So anyone else tired of grinding tomes weekly for gear?

[Recaldy]

It's going to be rather sad on their part if SE had to drop PS3 support to give us a replacement activity to replace tomes.

[Lambdafish]

snip

XIV did have this, but unsync destroyed it. I really do think that certain items should be gated behind sync (savage coil titles, savage alex mounts, certain orchestrion rolls, anima grind actually being worth it). The sole reason that I was against Alex NM back in the day was that the only reliable reward that raiders got was the story, and now the reward system in the game is completely ruined.

Then again, appeasing casual players = money more than making a well designed reward system apparently. INB4 can we get it on the cash shop

[Zojha]

Most games have to strike a balance between effort (pain) and reward.

And the good games stop thinking about this and care primarily for one thing:
"Is what we're offering here a fun and engaging experience or not?"

Because a grind is only a grind when it feels like a grind, i.e. is not enjoyable. There are thousands of League of Legends players who have several thousand games on their account, but I can guarantee you that none of them is going to complain how much of a grind it was and that the reward isn't worth it (Hint: There is none) and that the game sucks 'cause of it. They just enjoy the game and amass games and IP in the process naturally. That's pretty much the ideal for games and unsurprisingly, it's the most profitable game currently on the market - despite being entirely free to play.

The hard part is replicating that in an MMORPG and one of the big issue is that you need a high degree of repetition, but PvE does not have the same replay value as PvP due to it being necessarily scripted. And while we do have PvP, the gameplay doesn't appear to be the most compelling, the reasons for which would well be worth an entire own thread.
Moreover, the difficulty isn't as modular - While in LoL, everyone will eventually settle on a game difficulty that's "just right" for them via MMR, PvE content is delivered with a set difficulty, leading to some people considering it "too hard" and others considering it "too easy", which in turn leads to people not being properly engaged.
Further, progression is necessarily slow and small at endgame, because it doesn't get repeated. Many people enjoy progressing and getting stronger and in MOBAs, you get to level from 1 to max and gather up to six items that make you considerably more powerful not just once, but every game and in a mere 30-40 minutes to boot. That's fun, so much that people don't even mind it being reset afterwards and the different builds only add to the replayability. In that regard, the armory system has a lot of potential, but thanks to weekly caps and the slow pace of MMORPG progression, it unfortunately remains largely untapped, PotD being a notable exception. Here, PotD does a lot of things right, but I at least unfortunately do not find trash mobs and invisible traps very engaging.

Overall, game design is quite the difficult beast, but I feel that players and devs put way too much emphasis on controlling people with rewards already and way too little on whether what they do is actually something fun.

[Lambdafish]

"Is what we're offering here a fun and engaging experience or not?"

Because a grind is only a grind when it feels like a grind, i.e. is not enjoyable.

Not necessarily, its best not to use non MMO examples when talking about MMO gameplay, because the two don't necessarily equate, but what you should say is "Is what we're offering sufficiently and justifiably valuable to the player, while also not causing them to burn out and/or devalue the reward?" because grinds are nothing but long carrot on a stick goals (unlike LoL matches, which are self contained experiences that accumulate over time, not a goal), and the reward has to match the lengths to get it.

Your example is more akin to calling investing 500 hours in skyrim a grind, or calling the veteran rewards a grind, they aren't. Whereas increasing longevity of an MMO by setting a task that is supposed to be time consuming (without using too many resources) is a grind, and like any chore in the real world, the job looks much more appealing with a bigger, juicier carrot at the end.

Edit: I am not justifying grinds that aren't fun, varying the activity is important (as is not cheating players with RNG too much), but it is still ultimately a to do list of chores for a shiny carrot, that is the core design of MMOs, and is completely different to the core design of LoL (which is more akin to real life sports).

[MiaGrey]

I realize what I'm saying is a bit philosophical but I think the nature of the problem requires this kind of approach. "What is fun right now" has proven an unreliable measure for producing game mechanics that foster long-term satisfaction in an MMO.

By what then do we determine which new mechanics to introduce as solutions? If we have to orchestrate some immediate measure of pain to produce a lasting and greater good downstream then I think delving into the weeds of existing XIV mechanics is premature and ultimately just treating symptoms.

The observation was made earlier that in XI rare items were never phased out by new items. I really enjoy those subtle points which is why I preface most of my examples with “this is one example”. There are no doubt hundreds of micro mechanics which lent themselves to the “community” so many XI-fans refer to. I only wish I could catalogue them all.

I agree with the Lambdafish’s response to the LoL comparison. They’re entirely different genres and incomparable in terms of why and how people enjoy playing them.

I would explain it like this, if you limited the definition of grinding to say something like a repetitive task, then Candy Crush could be said to have a grind, but we all agree it doesn’t. That’s because it’s incentivizing you in other ways, it’s instant feedback / gratification. If you removed the real-time incentives from that game and shifted it to an aggregation model that payed out when milestones were reached, you’d have a grind and then you’d have the problem of striking the effort to reward balance.

Most of the people I know played FPS’s while playing XI. Why didn’t they just play the FPS? There was no grind, it was instantly gratifying and free. I think the answer is as simple as that they realized the big dopamine hit of delayed gratification was often superior to a thousand small ones. A grind being hard doesn’t mean it has to be unpleasant but it has to be sufficiently less rewarding than the carrot itself.

Speaking of this really base human reality in a game mechanics way is so obtuse because why on earth would you build something to punish yourself with? There is no confusion on the principle when it comes to contributing to your 401k or going to the gym. Here you have to build your own treadmill in a sense - to extend this metaphor if you do it right you wind up with a community full of healthy people.

“but it is still ultimately a to do list of chores for a shiny carrot”
I think that is the characterization of grinding that is causing so much grief. The “chores” are a prerequisite to the carrot. In an MMO you cannot have a carrot without the chores.

I realized this the first time I hosted & admin’d my own UO shard. When you can equip anything in the game they’re not carrots at that point they’re simply pixels on a screen. I truly understood in that moment the value in the struggle and the value to rarity. I’ll never forget the feeling I had when I equipped this one weapon that was virtually impossible to obtain, something akin to the Kraken Club from XI. I felt like a kid who just found out Santa wasn’t real - I immediately wanted to unequip it and go back to dreaming about what it would feel like to have earned it.

UO was nothing like XI in terms of game mechanics but if you asked people who played them both they would probably say something to the tune of “Yea they were both brutal but always worth it”. That’s because irrespective of specific mechanics the balance between effort of reward was harmonious.

UO had a very different kind of in game community. The systems for things like chat and friend lists were barebones compared to XIV. Yet, I remember having some of the most deep and meaningful social encounters of my MMO career there. Mechanics are irrelevant in the face of true value. I wrote peoples names down on paper all the time and never gave it a second thought, in fact in retrospect I think it greatly deepened the immersion to physically write names down. Again, another example of how mechanics need to be subservient to the larger experience of the game.

Edit:
Retrospect is one of the most useful tools I have in explaining my experience. I think most people (myself included) would have characterized in the moment that running from Sandy to the Dunes to party was massively not fun; however, in retrospect I'm able to appreciate that it made arriving in Valkurm a massive reward in itself.

[Lambdafish]

snip

Reading your analysis of grind reminded me of the clicker game sub-genre (a much better example than LoL). This would be a good one to reference, as they are wildly popular despite being nothing but reward generators. The player literally clicks, for hours, thats the entire game, but the robust reward system makes the experience "worth it". The evidence is there that grinding work as a device to keep people engaged, but the reward system in place needs to support the grind itself, and I don't think the dev team fully understand the importance of a well balanced reward system as opposed to making sure everyone gets equal share.

[razielvh]

yes, I am.

[Asuras]

Not sure if I mentioned this already... but the only thing I would change is the weekly caps. I would make it a rolling cap instead of resetting it to 450 each week. That way on week 2 the cap is 900 instead of being reset to 450... week 3 would be 1350 and so forth. That way you're not penalized for not capping in a week. For example, in week 2 if you capped week 1 then you're tally would be 450/900. Let's say you didn't cap week 1 and only got 180 tomes... well you're week 2 tally would be 180/900. You don't play at all until week 3? Tally would be 0/1350. Makes more sense to do a rolling update than a cap reset.

[AnimaAnimus]

Even if they kept the cap and made the cap per job it would be better imo.

[Hito-Shura]

I stopped farming tombstones a long time ago and I in-fact quit the game 2 times already because I'm sick of dungeon grinding and I only came back because I miss the story, the world and my character. Lucky that Stormblood is around the corner or else I would quit a third time because I cannot progress at my leisure by doing small things on the side other than dungeons. Let's not forget also that equipment becomes obsolete after only 3 months with this type of progression.

What I'm trying to say is that I don't mind the tombstones but what they should do is allow people to farm them however they want and not force them to farm the same 3 dungeons each day for 3 months. Who thought that was a good idea?!? Just give us a fair amount of tombstones for every activity and take into consideration that it should be fairly possible to cap each week by doing a reasonable amount of side quests with no dungeons. That way, the people wanting to cap quick will do dungeons and the people annoyed with dungeons will cap by doing other things such as gathering, daily quests and other stuff like that. Hell, add more open world content for those wanting to cap tombstones and enjoy the open world instead of closed instances all the time.

I mean... We've been doing this for 3+ years. SE is blessed to be able to keep its player base despite this HUGE flaw in design (probably because of the world, lore, a love for their character or simply extremely low standards).

I hope. I HOPE they thought about changing this shitty recipe for Stormblood... Please...