Grind isn’t necessarily a terrible evil in and of itself. It can be fun, in a Zen sort of way. That said, padding game content to string along subscribers is simply unacceptable in my book. Forcing the player to grind the same content is likewise unacceptable.

I’m a fan of the Final Fantasy series. They can be very grindy at times. Again, I don’t mind it sometimes, but here’s the key: game design should be such that grinding is optional, and it has to be borne of a player’s desire to play your game, rather than something that players need to do to progress in your game, or to justify to themselves the subscription cost.

I’m playing Valkyrie Profile 2, for instance, and I’ve spent time grinding to find some unique weapons. That’s not necessary for progress in the game, I just felt like doing it. Grind as an optional game element doesn’t bother me. Grind as a requirement or as a business scheme are very annoying.

I guess that miffed me the most. At least companies used to actually TRY to hide the fact the built a midelnto waste our time for money. Blizzard states it in a public document.

Grind is not necessarily a creature borne of design. Zubby mentions it well:

“Okay, so we have a subscription model, that’s our income. It’s beneficial to us to have our players playing the game as much as possible. How do we make them play more, and for longer stints?”
“Make whatever they need to do take longer”

For example, just to use the common WoW example, there is no technical or design reason why the end boss in, say, Scholomance can’t drop the appropriate tier armor set piece. What do we have in this group, let’s see… two warriors, a mage, a priest and a druid? Okay, here’s your 2x Warrior helm, 1x mage helm, 1x priest helm and 1x druid helm. Thanks for coming. Hope you liked it.

But no. Gandling drops basically whatever the RNG tells him to drop, and one of it to boot. Not necessarily something that any of the present classes can use. That might be SOP in DIKU, but it’s also “DIKUing” your players around.

Personal anecdote, (which I”m not proud of, but illustrates the point): I had to go to Stratholme and kill Baron Rivendare 47 times (forty-seven times, yup, I counted them) until he was kind enough to give my my Shadowcraft Pants.

If you take a step back and see how the design evolved through time, you can see Blizzard starting to see the error in that and slowly changing things around by the heyday of Zul’Gurub, and all the different coins you could get and exchange for gear.

Now we have badges and badge gear, which is essentially the same thing: We’re sidestepping the RNG (not for all gear though). We know whenever we drop a boss we get badges and then we turn around and use those badges to get what we want.

Badges are not a complete solution. If you’re going for tier gear, they’re not very useful to you. But it’s a system that lets those who are not so hot for tier gear to acquire lateral or incremental upgrades as they go. Also, the intrinsic “value” of each badge in terms of the investment of time it takes to get all the required badges is out of whack. That’s where most of the grind moved to: Yeah, now you get badges for sure. Woohoo. But you’ll need 150 of them.

Grind has no easy solution. You can mask it. We can point to DIKU and say that’s where it comes from, but the fact remains that as long as your players play through content faster than you can make new content, the easiest (not best) solution is to make them repeat that content until the new one is ready. You don’t want bored players in your game. Bored players leave, and what’s worse, take others with them. User-created content is no silver bullet either, because most players won’t play through crap content.

It ain’t easy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending grind. I agree with Zubon that three times should be about right as far as “what a player should get” from content. Mandating more times is dicking people over. And until you can churn out content way faster than we’re doing now, you’re gonna have to continue dicking people over.

For the record, I left WoW during t6 content.