With achievement systems getting more popular over the last few years, non MMO gamers are getting a chance to experience the same grind we MMO gamers have for years. The way things are going it seems that if a game is playable online then it will get an arbitrary achievement system. Left 4 Dead and Call of Duty: World at War are the last 2 non-mmo games I’ve played with just such systems. While L4D’s achievement system does not provide any reward once you complete a goal, CoD’s system not only unlocks new weapons but also levels your character to unlock new features. Then we have Xbox Live, a online system setup entirely around achievements. The more games you play and the more achievements you complete the higher your Xbox Live ranking.
Having been in the MMO community for some time, we’ve all heard the argument from disgruntled MMO or non-MMO gamers stating that MMOs are a huge time sink and that all you do is grind. I just find it hilarious that now these gamers too good for the MMO grind have no problem achievement grinding. You can argue that it’s different, however as soon as you add any reward to the achievement system that will give you an edge in gameplay, you are creating a grind. Team Fortress 2 is a perfect example. As soon as they added rewards to their achievement system, you had servers full of gamers grinding away trying to complete them. Many gamers even stating this completely ruined the game, myself being one of them.
With C0D4, servers were setup to instantly level you to the max so you could game without having to worry about grinding your way to new weapons and game features.
The fact is that both systems are serving the same purpose, to create a system that can rank players by what goals they’ve completed. By that I mean if you see someone with a special weapon or item, you know they’ve compelted some achievements to earn it, so in your mind they are better than your character regardless if the game has a ranking feature or not.
In MMORPGs gamers grind by completing quests, raids and PvP goals to increase their characters stats or gain better weapons and items. In turn they are able to perform better in PvP as well as in the tougher raids/quests. In non-MMORPG games, gamers are grinding by completing arbitrary achievements, like “Stab someone 50 times in the back while their on fire, in the air and relacing their shoes”. Then you get a new title or weapon or whatever the game feels like giving you.
Developers should be coming up with ways to remove the grind, not to make all games grind fests. MMOs biggest problem is that its based off of how much time you have to run the same quests over and over again to get that weapon or item. Instead of this grind/reward system that most games are currently in favor of, developers need to come up with something new. I know that grinding in some form will always be part of MMO gaming, however I think it can be changed where it doesn’t feel like you’re grinding.
I hate the grind on these games also. One of the reasons I don’t play COD4. Kinda sad too since I like achievements. A lot of them ad a lot of replay value to the game, giving you a good reason to try and finish an entire level in a certain time, or on the harder difficulties. I’m actually kind of disappointed that Castle Crashers had such crappy achievements. But like you said, once you gain an advantage for having these achievements, I stop caring. More often than not I sell the game back to Gamestop after playing through the single player campaign.
“Stab someone 50 times in the back while their on fire, in the air and relacing their shoes” LOL!
I agree. Hell, you can break everything in life down to a grind. I gotta wake up, take a leak, brush my teeth, get changed, drive to work, drop a deuce, etc. It is the nature of everything we do, so bitching about it to me is not really a valid complaint.
Non-massive games have been doing this for years. Fighting games and platformers where you have to win certain matches in order to unlock new fighters or the like. Diablo 2 forced a player to go through the entire game to unlock nightmare mode.
Developers haven’t really called it ‘acheivements’ but in effect it’s the same thing.
in things like fighting or shooters the game play was fun. What the hell is fun about clicking on a rat a 1000 times so you can click on a dog or something like that. I want to play a game because its fun. not because if I spend 100+ hours doing something boring it may be fun later. fuck that! mmorpgs are a boring and broken sham of a game type. they will stay that way til the grind gos.
What people are referring to when they talk about grind is boring repetitive gameplay. So it begs the question of what part of the gameplay do said individuals find boring and whether or not it is remediable. One problem is that ever since WoW popularized using quests as a means of leveling and achievements, every MMO has taken that and used it over and over again. The whole idea of the quest in the first place is that it facilitates story and disguises the grind as something more objective oriented. So if you’ve played one quest based MMO you’ve pretty much experienced the core gameplay of most MMORPGs.
MMORPGS have a RPG element which intrinsically involves grinding, if you can’t deal with it, go back to your crappy console games, bro.