Today I learned that playing story content = "grinding"
What is NOT "grinding" then? Playing around on the tailor?
Bort let me put it this way.
So I get my Delta Recruit to level 54... through the Breen Storyline. I get all the rewards
I go looking at what it would take for me to simply get the Romulan gear and some Romulan Dual Beam banks... and my crafting in Beams to the point where I can make a Omni Plasma.... oh and a single KCB... and that's with my sponsoring my rep.
Then I looked at the rewards I was given... how much grind I was going to do just to get just that simple stuff
I had enough dilithium to get the Three Dual Beam Banks from the Romulan store once I got my Romulan rep up... so that was good
Then I looked at the crafting system... even having gotten Beams to 10 cheating... it was going to take me weeks to get it up... I guess I could twink it using one of my other characters... but that's kind of not the point here.
Then I looked at the shortage I had... even with putting every single reward box into Romulan Rep... and I was thousands of marks short
Then I looked at the Omega rep... even after getting it to rep 2 I was 350 marks short of a KCB.
Then I figured I would do the storyline... but then realized that even at level 54 I was going to have to grind out content just to do the Delta Arc, since even at level 56 you can't get to 60 just doing the missions.
So no... doing the storyline isn't grinding.
It's what happens after the Delta Recruit stuff ends that is the grind and I refuse to do it when I already have a main that isn't even close to being top of the line.
Today I learned that playing story content = "grinding"
What is NOT "grinding" then? Playing around on the tailor?
Story content isn't grinding the FIRST couple times. It's when you have to do it again and again five hundred times in order to level up your character to max.
When you're repeating a mission more than ten times you rapidly learn just whether or not it's really fun on repeat, or just gimmicky ugh.
Both have their places- gimmicky ugh is novel and fun the first couple of times, and often immerses you into the universe- but that's because it's not designed with 'playing this a hundred times' in mind, it's designed for players to play once or twice on each faction.
When we talk about the grind, we're talking about leveling a character up to max in a reasonable fashion- and Cryptic's insistance on taking every fun and/or reasonable way to do that, and nerfing it so it is no longer a reasonable way, and 'adjusting the difficulty' so it is no longer fun- that's what we mean by grind.
So the next time you see someone complaining about 'grind' and think story content, try playing a step between stars fifty times in a row in a single sitting and then see how fun you find it.
So the next time you see someone complaining about 'grind' and think story content, try playing a step between stars fifty times in a row in a single sitting and then see how fun you find it.
Today I learned that playing story content = "grinding"
What is NOT "grinding" then? Playing around on the tailor?
I can see both sides of this.
I'm becoming a real skeptic of some of the game design theory out there but I think Jane McGonigal is onto something in her popularization of John Suits' "lusory attitude" concept.
Suits defines a game as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles."
"To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]."
To some extent, based on my reading of this, every person's design goal is someone else's grind.
The issue lies with what a person defines as "voluntary" and what they define as an "unnecessary obstacle".
Basically, you want to have a choice of inefficient ways to achieve your goal so long as the activity in the middle is diverting. The risk comes into play that a set of conditions may be perceived as necessary to achieve a desired goal... and this problem is actually complicated by the rewards being clearly stated upfront because then players may set their goal as those rewards, which renders the path to those rewards as necessary. (I can sense your responses to this right now and they're valid defenses of why you announce rewards upfront. I'm not saying you shouldn't. I'm stating what the problem associated with it is.)
It also turns the play motivations from intrinsic (the love of playing) to extrinsic (the desire for the outcome of the encounter, ie. loot or status). This is more complicated by games increasingly selling or monetizing extrinsic rewards while extrinsic rewards tend to have less durable value than intrinsic rewards, creating player burnout and regret.
I'm not offering you the solutions in part because they're complicated and in part because that would be work on my part and I'd rather put work into something that pays down my student loans than a forum post. :-) I'm just offering this all as something to chew on.
I'm not saying random loot is the solution or that announced rewards are bad. I'm saying they create problems. This may be a case where, as a designer, you've bought the cat to chase the mouse when it comes to your current approach and the next step is to buy the dog to chase the cat while continuing to buy cats to chase mice. The current set of solutions (ie. transparent rewards) create problems (jeopardizing the perception of game-like activity). That doesn't mean you need to abandon those solutions but might just mean that the current popular strategies in game design are solutions that you need solutions for. Sometimes, you have to put a bandaid on a bandaid.
Said with absolute sympathy and a desire to provoke thought!
Said with absolute sympathy and a desire to provoke thought!
Anything I had to say was blown away by this. Its not just a Cryptic problem either, this pretty much goes for a heavy chunk of the MMO-verse as it currently is. Thanks for sharing, man, I've got to chew over this.
Now level 30, Nimbus missions, (you know needed a few spec points on my main.) Back to working on here some more but the XP bonus, kinda makes me wanna grind my main some more.
Event is fun and a good idea, shame so many people can only think as must have it all, and therefore complain when it's not given to them all at once. If you are smart there is such a small grind, because you know what you want for end game and have been-there-done-that knowledge and stuff to help you.
50+ Delta? learn to doff well and play better, doesn't take long at all.
Bort, if you read this, who did the Uneasy Alliances episode? In particular, who made the great decision to better pace combat, such that it approached the ratio of story:reward more typical of the IP? Also, who wrote Sela's lines for that mission? They deserve a bonus.
Repeating the same content over and over to move a reward bubble is grinding
And this. The game has reached a critical mass of grinding. Even non-grinds feel like grinds, possibly because that's time not spent grinding...
Most players appreciate being able to hit some endpoint and say the character is (at least temporarily) "completed." It's perfectly acceptable to tell the players often referred to as "content locusts" to **** off. Unless you want to be the first to solve the "how do we give PvE the replay value of PvP?" problem.
On your end, I hope you guys have some changes in store for crafting, upgrading and specializations.
The odds of producing a worthwhile crafted piece are a real turn-off; if you can't open up customizable mods, then at least remove the VR-unique mods (maybe even pen).
The odds of upgrading a piece in quality once it's mark XIV are another turn-off. We shouldn't need to grind more than one bar per quality upgrade per piece at mk XIV, given the cost of the materials involved.
The high cost per spec point is a major turn-off. I'm ready to lump them in with lockbox ships as something I might as well not even recognize as existing, and that's after mixing battlezones with STF queues for increased XP/hr.
Level 34 and just finished Taris... I noticed that the XP rewards for those two at my current level and first time through the new Rom missions that I skip over levels. I went from 30 to 32 and from 32 to 34 by playing Shadow Play and Taris back to back...
CM
p.s. just realized the xp points were due to the xp boost server-wide as the DR reward for last week...
"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science." - Edwin Hubble
Meh don't let it bother you Bort, some people are on here just to whine and moan, they are probably miserable buggers IRL too. The Delta Recruit idea is a winner in our fleet, I don't know a single member that isn't levelling a Delta and many are levelling one of each faction. The game is really improving from where I'm sitting and I think most appreciate the effort.
Bort, people need to learn that playing story content is not grinding, your rep system is grinding
Man, don't play a rep system in any other MMO if you think this one is grinding, you'll have to ratchet up that hyperbole to crimes against humanity. You'll be begging for STO's 15 Mins of mission running every couple of days in order to get the marks to fill the project that runs while you are offline.
Meh don't let it bother you Bort, some people are on here just to whine and moan, they are probably miserable buggers IRL too. The Delta Recruit idea is a winner in our fleet, I don't know a single member that isn't levelling a Delta and many are levelling one of each faction. The game is really improving from where I'm sitting and I think most appreciate the effort.
I just got to level 50 on my Fed Klink and have just finished the Long Night, so I have a huge amount more to do, I think enough to get to 60.
Right. I'm not saying sto is perfect but the event is nice and some of these people expect everything handed to them apparently.
My KDF recruit is level 20, my Rom recruit is level 24, and my Fed recruit is level 12 or so. I don't recall the exact missions, but I know the KDF finished the TOS time travel mission arc, and the Rom has gotten to the beginning of Nimbus. yeah I could have made more progress if I had focused on one character, but ADHD....
I have the weekend to catch up. Leveling the Rom and KDF has been easy. For some reason leveling the Fed is a total PITA. But then, with him I was focusing on cruisers only. But it seems the XP rewards are slower coming for the early Fed missions.
They make a wondrous mess of things. Brave amateurs, they do their part.
Right. I'm not saying sto is perfect but the event is nice and some of these people expect everything handed to them apparently.
Or maybe they just have a different opinion than you do. Maybe you like chocolate ice cream and they prefer strawberry. Attacking them for their opinion doesn't make their opinion look wrong...it makes you look wrong.
Come on virus, it's hardly an attack is it, I think to say "some of these people expect everything handed to them apparently." is perfectly valid, it's part of the push button get bacon now culture that our young people have grown up with.
I have three kids, 11, 17 and 20, each has successively received more throughout their childhoods and when I compare with mine boy are they spoilt, likewise my dad would say the same about me as he grew up during the war. Nevertheless, it's pretty accurate assessment that many of the younger generation seem to expect everything given to them on a plate with a silver spoon without having to work for it, whether that be in real life or in a game. Note I said many, not all, I hate to generalise but there is a reason generalisations are useful if not exact.
That's kind of true. I actually think that it's a cultural problem just because I hate blaming generations. To put this into some context what generation out there has ever said that the newer generation is better than the one they are in?
Come on virus, it's hardly an attack is it, I think to say "some of these people expect everything handed to them apparently." is perfectly valid, it's part of the push button get bacon now culture that our young people have grown up with.
I have three kids, 11, 17 and 20, each has successively received more throughout their childhoods and when I compare with mine boy are they spoilt, likewise my dad would say the same about me as he grew up during the war. Nevertheless, it's pretty accurate assessment that many of the younger generation seem to expect everything given to them on a plate with a silver spoon without having to work for it, whether that be in real life or in a game. Note I said many, not all, I hate to generalise but there is a reason generalisations are useful if not exact.
There are folks that want everything yesterday. There are folks that could probably close their eyes and walk somebody through any mission because they've run them that many times. So having an event requiring them to go through and run those missions again to unlock rewards...may not necessarily qualify as a grind...but it would be hard not to seeing it as grinding...painful...tedious...not fun...whatever the case may be.
I get in trouble all the time with bantering with the "entitled" crowd...but I can see where somebody might go "ugh" at running a toon through all the storyline missions yet again for the 9001st time. Personally, it wasn't that bad - cause it has been so many times that it just doesn't bother me...tolerance or even just being able to run through them bam, bam, done so it was no big deal. Could see where folks that haven't numbed themselves to it yet, though, would still be in a position to complain.
Different folks enjoy different things. Some of the missions weren't fun the first time for some folks...doing it the 10th time or more? There are certain missions that I didn't enjoy the first time, yet they had a piece of gear that I wanted so I had to play it or replay it. Then if I wanted that gear on multiple toons? Yeah, I reall started to hate certain missions. Hell, I can't stand Uneasy Allies...despise Surface Tension...etc, etc, etc...both are missions that I found to be cool the first time...but yeah, having to replay them for gear got old fast.
Somebody that's had 1-2 characters for a period of time and goes back to replay them...might find something cool they missed and enjoy it. Somebody that's created over 40 characters with rerolls and new alts over the past three years - that replayed missions for gear after leveling and possibly had to replay missions over and over to get multiple copies of that gear...well, it gets old. They might not be as excited about this event as somebody else might be...and I can see that.
Level 54 now. All done with delta recruit missions, including the section at the end of Cold Storage where I go back in time to loop the continuity.
Switched over to an all beams build with FAW, surprising how much better that's working for me in 90% of the cases. The other 10% are group activities or 'epic battle' missions where my dinky little escort gets all the attention and dies.
Just finished the Klingon War, lvl 26. Crafting has become useful as I've provided and upgraded my DR's ship equipment. Running around with rare and very rare pieces, watching ships disintegrate under my Talaxian might.
My Fed Delta recruit, Stay Puft, is lvl 19 and about to do the Doomsday mission. Ironically, he does like using the Proton weapon from the Devidian arc.
Comments
Bort let me put it this way.
So I get my Delta Recruit to level 54... through the Breen Storyline. I get all the rewards
I go looking at what it would take for me to simply get the Romulan gear and some Romulan Dual Beam banks... and my crafting in Beams to the point where I can make a Omni Plasma.... oh and a single KCB... and that's with my sponsoring my rep.
Then I looked at the rewards I was given... how much grind I was going to do just to get just that simple stuff
I had enough dilithium to get the Three Dual Beam Banks from the Romulan store once I got my Romulan rep up... so that was good
Then I looked at the crafting system... even having gotten Beams to 10 cheating... it was going to take me weeks to get it up... I guess I could twink it using one of my other characters... but that's kind of not the point here.
Then I looked at the shortage I had... even with putting every single reward box into Romulan Rep... and I was thousands of marks short
Then I looked at the Omega rep... even after getting it to rep 2 I was 350 marks short of a KCB.
Then I figured I would do the storyline... but then realized that even at level 54 I was going to have to grind out content just to do the Delta Arc, since even at level 56 you can't get to 60 just doing the missions.
So no... doing the storyline isn't grinding.
It's what happens after the Delta Recruit stuff ends that is the grind and I refuse to do it when I already have a main that isn't even close to being top of the line.
Story content isn't grinding the FIRST couple times. It's when you have to do it again and again five hundred times in order to level up your character to max.
When you're repeating a mission more than ten times you rapidly learn just whether or not it's really fun on repeat, or just gimmicky ugh.
Both have their places- gimmicky ugh is novel and fun the first couple of times, and often immerses you into the universe- but that's because it's not designed with 'playing this a hundred times' in mind, it's designed for players to play once or twice on each faction.
When we talk about the grind, we're talking about leveling a character up to max in a reasonable fashion- and Cryptic's insistance on taking every fun and/or reasonable way to do that, and nerfing it so it is no longer a reasonable way, and 'adjusting the difficulty' so it is no longer fun- that's what we mean by grind.
So the next time you see someone complaining about 'grind' and think story content, try playing a step between stars fifty times in a row in a single sitting and then see how fun you find it.
No idea if this is good or not. but i just feel like leveling is pretty easy.
Wait until you hit the Delta Quadrant and say the same thing.
Oh and wait until you want to either craft your own gear or get rep gear.. and then tell me it's still not a grind.
Level 1-50 yeah it's easy. Crafting, Rep, Delta Quadrant... massive grind.
Hit the nail on the button.
That guys a Meme now, man.
I can see both sides of this.
I'm becoming a real skeptic of some of the game design theory out there but I think Jane McGonigal is onto something in her popularization of John Suits' "lusory attitude" concept.
Shamelessly pulled from Wikipedia, for convenience:
Suits defines a game as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles."
"To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]."
To some extent, based on my reading of this, every person's design goal is someone else's grind.
The issue lies with what a person defines as "voluntary" and what they define as an "unnecessary obstacle".
Basically, you want to have a choice of inefficient ways to achieve your goal so long as the activity in the middle is diverting. The risk comes into play that a set of conditions may be perceived as necessary to achieve a desired goal... and this problem is actually complicated by the rewards being clearly stated upfront because then players may set their goal as those rewards, which renders the path to those rewards as necessary. (I can sense your responses to this right now and they're valid defenses of why you announce rewards upfront. I'm not saying you shouldn't. I'm stating what the problem associated with it is.)
It also turns the play motivations from intrinsic (the love of playing) to extrinsic (the desire for the outcome of the encounter, ie. loot or status). This is more complicated by games increasingly selling or monetizing extrinsic rewards while extrinsic rewards tend to have less durable value than intrinsic rewards, creating player burnout and regret.
I'm not offering you the solutions in part because they're complicated and in part because that would be work on my part and I'd rather put work into something that pays down my student loans than a forum post. :-) I'm just offering this all as something to chew on.
I'm not saying random loot is the solution or that announced rewards are bad. I'm saying they create problems. This may be a case where, as a designer, you've bought the cat to chase the mouse when it comes to your current approach and the next step is to buy the dog to chase the cat while continuing to buy cats to chase mice. The current set of solutions (ie. transparent rewards) create problems (jeopardizing the perception of game-like activity). That doesn't mean you need to abandon those solutions but might just mean that the current popular strategies in game design are solutions that you need solutions for. Sometimes, you have to put a bandaid on a bandaid.
Said with absolute sympathy and a desire to provoke thought!
Anything I had to say was blown away by this. Its not just a Cryptic problem either, this pretty much goes for a heavy chunk of the MMO-verse as it currently is. Thanks for sharing, man, I've got to chew over this.
Event is fun and a good idea, shame so many people can only think as must have it all, and therefore complain when it's not given to them all at once. If you are smart there is such a small grind, because you know what you want for end game and have been-there-done-that knowledge and stuff to help you.
50+ Delta? learn to doff well and play better, doesn't take long at all.
Repeating the same content over and over to move a reward bubble is grinding
Everything is a grind.
The job you or your co-workers have chosen to accept is to hide that fact as best as possible.
And this. The game has reached a critical mass of grinding. Even non-grinds feel like grinds, possibly because that's time not spent grinding...
Most players appreciate being able to hit some endpoint and say the character is (at least temporarily) "completed." It's perfectly acceptable to tell the players often referred to as "content locusts" to **** off. Unless you want to be the first to solve the "how do we give PvE the replay value of PvP?" problem.
On your end, I hope you guys have some changes in store for crafting, upgrading and specializations.
The odds of producing a worthwhile crafted piece are a real turn-off; if you can't open up customizable mods, then at least remove the VR-unique mods (maybe even pen).
The odds of upgrading a piece in quality once it's mark XIV are another turn-off. We shouldn't need to grind more than one bar per quality upgrade per piece at mk XIV, given the cost of the materials involved.
The high cost per spec point is a major turn-off. I'm ready to lump them in with lockbox ships as something I might as well not even recognize as existing, and that's after mixing battlezones with STF queues for increased XP/hr.
It seems it's worth less than whatever material the diploma is printed on. Worse, it's impact is not just genre wide, but industry wide.
CM
p.s. just realized the xp points were due to the xp boost server-wide as the DR reward for last week...
I can't speak for anyone but myself, of course, but story content is my favorite part of the game.
oh good god dont remind me.....every 5 effing seconds KURLAND HERE! dsjfklsldjkfsl;dkjfg;lksdjf
*facedesk*
Cheers! Same thing on my part.
Dont let the naggers get to You
Now waiting for an actual T6 Escort to buy...(no, the Phantom doesn't count)
Man, don't play a rep system in any other MMO if you think this one is grinding, you'll have to ratchet up that hyperbole to crimes against humanity. You'll be begging for STO's 15 Mins of mission running every couple of days in order to get the marks to fill the project that runs while you are offline.
Right. I'm not saying sto is perfect but the event is nice and some of these people expect everything handed to them apparently.
I have the weekend to catch up. Leveling the Rom and KDF has been easy. For some reason leveling the Fed is a total PITA. But then, with him I was focusing on cruisers only. But it seems the XP rewards are slower coming for the early Fed missions.
They make a wondrous mess of things. Brave amateurs, they do their part.
Or maybe they just have a different opinion than you do. Maybe you like chocolate ice cream and they prefer strawberry. Attacking them for their opinion doesn't make their opinion look wrong...it makes you look wrong.
There are folks that want everything yesterday. There are folks that could probably close their eyes and walk somebody through any mission because they've run them that many times. So having an event requiring them to go through and run those missions again to unlock rewards...may not necessarily qualify as a grind...but it would be hard not to seeing it as grinding...painful...tedious...not fun...whatever the case may be.
I get in trouble all the time with bantering with the "entitled" crowd...but I can see where somebody might go "ugh" at running a toon through all the storyline missions yet again for the 9001st time. Personally, it wasn't that bad - cause it has been so many times that it just doesn't bother me...tolerance or even just being able to run through them bam, bam, done so it was no big deal. Could see where folks that haven't numbed themselves to it yet, though, would still be in a position to complain.
Different folks enjoy different things. Some of the missions weren't fun the first time for some folks...doing it the 10th time or more? There are certain missions that I didn't enjoy the first time, yet they had a piece of gear that I wanted so I had to play it or replay it. Then if I wanted that gear on multiple toons? Yeah, I reall started to hate certain missions. Hell, I can't stand Uneasy Allies...despise Surface Tension...etc, etc, etc...both are missions that I found to be cool the first time...but yeah, having to replay them for gear got old fast.
Somebody that's had 1-2 characters for a period of time and goes back to replay them...might find something cool they missed and enjoy it. Somebody that's created over 40 characters with rerolls and new alts over the past three years - that replayed missions for gear after leveling and possibly had to replay missions over and over to get multiple copies of that gear...well, it gets old. They might not be as excited about this event as somebody else might be...and I can see that.
Switched over to an all beams build with FAW, surprising how much better that's working for me in 90% of the cases. The other 10% are group activities or 'epic battle' missions where my dinky little escort gets all the attention and dies.
Centurion maximus92
12th Legion, Romulan Republic
12th Fleet
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