In the past, I never lasted long playing MMO’s. The reason, of course, is the grind. The Guild Wars 2 people, on the other hand, have made it their mission to eliminate grind from their game. And, so far, it’s been the most enjoyable MMO I’ve ever played. However, it hasn’t eliminated grind because it still relies too much on one game mechanic: counting your activities.
The most obvious counter is the Daily. I opened up the Daily recently and the list had things like “Kill 5 veteran monsters”, “Dodge 10 attacks”, “Gather 30 items”, etc. Easy enough to do. Problem was I had no intention of crafting that particular day. I literally started dozing off trying to get enough green logs and onions and whatnot. I didn’t care what I was gathering. Yet I felt compelled to do it because there’s a counter on the right promising me some loot if I just keep going.
The Flame and Frost prelude content is better at hiding the counter, but it still has one. At first I thought I was helping a bunch of refugees. Then I found the counter in the Achievements panel that said I needed to complete 75 refugee-related things to finish the quest. Now I’m chasing a number again.
By counting activities, the game is making the player aware of repetition. By setting a specific number of times to do something and then putting a big carrot at the end of it, the game is encouraging you to grind. The consequence is that it breaks the illusion that you’re playing a role in an actual world.
So what’s the solution? The obvious and best answer is to design quests that complete based on context, not amount. You complete the quest by “killing ALL the bandits” as opposed to “killing 10 bandits”, for example. Contextualizing every event into the overall pastiche of the game world is the most difficult thing to do and, frankly, is something the Guild Wars 2 staff do amazingly well! But they still rely on a counter or a progress bar to define “progress.”
How can you define progression without making it seem pointless and repetitive? It’s tough! A game where you’re meant to play for hundreds of hours can’t practically avoid repetition. So how do you make it less boring?
So how about this? Instead of counting UP, why not count DOWN?
Think about it. What’s more exciting, counting DOWN the seconds to New Years Day or counting UP to 100 push ups? Instead of saying “Kill 10 underwater creatures”, say “3 more underwater creatures left”. The player doesn’t have to worry about if he did X amount of anything. He only has to worry about if he’s on the last one. By doing this simple flip, you place the emphasis on the GOAL, not the amount!
This is a fundamental change in how we look at MMO game progress. Though technically it’s still a counter, people respond to countdowns totally differently. In my opinion, this would alleviate a lot of the tedium associated with completing tasks.
It’s not a complete solution, mind you. The actual solution would be to eliminate counters altogether but that is a much harder proposition. At least with this idea, what you have left to do, not what you’ve done, is placed at the forefront. That’s huge!
Still, the overall goal is context. So long as there’s a purpose to your actions, you won’t mind the doing it, even repeatedly. Does anyone complain about pressing W over and over to go forward? But aything that breaks the illusion must be eliminated or at least hidden away. The trick I’m proposing here is just another way to keep our eyes on the prize and not on the grind. It still won’t fix the exhorbitant amount of time necessary to obtain Ascended gear but that’s another issue…hahahaha!
Whatcha think?
God bless!
