Kill Ten Rats

Whenever I post on grinding, there are the inevitable comments from people who enjoy it. The note that seems to be missing is, “in some ways, in some contexts, at my option.”

Good grind gives you the choice in those things. Having played MMOs for years, I clearly must love me some mindless repetition for its own sake, and sometimes that is really what you want. Killing ten rats is reliable in its difficulty and reward, comforting in its consistency. There really are times when you just want to farm something. It lets you decompress after work, it gives you something to do while chatting, or it lets you gear up to or down from more intense activity.

There are many examples of good grind. The game might not kick you out after you beat it, so you can keep playing if you like. “Survival mode” is popular, in which you click the button for an endless stream of zombies. I love New Game Plus in all its forms. (My apologies again to Kingdom of Loathing for whining that it was feeling grindy on my 80th Ascension or so.) Or maybe you can do a bit of rat-killing on the side for a cosmetic reward or a small, non-essential buff.

Bad grind is required. Bad grind is when the NPC says, “Now go do that five more times!” before you get any new options. Bad grind is when no NPC says that but the next boss is balanced around your having farmed five more levels. Bad grind is when a game has 8 hours of content and makes you repeat it 5 times so that it feels like 40 hours of content before the big end scene. Bad is when “New Game Plus” is required to get to the “real” game (arguably: or all the trophies/badges/achievements). Bad grind is when the repetition is not the game itself but is keeping you from the rest of the game.

There is an intermediate case where the grind is the entire point. (Some might say that MMOs inherently fall into this category.) You know walking in that you are going to be doing the same thing for hours. That is why you are there. Either you classify the whole thing as “not fun” and skip it, or you wallow in it. The only problem is those poor souls who wandered in expecting something else.

: Zubon

There has been some critical concerns about the anticipated gameplay of SWTOR – namely that it you, the gamer, will end up playing large parts of the game solo. This is a concern that echoes design decisions made in other products as far back as reducing the grouping size in SWG from 20 to 8 or Azerothian mobs being stripped of their elite status and becoming easily soloable. “The MM in MMORPG means ‘Massively Multiplayer’! Why play a ‘massively multiplayer’ game if you’re going to play it solo?” was the argument put up against these changes. Luckily for me and my absolute inability to post here more than a couple of times per year, Zubon has recently touched on this very subject in his post, Unforced Grouping. But I think there’s a more subconscious reasoning going on than the low investment requirements of soloing or the high potential for a bad grouped experience. I think we’re afraid.
Continue reading L’enfer, c’est les autres

City of Heroes has practically an embarrassment of riches in game design. I keep hearing design dilemmas in other games and thinking, “Oh, City of Heroes solved that problem years ago.” The solutions are usually heavily reliant on instancing, but how much of your WoW time are you spending in instances anyway?

Many games borrow the City of Heroes sidekick system, in which you can bring a teammate up (or down) to your level. City of Heroes has gone beyond that: everyone on the team is the same level, and all the instanced content is always the right level. It really is that simple. Set everyone to the same effective level. Set all the enemies to that level (or let the players dial up the difficulty). Done.

Some of this works due to a good design in ability acquisition. You do it once. City of Heroes trainers do not try to re-sell you Fire Bolt every five levels with a new number attached. You buy it once and it scales with your level. If you join a team that changes your effective level, your abilities scale up or down appropriately.

Not enough content in a level range? Every quest can work for every level range. Friends just joined, or you are joining a group of level-capped friends? Everyone can play with everyone else. And content scales to team size, so bring as many friends as you like.

Fun bonus thought: if Blizzard really wanted to, they could have the hit points and damage of every enemy in every instance scale to the gear score of the party.

: Zubon

An MMO guild needs constant renewal. If you are not recruiting, you are dying. People unsubscribe all the time, so you are trying to keep a colander filled.

I am not all about the new recruits. I may not learn their names until they have been around a while; until proven otherwise, I assume that everyone is just passing through. I do not have the reserves to get emotionally invested in a series of people who are going back to X or just playing until Y comes out, whether or not they mention that. There is a self-fulfilling prophecy in expecting people to leave soon, but over the years I have invested a lot of attention and gold in people who did not always bother leaving the “this game just isn’t for me” note. I understand that many people are capable of taking an appropriate level of interest in an acquaintance, but I do not relish the hazy zone between “some guy” and “close friend.”

I prefer a small, tight-knit group. This is hard to maintain across games, jobs, families, time zones, to say nothing of across the years. This would be a major factor of my taking the year off MMOs.

: Zubon