One Grind to Rule them All

As readers of this blog know by now, I have been playing Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online for a few months now. My opinion of this game has changed gradually as my character has advanced to the upper levels. She’s now level 42, and has moved into the “higher level” areas — places such as Angmar and the Misty Mountains. The game-play of LOTRO has remained very consistent in some ways, and changed dramatically in others, at the same time. The real change however, has been a change not of kind, but of degree. The degree I’m referring to specifically is what MMORPG gamers call “the grind.”

What do we mean by “grind?”

Before I get into the details of “the grind” in LOTRO, let me first define what most gamers mean when they say something is a “grind.” To me, a “grind” is anything a game makes you do over and over again for no reason other than to increase the number of times you have done it. A great example of “grinding” is the way crafting is done in most games. If you want to level up your crafting, you have to collect hundreds of some resource, and then craft some useless object over and over again, to level up. Most people aren’t having fun while doing this. They don’t want to craft the useless object once, let alone hundreds of times. But the game makes them do it hundreds of times before they get to the “next level.”

Now, I want to be clear that this definition doesn’t just mean “repeating content a little bit.” I don’t consider having to kill 5 wolves to be “a grind” because it’s over in a few minutes. But when I am asked to kill 500 wolves, or 50, or heck even 20, now it’s a grind – because it’s going to take up a significant portion of my time (many minutes, maybe even several hours). And my time is being taken up by doing the same mind-numbing thing over and over again. This is what a grind is, at its heart – doing something over and over again that gives you no substantial “value add” to your entertainment. Boring the player to the point of falling into a stupor over and over again.

I’m going to be blunt here: I hate grinding. I think it has no place in a game, and should never exist even in small doses. If a designer is asking me to do the same thing more than 3 or 4 times, that designer has asked me to grind, and I’m going to object. Now, the reality is that all games have some “grind” aspects to them, and I have had to just live with that. But when a game is made out to be mostly or all grind, my objections become stronger… and they become stronger in direct proportion to the amount of grinding I am being asked to do.

The reason I hate grind is simple: it’s a poor, lame substitute for content. To me, “content” in a game is something unique, interesting, and fun that I can do. It’s certainly true that killing a “rabid wolf” once is content. But the 99 times I have to kill it after that are not content; they’re “grind.” That’s how I view it. I realize others will have a different definition, but this is my blog, so this is the definition I’m going to use.

Why games have grind

Lots of players hate grind as much as I do, and one will frequently see them complain on the internet or on web forums (as I am doing right now, in fact). So why do games have grind in them? Well, I think there are a few reasons, these being:

The grandfather clause of stupidity: Years ago I read the website of a really interesting guy named Musashi, or “Mu” for short. He has a bunch of long rants about game design, and one of his best and most interesting has “The Grandfather Clause of Stupidity” as its title. Succinctly, what he’s talking about is that games of today frequently have no better reason to incorporate a system (most often, a bad system) except that other games in the past had the system. For example, the “armor class” feature that most games have is taken from Dungeons and Dragons, which took them from its parent, Chainmail. Rather than creating a system based on how armor actually works in the real world, designers in 2009 will just co-opt the idea of “armor class” from D&D, and this will include whatever bad features were included in the original game, Chainmail (and there were many – because chainmail was a game for miniatures, not for roleplaying). This extends even more so to the computer gaming genre. The “grandfathers” of today’s MMORPGs are Ultima Online and Everquest. Now when these two games came out, online gaming was new, and there were lots of technical limitations to servers and clients. Therefore, just having creatures be “out in the world” and telling players “go kill 50 of them” made sense, because anything more complex than that (even things like cutscenes, animated art, voice-overs) would have been impossible using 1998-2000 tech. People were using dial-up and had 200 MHZ machines for crying out loud… they could not have done much more than the game allowed in those days.

However, we are far, far past the days of 1999. Computers have multi-core processors. People have high-speed DSL and cable modems. Artificial intelligence has advanced by 10 years since EQ launched. There is no reason that games of today need to be anything remotely like EQ, because the technical limitations under which EQ’s authors labored no longer exist – just as the technical limitations of using pencils, paper, and “to hit” tables no longer exist. And yet, designers keep incorporating all the same kludges that EQ and UO used because they had no other choice, on the logic that “it’s how EQ did it.” So when someone writes a quest to “kill 20 beefalos,” it’s not because the computers of today can’t handle something more complex, or because you couldn’t make something more complex work in a game, but rather, because “that’s what people do in MMORPGs” because “that’s what has always been done.”

And so, one reason why MMORPGs have “the grind” is because “they’ve always had the grind” and so, “that’s how they are supposed to be.”

Gamers as employees: A lot of designers, and players, think that an MMORPG is supposed to be a job, rather than just a fun diversion. They think you should have to “work” for everything you get in an MMORPG. You shouldn’t be able to just go kill one giant rat and get the quest done. You should have to kill 100 rats because doing that is “hard work” and completing the quest should “mean something.” I’ve always found this argument to be extremely bizarre, mainly because MMORPGs are games, and games are meant to be fun (not work, not a job). It’s also an odd argument because it’s not clear to me that anyone who is just clicking buttons and watching a bunch of pixels on a computer screen is ever going to “accomplish” anything that means something. However, this is one reason for the grind. If the designer thinks you should have to “work” while playing his game, one easy way to do that is to make you grind 1,000 of something instead of just 2. The other 998 are the “work” part.

The trainsitive property of MMO grinding: In mathematics, the transitive property says that if A = B and B = C, then A = C. I think in the minds of game designers, there is something similar to this going on. They know that grinding takes time, and that taking time needs people to subscribe longer, so they think that grinding will lead to longer subscription times. In pseudo-math terms, grinding = time and time = subs so grinding = subs. Of course, they’re ignoring a second set of equations, namely that grinding is boring, and bored players cancel, or, “mathematically,” grinding = boredom and boredom = cancel, so for some of us, grinding = cancel. Unfortunately because “grinding is a part of MMOs,” the game designers don’t consider this sequent set of “equations” – they seem to figure that we’ll all expect their game to have a lot of grind in it, and that nobody who likes MMOs would cancel because of grind. In fact other players will even tell you this: “If you don’t like mindless grind, don’t play MMOs,” someone said on a forum once… in defense of the grinding.

The uber-grind of LOTRO

Now that I’ve defined “grind” and explained why games have it, I will turn my attention to the second-grindiest game I have ever played (WOW is in first place in this category): LOTRO. My early writings on LOTRO do not reveal this, because the “grind” is minimized or masked in the game until you hit level 25 or so. In the early game, when they ask you to collect things that drop (paws, hides, etc), it’s almost always 10 or less. Although 10 can still feel a little grindy, it’s over quickly enough that I tend not to notice it too much. Also, in the low levels, they were very careful to make sure that the thing you were looking off dropped nearly 100% of the time off of the target. For example, if you’re supposed to collect 10 bear paws, after killing 10 bears, at least 9 and frequently all 10 will have dropped. Unfortunately this aspect of the game changes as you level. By level 40, in Evendim, I was asked to collect some bandit loot drops that required me to kill over 100 guys to collect 4 things. That’s a 4% drop rate… and 100 bandits worth of pure, utter grind.

Also in the early game, in LOTRO, you are engaged in the story much of the time. The first several levels are highly story-driven, with the tutorial, and then you get into the epic quests, which can carry you quite far. The Bree-land adventures are not grindy, and so it seems like the game is more story-based than other MMOs. But that’s a false perception. As you get into the Lone-lands and North Downs, the level 20+ areas, the grind gets more intense, and by the time you’re level 40, the grind becomes insane. For example, in LOTRO, “deeds” are given for killing certain enemies. In the low level areas, like Bree, you’ll get a title (like “Slayer of Spiders”) for killing 30 and then a virtue bonus (such as +1 to Empathy) for killing another 60. That’s 90 total enemies, which is a grind enough… but at least with that many, half or more of them come from doing quests anyway, so it’s not that bad. But in later zones the number goes up… you’ll have to do 60 and then 120 in zones like the Lone-lands or North Downs. Then you get into even higher zones like the Misty Mountains and now it’s 120 for the title, 240 for the trait bonus. And some go as high as 150/300 (450 total mobs to kill… talk about uber-grind!).

The fact is that by the time I got to level 40, I started to realize that almost all the content in LOTRO is grind-based. The Epic Quests are not, because they are story based, but you only do a few of those relative to all the non-story quests that are just grinds. Let’s look at the kinds of grind in LOTRO:

Trash quests: This category is probably 90% of the quests in the game. The NPC gives you a few paragraphs of text weakly justifying why you are supposed to go out and kill a bunch of enemies or go find drops off of enemies (that you of course have to kill first). The story they give you is utterly irrelevant (unless maybe it hints at where to find the things you’re going to kill). These quests are lifted right out of the other MMOs out there, and could be transferred without loss of relevance to WOW, EQ, Lineage, you name it. There is nothing “Middle-Earth” about these quests… they are pure, mindless grind.

Virtue deeds: The virtue traits, such as Empathy, Zeal, and so forth, require grinding to obtain in many cases. Some of them don’t, such as ones that ask you to find ancient landmarks (that’s exploring, not grinding). But the majority of them are just rewarded for killing a couple of hundred enemies, and hence are pure grind.

Class deeds: These are absolutely ridiculous “quests” that ask you to just use a special move 500 times to get a stat bonus. You are limited to raising this deed 50 per day, so it takes at least 10 days to get the deed. Most people seem to just find some trash mobs that are easy to fight, and just do their special move over and over again during a few dozen fights with the trash mobs, until they hit their 50 for the day. There is no thought to this… just mindless grind.

Faction reputation: Another thing you have to grind in the game is reputation with different factions. The reputation can grant virtues or access to special areas or items. The only way to gain faction reputation is to grind it by doing the things that raise faction over and over again. For example, you can raise Ranger faction by crafting some special sashes, as a tailor. Craft 5 and turn them in, and you’ll get 300 faction points. That sounds like a lot, except you need 10,000 faction points just to get the first “faction level”, then 20,000 and it goes up from there. Since 5 sashes are worth 300 faction, that means each sash is worth 60 faction. A little quick math tells us that to raise faction by 10,000 points through crafting sashes, one would need to craft about 170 sashes… and then another 340 to get the next level of faction. Of course, crafting sashes requires boiled hides – about 4 of each. So if you wanted to faction up by crafting, you’d need about 2,100 boiled hides to get the first 2 faction ranks, each of which takes 2 raw hides to make, or a grand total of 4,200 hide drops taken off of animals in the wild. Since each animal drops at most 1 hide, and sometimes none, you’d need to kill around 5,000 wargs to get 2 ranks of Ranger faction in Esteldin. Of course, making sashes is not the only way to raise faction, but any other way will be equally grindy. Quests grant you about 700 faction in most cases, so this means you need to do 14 quests, most of which will be asking you to do more grinding.

Crafting: To level up crafting, there’s only one way: grind, grind, grind. You’ll need to collect thousands of resources, and then refine them into hundreds of components, and then go ahead and make hundreds of items. For instance, to master the mere second tier (of 6) in Tailor, you will need 840 “crafting experience” points. You gain about 4 each from making components and 6 from making an item like an armor vest. Since two components make the item, by the time you’re done, that’s 14 craft xp. To make each component takes 2 boiled hides (4 total for two components), and then 1 boiled hide for the armor vest. This means you get 14 craft xp per 5 boiled hides, and since boiled hides take 2 raw hides to make, 14 craft xp per 10 hides you collect in the wild. This means you will need roughly 600 hides to master the tier 2 crafting. Again since hides drop usually, but not always (let’s call it about 90% of the time), you’re going to have to kill about 700 bears and boars to level up just the 2^nd of the 6 crafting tiers. By tier 6 that number will be something like 2,000 if I’ve done my conversions right. This is pure, utter grind.

Looking at the above, many people would probably say, “Wow, that’s a lot of grind!” And it is. By now you might be thinking that surely there are some non-grindy aspects to LOTRO. And you’d be right… sort of. There is one, and only one, element to LOTRO that is not a grind: the Epic storyline. Those are pretty much the only quests in the game that are not “kill a bunch of these things” or “get loot drops from a bunch of these things.” Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of these quests. You certainly can’t just do them and level up to 60. Rather, most of the leveling is done via grind, and then every few levels (at least to 42) you do some “epics.” As I said above, epics constitute perhaps 10% of your game-playing time. The rest of it – all the rest of it – is taken up as with the above… grind, and nothing but grind.

Conclusion

LOTRO has done a very good job capturing certain aspects of Middle-Earth. The landscape and flora and fauna of the world are good representations of Tolkien’s universe. However, where the game utterly fails to be Middle-Earth-like is in all the non-epic quests. I mean really, when in the books, did you see hobbits going around killing wolves over and over again? Or dwarves grinding spiders? One of the really unfortunate consequences of all this grinding is that it takes one completely out of the head-space of Middle-Earth, and into the head-space of “standard gaming.” I’ve already done all these other grinds in other games, so there’s nothing new here in terms of the grind. It’s the same thing I’ve seen before, and everyone else has seen before. Doesn’t Middle-Earth, which is the richest, most expertly created fictional world/universe in the history of fantasy and science fiction, deserve better than this? I think so.

One thing has definitely happened as a result of all this grinding. Early on, I could not stop playing LOTRO. I hadn’t done fantasy in a long time, and it seemed a well done game. I would estimate that I played probably about 20-25 hours a week back then. Now, I have to almost force myself to log in, and after 45 minutes or an hour, I want to log out. The grind is too boring to do for more than an hour, and I am quickly losing interest. I do not like the grind, and since LOTRO is almost all grind, I’m starting not to like LOTRO.

Fortunately I do have my excellent Kinship, the Green Company, which is a role-play oriented group. And Middle-Earth is still an awesome world to RP in. So, I’ll stick around for a while, perhaps a long while, for the RPing opportunity. It’s worth $15/month to be able to role-play in Tolkien’s world, with good RPers who also know a lot about that world. But take the RP out of it, and you just have a grind with a thin veneer of Middle-Earth over it. And that’s sad.