Funny part, I've never done the "grinding" at all. I've leveled all the way to VR14 through story quests and pvp. Champ level 125 now, with 0 grinding. I'm too lazy to grind heh.

Yolokin_Swagonborn wrote: »

GaldorP wrote: »

I believe there should be more options to grind (especially for VR 14 chars) and that good grind spots should not only be in the solo-questing zones (because grinders annoy questers and vice versa) but in designated grinding areas.

However, bosses that instantly respawn or summon an infinite amount of adds that grant good XP are obviously unintended mechanics and had to be fixed.

Is there some unwritten law of MMOs that states you have to wait for hours to get group going and then click through tons of quest dialogues before you can get any action?

The downtime in this game is immense. I just want to kill things, steal their loots, then kill more things and get more powerful. I don't want to wait in a silly queue for a very themepark experience where I must kill the same four things in the same order every time for very meager rewards.

Of course grinds are unintended. My argument is that what is intended is BORING and what is unintended i.e. emergent gameplay is far superior.

I'm all for grinds. I have 3 VR 14 chars already and currently working on my 4th. I'm just saying these bosses were clearly exploits that made it too easy and allowed you to level too fast/required too little effort in comparison to all other levelling activities. Grinds should be in places intended for grinding and there should be such places (that aren't in the middle of questing zones). Just hunting monsters for XP works well. There's no need for boss exploits that allow people to get XP 10 to 20 times faster than everyone else.

Yolokin_Swagonborn wrote: »

GaldorP wrote: »

There's no need for boss exploits that allow people to get XP 10 to 20 times faster than everyone else.

So my rate of advancement through this game should be limited on behalf of someone who reads every quest dialogue and takes a very slow methodical pace through the game? No offence to their playstyle but why the crab bucket tactics?

No, it should be limited on behalf of someone who goes to a spot with a very high monster density and fast respawn or a spot with many monsters that can be reset and works hard to farm these monsters as efficiently as possible.

Yolokin_Swagonborn wrote: »

Do you know what grinds that are sanctioned and regulated by ZOS are called?


QUESTS

Have you seen this post made by a ZOS official yesterday?

ZOS_ArtG wrote: »

We recognize that there are grinding spots in the game, and we don't have a problem with those who choose to grind to level up.

Grinds that abuse loopholes and clearly unintended mechanics for immense benefits are called exploits.
The crab and scorpion grind you listed clearly fall into that category which is why they were fixed once they became public knowledge and were used by a lot of people (don't know about the tree grind, I've never seen that one in action).

So when you have levelled.....do you do anything else or just continue the grind ?

Dixa wrote: »

How many people ground out max levels in skyrim, oblivion or morrowind without ever touching the quests?

Just curious.

How many trials, multiplayer dungeons, DSA's, and PVP campaigns were in Skyrim, Oblivion or Morrowind?

You can't compare single player games to an MMO simply because they have the same parent name. ALL the content that is MMO, that MMO players came for....shouldnt be gated behind months of repeating the same quests so many times you want to murder all of your own faction, just so they can have some options.

Dositheus wrote: »

I'd enjoyed actually going through the story myself and doing the quests and listening to it. It took me a bit longer, but conversely I got a lot more out of the game enjoyment wise. I don't wonder if some of the attraction to quick grinding is a difference in generations. I'm old, I admit. I cut my MMO teeth on MUDS. Where you had to read through quickly scrolling walls of text to know what was happening. No fancy graphics or ***, just words. And with that, my expectation of advancement in an MMO likewise goes to doing quests and enjoying the story. The newer generations certainly seem to be more focused on instant stimulation and reward, and perhaps for them grinding is more enjoyable. I guess I can see that, it's just a bit foreign to me. Which playing MUDS would be to most kids these days. I mean... a screen full of properly capitalized, structured and spelled sentences complete with punctuation as a mode of communication? That's some crazy *** right? When a quarter of my guild quit because they had power ground to vr12 in a day, and not done any quests and were thus over the game, I really didn't know what to say. I just had shrug and go back to solo questing and pvping. :P What can I say, I'm old school.

Greetings fellow MUDder! I've been playing, coding, and building areas on MUDs since the early '90s and am still at it (really happy Gemstone IV went F2P as GS3 was one of my early favorites).

However, your generalizations don't apply to me. I loved grinding in MUDs (though us old fogies called it hack'n'slash). I'm not interested in the speed of my advancement at all, and if I quit it won't be because I've run out of content. It'll be because I am forced to do things that I find soul-crushingly, mind-numbingly boring to advance. I love the mechanics of solo PvE combat, learning how to optimize my behavior to dominate huge groups of NPCs. Man vs machine.

I just think many of the quests in this game are extremely poorly designed and boring given my taste - and this is from someone who has written hundreds of quests in MUDs. One factor is that I'm an extremely fast reader and get impatient listening to dialogue I could read 5x faster, and thus having everything voice acted is an annoyance to me when I can't skip past the incredibly slow scripted scenes. I loved Morrowind because I could read things at my pace, and not needing to voice act everything meant there was a lot more depth (also why I still love MUDs). I've read pretty much every major fantasy series and many of the lesser known ones and don't find the quests in this game to have the same quality of plotting, writing, or character development I've grown accustomed to. Again, just my opinion, but I'm entitled to it, right?

I'm glad you love questing in this game. I think it's great that ZSO has made a game where the primary advancement mechanic appeals to your tastes (and obviously that of many others). No one is arguing that questing should be removed from the game. We'd just like ZSO to respect our preferences as people who enjoy solo/2-man PvE combat more than running around a map and listening to voice-acted stories. I'm not in the "leave exploits in the game" boat, but I also hate being forced to run through these quests for skill points and to unlock areas. All I'm looking for is the ability to do the things I enjoy in this game while being able to advance to the same levels that people who enjoy questing can advance to.

Maybe ZSO doesn't want players like me in the game, and I can respect that. This is their game and they call the shots. But it'd make me sad, because I have a ton of fun playing it and would be a loyal player for years, but every time I'm running around triggering dialog and scripted scenes with nary an exciting fight to be had because it is the only way to advance, I consider quitting the game. It certainly puts me into "I'm not going to invest real money on items I want from the Crown Store for a game I'm going to get fed up with and quit" mode.

Selberhad wrote: »

Dositheus wrote: »

I'd enjoyed actually going through the story myself and doing the quests and listening to it. It took me a bit longer, but conversely I got a lot more out of the game enjoyment wise. I don't wonder if some of the attraction to quick grinding is a difference in generations. I'm old, I admit. I cut my MMO teeth on MUDS. Where you had to read through quickly scrolling walls of text to know what was happening. No fancy graphics or ***, just words. And with that, my expectation of advancement in an MMO likewise goes to doing quests and enjoying the story. The newer generations certainly seem to be more focused on instant stimulation and reward, and perhaps for them grinding is more enjoyable. I guess I can see that, it's just a bit foreign to me. Which playing MUDS would be to most kids these days. I mean... a screen full of properly capitalized, structured and spelled sentences complete with punctuation as a mode of communication? That's some crazy *** right? When a quarter of my guild quit because they had power ground to vr12 in a day, and not done any quests and were thus over the game, I really didn't know what to say. I just had shrug and go back to solo questing and pvping. :P What can I say, I'm old school.

Greetings fellow MUDder! I've been playing, coding, and building areas on MUDs since the early '90s and am still at it (really happy Gemstone IV went F2P as GS3 was one of my early favorites).

However, your generalizations don't apply to me. I loved grinding in MUDs (though us old fogies called it hack'n'slash). I'm not interested in the speed of my advancement at all, and if I quit it won't be because I've run out of content. It'll be because I am forced to do things that I find soul-crushingly, mind-numbingly boring to advance. I love the mechanics of solo PvE combat, learning how to optimize my behavior to dominate huge groups of NPCs. Man vs machine.

I just think many of the quests in this game are extremely poorly designed and boring given my taste - and this is from someone who has written hundreds of quests in MUDs. One factor is that I'm an extremely fast reader and get impatient listening to dialogue I could read 5x faster, and thus having everything voice acted is an annoyance to me when I can't skip past the incredibly slow scripted scenes. I loved Morrowind because I could read things at my pace, and not needing to voice act everything meant there was a lot more depth (also why I still love MUDs). I've read pretty much every major fantasy series and many of the lesser known ones and don't find the quests in this game to have the same quality of plotting, writing, or character development I've grown accustomed to. Again, just my opinion, but I'm entitled to it, right?

I'm glad you love questing in this game. I think it's great that ZSO has made a game where the primary advancement mechanic appeals to your tastes (and obviously that of many others). No one is arguing that questing should be removed from the game. We'd just like ZSO to respect our preferences as people who enjoy solo/2-man PvE combat more than running around a map and listening to voice-acted stories. I'm not in the "leave exploits in the game" boat, but I also hate being forced to run through these quests for skill points and to unlock areas. All I'm looking for is the ability to do the things I enjoy in this game while being able to advance to the same levels that people who enjoy questing can advance to.

Maybe ZSO doesn't want players like me in the game, and I can respect that. This is their game and they call the shots. But it'd make me sad, because I have a ton of fun playing it and would be a loyal player for years, but every time I'm running around triggering dialog and scripted scenes with nary an exciting fight to be had because it is the only way to advance, I consider quitting the game. It certainly puts me into "I'm not going to invest real money on items I want from the Crown Store for a game I'm going to get fed up with and quit" mode.

Nice to meet a fellow MUDer, I always gravitated toward the pvp oriented ones. IE, Carion Fields, Abandoned Realms, etc. I mean, most of them did have a good bit of grinding, in the form of slaughtering area mobs. I suppose I always enjoyed the quests more than the grinds though, regardless. From the perspective of "lets have everyone enjoy the game how they want" I think you have a great point. Perhaps some good testing and trying to work it so that the average amount of XP someone can garner from grind spots, is roughly equal to what they would get through questing would be nice. Perhaps up quest xp to closer to that of a good grind spot. I mean, at the end of the day, none of us want to fall behind the advancement curve.

Heh, back in MUDS. I suppose I did used to write bot scripts to grind my character's skills and xp up while i was at work. As a quick reader (skimmer at least, as I have Dyslexia) I can understand about the voicing. I generally read the dialog and then click on ignoring whatever the npc is actually voicing. I'm also one of the guys who would read through each room description and then go back and send spelling etc reports to the devs of MUDs so they could fix their room descriptions heh.

At the end of the day, I suppose we all can agree to enjoy different methods for advancement. But I think a key thing we need to agree on as well, is that the reward for effort should be relatively equal accross the board. IE, those insane grind spots that get people a ton of xp/gold are not proportionally fair and thus.. were popular. An hour of grinding, should be about as rewarding as an hour of rushing around doing daily repeatable questing for everyone to be able to enjoy whatever their preference is.

Yolokin_Swagonborn wrote: »

It's almost like ZOS is jealous of any grind spot that gets too popular because it competes with their content. They tell themselves that us grinders really hate it and are only doing it because it gives us some hugely unfair advantage. In truth, its more fun and exciting than the quests and as you said, lacks the boring storyline and the down time of running from questgiver to questgiver to get any action.

To my understanding ZOS is not anti-grind. Only taking care of grinds that are exploits of game mechanics. Grinding is possible and it happens all the time and further more it is even faster than questing but not too much. The game mechanics exploits usually results something from 5 to 10 times faster progression than questing and in many grinders minds is the right way to grind.

If it's constant action and exp instead of boring quest and listening to dialogues, it is there and it is possible. May not give progression 10 times faster than questing but that wasn't the point or was it?

Define too fast....just running in circles duo in open world killing dense mobs I can cp every 15 minutes enlightened and be very hour unenlightened....I can use the same locations (about 50 different ones) to level from 1-50 at about 15-30 per level....that's solo, now duo you can cut 1/3 of that time off because more killing. So in open world and certainly legite grinding I can duo level every 10-20 min....its just efficiently building for the content you are fighting and maximizing your kills per minute while fighting challenging mobs....which BTW can be challenging often its 100-300 mobs per level, you try cramming that many kills into a 10-20 min window open world.

You must do lots of damage
You must kill efficiently
You must pull multiple groups
You must be able to maintain this damage while not dying from whatever mechanics said multiple groups of mobs may have
You must have excellent pathing (the route)
You must compete with random players who might attack then mobs and decrease your grind maximization

Each class and race and weapons combination changes the most efficient way to approach a particular location. This tinkering where you modify your build to specialize for a particular grind in order to maximize the return potential on time commitment is where the challenge lies.

Further grinding does not create unfair advantage (well lemme clarify this....grinding that everyone knows about does not create an unfair advantage). By constantly nerfing known grindspots the people aware of the unknown locations will benefit and since they are afraid the spot might be nerfed if it became too popular then they won't share the information. This creates a bias that is unfair.

I tend to agree with the OP that the challenges created by efficient grinding often are appropriate for the skill required. I also agree that grinding cannot be eliminated. As long as there are multiple locations in the game with any one of the following:

Different exp rewards
Different spawn rates
Different mob density
Different mob abilities (as simple as ranged vs melee, but could include crippling effects, woes, healing etc...)
Different loot tables
Different distances to vendors
Different levels of competition with other players
Etc....

As long as there are differences between mobs and mob locations there will always be one spot that is more efficient than all the others and likely several that are efficient and worth doing.

I really don't understand the constant nerfing of grind spots...from a psychological viewpoint and trying to look at it from a developers viewpoint....

1) players find a grind spot
2) lots of players congregate at the grindspot
3a) if it is open world then player competition regulates the maximum exp potential, more players = less exp
3b) if it is instanced lots of players can be seen at the entrance/exit to the content
4a) in regards to 3a the system is self regulating...no issue
4b) in regards to 3b the players are instanced and out of site from other players and mind their own business
5) in both instances there are lots of players interested in the content, perhaps it is the reward, perhaps it is the challenge (one of my favorite challenges in WoW was chain pulling an entire scarlet monestary dungeon solo and surviving....was I over level and not getting exp for the challenge? Probably but I honestly cannot recall....we would two man it also with weaker characters...and we would do it in other dungeons to create an appropriate challenge...did we get lots of (low level loot and make a bunch of gold? I dunno ...lol that wasn't the point, maybe we did???) Did we get lots of experience ? Again I dunno maybe? So what if we did? Did it give an unfair advantage in PvP? No ...you still had to get PvP gear or raid gear to equip up...did it give an unfair advantage in pve? No...yeah maybe we leveled faster or had different gear or w/e you could still regulate your own difficulty of content fairly easily.) What these things did provide were great YouTube videos, great screenshots, teamwork (yeah it usually took a bunch of people brainstorming to improve build after build after build, until a location was perfectly maximized), friendsship developed and most importantly fun.
6) I want to emphasize that these various gameplay styles provided lots of fun....could I chain pull an entire zone and live? How about a whole dungeon and live? Could I twink a level 30 and freeze my level to be unkillable? All of these situations generated interest (developed friendships)
7) these friendships incentivized continuing to play the game
8) the challenges incentivized continuing to play the game
9) the ability to pull ridiculous quantities of mobs and die because it wasn't a bright idea (Leroy Jenkins anyone?) Created timeless videos and generated amazing free advertising for the game.
10) finally consider this if you have content that is engaging player (in other words there are lots of players there doing the content, for what ever reason, then you have created an engaging environment) this is player interest, its players wanting to do stuff in your game....why would you get rid of that? Instead the goal should be to make something even more engaging.

At current in tamriel unlimited the grind environment is unhealthy ... What I mean by this is that grind spots that give exp are overly abused (they really are) this is a direct response to the Nerf policy of the developers. The players know that any spot that becomes too popular will be gone...thus if they find a spot they are driven to do two things:

First, they don't tell a soul (unless they have too), the reason is simple....if they tell, then word gets out and if word gets out then the spot disappears and then you are back at square 1. This non communication is a direct reduction in the amount of friendships developed, if I talk to fewer people because I'm afraid talking to them will ruin my fun then I don't develop friendships that create more fun....if I don't have a group of friends to play with then I get bored and leave...

Second, the fear of losing the spot incentivizes them to focus solely on the grind because it will be gone soon....this is also unhealthy because now players feel obligated to grind because they will lose the spot which unintentionally increases the abuse of the spot....this drives players to grind more than they would just for fun and makes the grinding tedious as well...and it causes more player isolation, less friendships, less interest in the game.

The solution:

Let players grind, it is healthy for the game. Players make friends, they play, they stay. Create engaging content that is more engaging than the grind spots if you do not like grinding...this idea that you need to eliminate the most engaging content you have (evidenced by the number of people doing it...is crazy...it is the equivolent of me operating a movie theater and to stop showing all movies that have nudity (because I don't like nudity) ...even though tickets for those movies is a large portion of my revenue....the logic here is illogical...zos should encourage players talking about grindspots and posting videos ...now the few spots that are overwhelmingly powerful should be toned down...I mean if you can crank out an unenlightened cp in under 20 minutes...that's a problem...but most grinding doesn't fall into this category imho

Best grind was the very first vet grind we all discovered the first week of live. (im sure some did in beta as well)

The Matrons Clutch or whatever its called World boss with all of the Dreugh. Oh my god you could go up a vet level in less than a half hour there, there were vet 5+ after just one day of the grind.

They nerfed that one quick as hell. But it was also the most camped grind I have ever seen, easily 200 players standing on one spot. You suckers in ESOTU that think the crag grind was insane, you never saw the earliest ones. Even some of the dungeon ones were sick.


Also OP i will disagree with you on one point - people dont tell other people about things like this because they care if it ever gets nerfed. They do it so no one else has access to to it so they have an unfair advantage. I did not forget the full guild of v10s on Dawnbreaker the second week of the game. A full guild? Yeah we know they got there in a shady way. Vet content at the time was extremely slow and difficult. Those who took advantage of the early grinds (and told no one else about them) enjoyed a full month of I-win mode as everyone else that didnt use them (or had no idea they existed) plodded through content and meager gains to reach the same levels.