It gets me down, grinding.

No, I’m not talking about grinding my teeth, (though I certainly do plenty of that.) I’m talking about in-game grinding; those endless lather-rinse-repeat – do this, do it some more, now do it again, busy-work quests that are part and parcel of MMOs as we know them.

Like a cat that is otherwise sleek and loveable; when threatened, MMOs have a tendency to fluff themselves up in an effort to convince you that they’re many times larger than they really are.  (Except that the threat here isn’t the neighbor’s petulant poodle, it’s the player’s pursuit of the game’s own goals.) Those extraneous quests add bulk to an otherwise undersized storyline. The problem is that said bulk is at best, meaningless, and at worst, mandatory. Grinding, as the term implies, adds nothing to the player’s enjoyment of the game.

Worse, those quests often actively detract from whatever story the game is trying to tell.  They’re like unnecessary pages stuffed into a book. Imagine reading a novel (or watching a movie) and every time our hero takes two steps further into the plot, she’s met with this,

“Valiant hero, I have what you seek! It is the key to unlocking all the mysteries of Clichédia’s tortured past and turbulent present! There is no time to waste! But first, I need to you bring me the pristine spleens of a thousand wargnargles…”

Are you kidding me?

If the country is on the brink of disaster and I’m bearing an intercepted message from the enemy alliance, I shouldn’t have to fetch you a cupcake recipe, find your long lost nephew or do your damn shopping before I’m finally admitted to see the King!

How does sidetracking the main character (that would be you, the player) foster the sense of urgency that most game plots are trying to create?  Why should I give a damn, in character or out, for the fortunes of a particular game world when half the NPCs are fixated solely on filling out their collections of extraneous crap? The only thing that could make it worse is if all those grinding side-quests were full of advertising.

“No, I meant McNorgle’s Wargnargles; coming soon to a Merchant near you!”

Look, I’m fully aware that building an MMO can be a labor-intensive slog and that story-relevant content doesn’t exactly grow on trees, but that doesn’t change the fact that publishers are marketing their MMOs as games, not root canals, and games are supposed to be fun.  Grinding isn’t fun; it’s hours of monotony bracketed by distant bits of actual story.

I’m not saying that fetch-quests have no place in an MMO, but if you’re going to put them in your game then for Pete’s sake, make them relevant; make those bloody wargnargle spleens a necessary part of what gets you to the next step in the story.  Or set up an important encounter that can only happen somewhere in the same area. And while we’re at it, up the drop percentage.  I find it hard to believe that only one in every half dozen wargnargles actually has a spleen.

I understand that publishers want to add as much play value to their games as possible, (thereby keeping butts in chairs, playing longer.) but just making a game longer doesn’t actually add play value. If coming up with a long, continuous story is too difficult, why not create a series of much smaller, self-contained stories that link together? Then, instead of bulking up one main story to make it seem bigger, (and take longer to get through) those quests can be left out and there can be unlockable sandbox areas between each of those contained stories.  Those areas can be used for farming or launching raiding parties or whatever.

Finally, if you simply must pad out your game with grinding quests, make them something players can ignore without a penalty. Skipping the tedious bits shouldn’t mean that your main character doesn’t level sufficiently to take on the next unskipable set of bad guys.

Fair Game updates every Monday. No wargnargles were harmed in the writing of this article.

Image attribution: By Hannibal Poenaru from near Paris, France (flickr.com) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons