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[ductape]

I play Eve online. Let me say that I have 26 million skill points in there. Thats about 2 years of skilling up. Some skills take 45 days to train. Some skills take a few hours or a few days. This all happens whether you play or not.

BUt, don't think Eve has no grind. The money is what you must grind for. IN eve, where your ship blows up, YOUR SHIP BLOWS UP! And, most the little awesome bits you had on there too.

But! Dont dispair, that is what makes pvp so awesome in EVE. You actually stand to loose something that means something to you. Trust me that people dont engage in pvp lightly but when they do it is hardcore and furious.

I also play NWN1 persistent world: Escaped from the Underdark. I have mentioned this is several other threads so I wont drag it out. It is not massive, but it is multi. about 15-40 people on usually. Heavily RP oriented, no real grind to speak of. If your character dies in pvp it is permanent death. I often go through about 3-6 characters a year there. Each one is a fully developed person and the whole experience is very immersive. THERE IS NO GRIND TO SPEAK OF, you can get to a high level in a couple days of playing.

I have lots of ideas from an mmorpg that has no grind. Without a lengthy explanation take for example a popular game on our forum: Haven and Hearth. Take out all the clicking to build things, ALL OF IT. Make everything have timers so that you may wait hours or even days for them to complete. Players build their cities and battle each other, it would become more about management than resource gathering or button clicking. Over-simplified but still get the point across i think.

BTW, check out NWN1, trust me it awesome if you are in the right persistent world. Check out Escaped from the Underdark if you can. Cant recommend these folks highly enough.

[Volfram]

So have you played State of Emergency?


Uru Live is an MMO without grind(actually, that's supposed to go open-source soon, if not already.  I shall have to check this...), but partly because it's so incredibly different from most MMO games.

Another option is the Monster Hunter model.  There are no levels, but you can upgrade your armor with loot.  I don't know how Frontier works, but there's a reason Freedom 2 was the best-selling PSP game until FF7:Crisis Core was released.

I'm really looking forward to Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, and hoping that Frontier gets a stateside release.


Actually, a friend of mine was trying to design an MMO recently, and he would pitch ideas back and forth with me.  He kept saying "but you've gotta have grind," and I'd respond with "No, do this instead."  I tended to take the Monster Hunter model to a logical extreme.

[Chutney]

It's not a sandbox, it's a grindbox.

So which MMO is not fallen under that "grindbox" category? 

Sadly, none so far. But I still have hopes.

What I mean was, it was wow+ level of grind. Wow is pure slow-fucking-ness past level 30 or so. Ryzom manages to be above that when it comes to slow grind.

I'm just curious, when was the last time you played? They removed most of the grind recently (and indeed, WoW started out as THE "grindless" MMO(relative of course), so you can imagine how fast it is now compared to most MMOs). I just leveled from 1 - 45 (college friends kind of made me do it, and I didn't play too seriously ie: spending most of my time naked in a city yelling things about the apocalypse) in around 2 weeks.
Considering 1-15 took me 2 years in FFXI (and playing at a consistent rate) and I have never made it past 20 in any other MMO I played, that's pretty good. In fact, WoW almost seems to move TOO fast nowadays, I find myself being leveled way past a dungeon before I even get the quests that send me TO that dungeon.
And this is done without ANY grind, just doing quests and killing monsters while doing quests. Monsters actually give minimal experience so leveling off of grinding will take you 10x as long as questing/doing dungeons.

[ductape]

this is because the want you to hurry up and get to the "epic" grind which you get the privilege of beginning at lvl 60. Even after you hit 70 or 80 or whatever they have now, its all about instance grinding for gear or pvp grinding for gear.

grinding=any repetitive play you must do even though you are sick and tired of it just to get that damn carrot on the end of the stick.

[Chutney]

this is because the want you to hurry up and get to the "epic" grind which you get the privilege of beginning at lvl 60. Even after you hit 70 or 80 or whatever they have now, its all about instance grinding for gear or pvp grinding for gear.

grinding=any repetitive play you must do even though you are sick and tired of it just to get that damn carrot on the end of the stick.

Ah, good point. I guess I didn't consider endgame a grind because it's a choice on the player's part. of course if you choose not to do the endgame, you kind of wasted all that effort GETTING there.
So WoW is essentially grindless(unless you count doing quests as a grind, in which case I don't think there is such thing as a grindless game for you because even non-MMOs have you doing repetitive stuff! ie Zelda with dungeon after dungeon and often reusing the same puzzles/enemies, mario where it's running and jumping. But now I'm just arguing semantics I suppose, so ignore this tangent, I guess!) until max level (80 now, btw), and then the grind begins.

[Soulwynd]

Quest grinding is just another form of grinding.

And I played around last year. Somthing must have changed drastically if there's no more grind.

[Rilder]

I played it once, its pretty bad, its a sandbox yes, but its a sandbox with no toys and only a little bit of sand.

Community is terribad also, full of ignorant fanboys who hate anybody who doesn't like the game.

[Il Palazzo]

fanboys who hate anybody who doesn't like the game.

It's something like bay12 forums, no?

[Tormy]

It's not a sandbox, it's a grindbox.

So which MMO is not fallen under that "grindbox" category? 

Sadly, none so far. But I still have hopes.

What I mean was, it was wow+ level of grind. Wow is pure slow-fucking-ness past level 30 or so. Ryzom manages to be above that when it comes to slow grind.

Yeah..perhaps Bioware's upcoming Star Wars MMORPG will be different. We shall see. 

[Soulwynd]

It's not a sandbox, it's a grindbox.

So which MMO is not fallen under that "grindbox" category? 

Sadly, none so far. But I still have hopes.

What I mean was, it was wow+ level of grind. Wow is pure slow-fucking-ness past level 30 or so. Ryzom manages to be above that when it comes to slow grind.

Yeah..perhaps Bioware's upcoming Star Wars MMORPG will be different. We shall see. 

Mega-Doubt-It

I have hopes for The agency, Global Agenda, APB, and Fallen Earth.

I had hopes for Huxley and Darkfall, but they also put grind above fun.

I think the only mmo I've played that tried to at least make the grind fun was Warhammer. Instead of grinding npcs and quests, you could grind the pvp areas and the pvp scenarios, which were almost as much fun as TF2 matches. It was still grind, but a good grind, as you could easily level all the way from 1 to the top just by playing PvP games and ending up with good gear as well, as there was still looting during pvp and the pvp rank rewards allowed you to buy awesome equipment.

[beorn080]

It's not a sandbox, it's a grindbox.

So which MMO is not fallen under that "grindbox" category? 

Sadly, none so far. But I still have hopes.

What I mean was, it was wow+ level of grind. Wow is pure slow-fucking-ness past level 30 or so. Ryzom manages to be above that when it comes to slow grind.

Yeah..perhaps Bioware's upcoming Star Wars MMORPG will be different. We shall see. 

Mega-Doubt-It

I have hopes for The agency, Global Agenda, APB, and Fallen Earth.

I had hopes for Huxley and Darkfall, but they also put grind above fun.

I think the only mmo I've played that tried to at least make the grind fun was Warhammer. Instead of grinding npcs and quests, you could grind the pvp areas and the pvp scenarios, which were almost as much fun as TF2 matches. It was still grind, but a good grind, as you could easily level all the way from 1 to the top just by playing PvP games and ending up with good gear as well, as there was still looting during pvp and the pvp rank rewards allowed you to buy awesome equipment.

I once played an MMO that was grind free. It was called Mankind, and was a space based RTS MMO. I can't really recommend it due to imbalance and its always on nature. However, the only things you need are money, materials, and research. Research is carried out in labs and is fairly automatic, materials can either be harvested yourself, basic ones purchased from imperial stations, or purchased from other players, and money can be made in several different ways, including trade, mercenary, or missions from imperials. Making money can be a bit grindy if you want to completely optimize it, but for the most part you can make enough in a non grinding way for it not to be a problem. It's French, by the way, and had a fairly large international community.

[Keiseth]

Hmm. City of Heroes has a fairly light grind, so far. Most of your EXP should be attained by playing through story arcs and unique missions, which means it feels a bit more like playing a traditional jRPG-- go along the story, fight along the way, and you should be the correct level to face whatever comes up.

That's probably because things in missions tend to scale to the party's level. You can adjust the difficulty upwards, but it still feels strange.

[Soulwynd]

You must be under level 30.

[Okenido]

Thing is...

You don't even have to grind to play the high level quests. (The sidekick feature is one of the many features that I'm surprised doesn't show up in more MMOs.)

[Soulwynd]

But you still don't have the high up powers and the enhancement slots. They make a huge difference so it's more likely for a high level to want another high level while grinding 30-40+