[MUD-Dev] Why do smart people grind?

[Oliver Smith]

Geoff Hollis wrote:

> My guess is it's more due to its addictive nature, and the
> achievement we feel after is probably some kind of retrospective
> justification. Highly repetitive actions with even the smallest,
> intermittent reward are highly addictive. My guess is this is also
> enhanced by knowing that once - just once - you might hit paydirt
> and get that ultra-rare item that everyone is after (grinding is
> like playing a slot machine, where levels and items are the
> prizes).

There are several definitions of "grind". I tend to think of it as
when a player locks down to a particular mechanism for harvesting
experience rather than gadding about adventuring and enjoying the
game. I think all definitions carry a sense of repetition.

The context of the individual game can have a large factor on why
people grind. If the player likes the game environment and setting,
relates to the background and culture of the virtual world, and if
they have a social community to fall back on when gameplay fails
them, then the player will endeavor to find ways to enjoy the game.

Most MMOGS necessarily introduce a divide between players of
different levels, to try and prevent players circumventing the
prescribed rate of consumption of content to join their buddies. I'm
not entirely sure who came to the conclusion that killing
rats/snakes/wallnuts was infinitely more compelling than hanging out
with your buddies, but... It's a concept that's stuck, although CoH
and a few others seem to finally be tackling it.

I would suggest three main reasons people grind:

  - Catching up with their buddies,

  - Human 'instancing',

  - Content/end-game achievement

I would suggest that the foremost reason that people grind is to be
with their buddies; your buddies may be your primary reason for
being in the game, they are probably the source of all the fun and
exciting things you are hearing about the game. The
rats/snakes/wallnuts make the water-cooler discussions of your
buddies experiences sound like epic battles.

Since games usually reward groups bonus exp over solo players, and
your buddies are evidently a group, you're at a double advantage,
and if you take time to stop and play nice, the only thing that will
happen is you will fall behind.

Naturally, the player will find the best exp/time ratio and try and
catch up with your buddies. The player doesn't want to grind, but
it's the only way to achieve his world now, instead of yours.

Second, in games where instancing is absent or poorly
used/implemented, players will tend to do their own instancing, by
staking a claim to their exp "water hole" for the night. Given the
choice between spending the night getting 1/4 of the exp you could
have elsewhere, and spending the night wandering from place to place
trying to find exp and making 1/1000th of the exp you could have
elsewhere, the players will "instance" the camp as their own.

Third, I think, is the player's desire to avoid certain aspects of
content.

If a layer of content is particularly unappealing, oversimplistic or
just not fun, players are going to want to avoid it. If, however, it
happens to be compulsory, then players will naturally want to
abbreviate their experience of it.

What a player considers as a milestone is also significant. Some
players perceive level progression as a sufficient reward for a hard
nights work.  Other players want a new skill, spell, or something,
so that tomorrow night won't be the same.

Exploration and questing are all well and good, but they don't
provide the same levels of reward for all players. Exploration isn't
fun in an open field, if you have no content for your explorers to
discover, they won't enjoy it. Your questers won't find repeating 1
of 8 quest templates fun throughout their entire game career.

In DAoC and SWG players frequently want to get cracking on PvP, and
the best place to do that from is with a high level character. The
PvE is just a hinderance to reaching it, they possibly don't enjoy
PvE at all, but are willing to suffer it as long as they can get it
over with quickly.

SWG has the additional end-game option of becoming a Jedi, which
naturally appeals to a great many players. Getting from ordinary to
force sensitive to jedi can be done through various types of skill
points, but for most players it boils down to mele/combat exp,
obtained through kills.

Without wanting to focus too much on the SWG specifics, the point
here is that for players to obtain the end game, usually repetition
is compulsory.  It's been estimated to take around 21,000 kills to
unlock the 4 skill in an SWG jedi skill tree - just for that skill,
not including the exp required to reach it. SWG doesn't have 21,000
free standing monsters to be fought, so if the player adventured
laboriously and killed every single instance of an npc in the world,
he'd still have to repeat himself some.

Why would any smart person want to drag that out over months and
months, instead of finding a way to get it over with as quickly as
possible... ?
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