off cliffs while some can run and shoot at the same time so you have melee running after them trying to hit them etc.. No.

The only problem I have with procedural generated games is the fact it feels empty, no fun in completing trash quests most of the time.