Grinding games are boring

[srachit]

Well I am pretty bored of games where all you do is just basically keep on pressing the fight button or keep on pressing the do job button till your skill goes up and person who does this the longest is the best.

Grinding games are boring, period.

Now I wanted to ask you my fellow developers of if you'll have any ideas of have come across games where they have managed to avoid this entire grinding concept to decide who is the best?

i was thinking of a solution, where a players skill is based on how well he plays a puzzle. Like faster and better he completes a puzzle, the higher his skill and if he messes up in the puzzle lower his skill. The battles between players would be decided by doing puzzles aswell. This way a player joining years later would also stand a chance against the older players, it would all depend on skill.

Anyone has any other solutions on how we can avoid this entire grinding process? Or if you do like the grinding process, why do you?

[Callan S.]

It depends on whether you have any things like reputation score (never mind an XP score). Any number to increase that persists over a long period. If you do, even being skill based doesn't avoid that.

I think one way around grinding is that a short amount of play grants a very slow increase over real time of the stat.

[Jackolantern]

The problem, and why grinding is so common in one form or another (quest grinding, kill grinding, etc.), is that content is expensive. Players can chew through unique content much, much faster than a development team, commercial or indie, can afford to create it. So to get the kind of playtimes that MMOs require (multiple hundreds or even thousands of hours), some repetition is required.

I think the best way to handle it is to have tangible rewards always visible, and break up the repetition as much as possible by offering other activities that can also work towards those same rewards. For example, in some newer MMOs, you gain the same xp whether you are doing PvE or PvP, which are completely different activities. Players can quest or kill monsters for a while to get half a level, and then go do PvP to get the rest of the level.

[Callan S.]

Depends on content. There are not a few web comics out there that put out a comic per day. If you want a complex interactive map, probably can't do that. If you want some machina, that's probably doable on a regular basis.

[tboxx]

Than the puzzle become a grind. Some players actually don't like having to pay too much attention to things like crafting. Some games have required crafters to pay attention to the progress bar when they craft by hitting key combos and players hated it. Also the game would be a puzzle focused game.

[tboxx]

Well I am pretty bored of games where all you do is just basically keep on pressing the fight button or keep on pressing the do job button till your skill goes up and person who does this the longest is the best.

Grinding games are boring, period.

Now I wanted to ask you my fellow developers of if you'll have any ideas of have come across games where they have managed to avoid this entire grinding concept to decide who is the best?

i was thinking of a solution, where a players skill is based on how well he plays a puzzle. Like faster and better he completes a puzzle, the higher his skill and if he messes up in the puzzle lower his skill. The battles between players would be decided by doing puzzles aswell. This way a player joining years later would also stand a chance against the older players, it would all depend on skill.

Anyone has any other solutions on how we can avoid this entire grinding process? Or if you do like the grinding process, why do you?

How about Max skills and crafts at start. Now the grind would be aquiring gear and resources for crafting but that might mean doing the same thing in a round about way. I e you are killing mobs over and over for gear which translates to being the best etc.

[Jackolantern]

How about Max skills and crafts at start. Now the grind would be aquiring gear and resources for crafting but that might mean doing the same thing in a round about way. I e you are killing mobs over and over for gear which translates to being the best etc.

Considering that in a regular MMO you acquire gear and resources for crafting, plus you get to level-up as well, this kind of seems like you are taking away from the game rather than adding something. True you could have more skills and crafting abilities, but I think this would take away a lot of the drive to play the game.

I don't think the solution will be in taking anything away, but rather, adding things to the formula.

[Callan S.]

Don't forget to check out puzzle pirates as a mmorpg who went the skill based way.

[tboxx]

How about Max skills and crafts at start. Now the grind would be aquiring gear and resources for crafting but that might mean doing the same thing in a round about way. I e you are killing mobs over and over for gear which translates to being the best etc.

Considering that in a regular MMO you acquire gear and resources for crafting, plus you get to level-up as well, this kind of seems like you are taking away from the game rather than adding something. True you could have more skills and crafting abilities, but I think this would take away a lot of the drive to play the game.

I don't think the solution will be in taking anything away, but rather, adding things to the formula.

I think some players like the fact to be a good crater you need to spend hours upon hours boringly grinding so that fellow master crafters are rare. Which certainly mimics real life. I think a larger focus on getting the resources to build the items would be a interesting spin rather then actually making them. In shadowbane the NPC vendors you hired in your guild city made the items but you had find the NPC crafter contract in item loot as well as level the npc up which cost gold and time. Then you selected the type of weapon or armor you wanted and it would random roll stats. It was an interesting system because the "crafter" type person was the guy who watched the NPC output and recycled the junk random rolls and kept the good stuff.

[tboxx]

Don't forget to check out puzzle pirates as a mmorpg who went the skill based way.

Yeah I was thinking puzzle pirates in my head when you mentioned puzzles. That would be the thing though a puzzle type mechanic would type cast your game as a puzzle game.