In Defense of the Grind

Grind. The word itself just sounds unpleasant. Gamers use the term to refer to any repetitive task. Common examples includes clearing the same field of monsters, completing the same quest/dungeon over and over, crafting otherwise worthless items simply for skill gain, and so on. Grinding is not exclusive to the MMORPG genre, many games all but force players to grind for a few hours by throwing in difficulty spikes. In singleplayer games the grind is a sideshow, a few extra hours of padding to extend the game’s play through time. It's only in the MMORPG genre that grind takes center stage.

Grinding is an important, even essential gameplay mechanism in MMORPGs and is unduly derided. Some of my best gaming memories include grinding with a group of friends while chatting either in the same room or over a voip service. Here are three of my favorite grinding stories, let’s take a look at them and see why they were so memorable.

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Henesys Hunting Grounds, graveyard to millions of mushrooms and months of my life

Back when MapleStory was in open beta and Scania was the only server available, there was one item that was easily recognizable by casual and hardcore players alike. It was a rather simple, round shield that had a low lvl requirement. It offered a modest defense score, and could be upgraded many times. Best of all, it dropped off relatively weak monsters right outside town. I must have killed tens of thousands of green mushrooms in the Henesys Hunting Grounds in my quest for that silly little shield, called a pan lid. The drop rate was abysmal, and I kept on killing those poor mushrooms long after they stopped being efficient sources of exp.

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It really was just a pan lid after all...

I did eventually get my pan lid, but equipment in MapleStory didn’t have a singular value back then. Instead, each drop had a random value within a range assigned to it. My pan lid rolled at the bottom of the spectrum (9-12), at +9 defense. The range might look narrow, but the value of an item could double with each additional stat point. But I was content. I finally had my pan lid!

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Quel'Serrar, one of the best tanking weapons in Vanilla. Also, it glows green!

Next, let’s jump to World of Warcraft. Back in vanilla, there were many epic items that simply lay beyond the reach of ordinary players no matter how much time they put in. Epic tier equipment sets could only be obtained by clearing exceedingly difficult 40-man dungeons that required membership into a well organized guild. There were, however, a few rare pieces of gear available to the non elite, but only if they were willing to put in the grind. One such item was the legendary sword Quel’Serrar. Massive for a single hander and giving off a green glow, Quel’Serrar was easily recognizable by fellow players. Merely wielding the blade proved you had been on a personal Hero’s Journey across the world of Azeroth. Acquiring the legendary blade was a multistep process with the final bit quite literally requiring the sword be forged by dragon fire and seeped in dragon blood!

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Slaying Onyxia, Broodmother of the Black Dragonflight

But it all began with a battered and dusty tome. Foror’s Compendium of Dragon Slaying was an extremely rare drop from the final boss in an instanced dungeon called Dire Maul and was required to start the Quel’Serrar questline. My brother and I ran that dungeon countless times with several of our friends. Eventually, we got lucky and the book dropped. After a series of quests, the final hurdle involved slaying the difficult but feasible end game raid boss Onyxia. My brother finally had his Quel’Serrar! While I didn’t get to enjoy the efame associated with the blade personally, but just being part of the process is still one of my favorite WoW stories.

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The tittle of this screenshots was "100th Non-stop Baal Run Game -_-"

Finally, let's talk about Diablo 2. The first Diablo game was a hit, but the sequel made the franchise into a sensation. It was the first truly accessible online RPG for my generation. Everyone played it, and everyone loved it. But what exactly was everyone doing? Grinding! Sure, the story was enthralling and the cutscenes were epic (for the time), but the real point of the game was the gear grind. Even after years of playing, I would regularly return to make a new character after a ladder wipe to start the grind anew. I must have spent hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours doing the same few ‘runs’ while skipping 90% of the story content. Tristan Runs, Summoner Runs, and Baal Runs come instantly to mind. The grind eventually became so refined that bots were written to do the entire run and then rehost another game to repeat the process. When a fresh character was leveled and ready, the grind for even more valuable uniques could begin by farming ‘uber’ versions of bosses.

MapleStory, World of Warcraft, and Diablo 2. Three examples of otherwise very different games that all did grind right and prospered because of it. Whether a MMORPG is free to play, subscription based, or buy to play, proper implementation of the grinding mechanic is vital. But what does it mean to get the grind right? Based on my years of MMORPG experience, I’ve come up with a few theories which can be gleaned from the examples above. They are:

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1 Diminishing Returns

In both MapleStory and Diablo, a character’s base level matters less and less as players advance. The meager few stat points awarded per level are a tiny fraction of the overall stat pool and of the bonuses granted by equipment. What this means is that every hour you grind yields a smaller reward than the hour before. This principle holds true for both experience and equipment grind. The main reason to grind for or purchase a pan lid in MapleStory was bragging rights. There were shields much easier to obtain that offered nearly the same defense.

2 Self Discovery and Choice

In all of the examples above, the game did not force me to grind those particular avenues. I wasn’t given a prompt or a quest. For one reason or another, I chose those pursuits. In the case of World of Warcraft, the game would have otherwise 'ended' since I did not have the desire to pursue membership into an elite guild. The availability of so many grinding options (including Battlegrounds PvP) kept the game alive. More importantly, not every player chose the same path I did. I recall many friends spending days, even weeks grinding reputation with one faction or another in World of Warcraft. I assessed the reputation rewards, usually access to a trinket, and decided it wasn’t worth it.

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3. Don’t Worry About Balance

This one sounds crazy, but makes perfect sense in the context of MMORPGs. Balance is vital in purely competitive games like Starcraft 2, but can actually dull the experience in a virtual world. MS, WoW, and D2 were some of the most unbalanced games around. Mages were leagues ahead of other classes in early MapleStory, WoW was only semi-jokingly referred to as ‘World of Roguecraft’, and Diablo 2 was completely and utterly broken. But that’s why we loved them. Even the act of complaining on forums about the real or imagined imbalance of a particular class, skill, or item is a form of user engagement. Players in MMORPGs are free to create alts, try new builds, and farm or purchase different weapons and armor if they feel one build is stronger than another. To sum, a MMO should not sacrifice variety on the altar of balance.

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Grinding Gear Games - The aptly named studio behind Path of Exile

For every game that gets grind right, there are of course a dozen that fail miserably at it. I’ve listed three examples of games that pulled it off, but there are many others out there. One honorable mention is Path of Exile which builds on the core principles established in Diablo 2, but did away with the retail price tag. I would be interested in hearing your grind stories, positive or negative. Please share them with me below!