Discussion about grinds

For me it was always the reward of my actions and constant pressure of potential pvp. If I came to some location to drop an item from a mob, I'm completely fine with farming that same location for several days if I get to fight other people for the same location. And once I drop that item, I'm freaking ecstatic. But usually, the longer I farmed the location, the more excited I'd be. In other words, I guess I'm somewhat of a masochist myself.

With the game in question being Lineage 2, obviously.

In groups, I can accept any amount of dynamic grind, it doesn't even feel like a grind, to me, at that point.

Honing skills, timings, spacings, coordination, synergies... it is only 'bad' when it becomes easy, but if it becomes easy, then you just go up a difficulty tier in terms of enemies.

If it's 'pull these enemies to this spot and wait for your abilities to AoE them down' then I can stand it for about 10-20 minutes at a time, and after that I start thinking about how it could be better or how to make it more interesting.

It's really bad for my roleplay, too. Without unexpected things happening to affect the rhythm, my RP suffers terribly, and I end up disengaged.

This isn't an answer relative to 'amount of hours it takes to level' because I'll 'grind' like this even in games without any system of leveling, if it's dynamic enough. Just make sure to take breaks (on the scale of days, not the short ones while playing) to bring the feeling back.

Adding random PvP to this generally makes it better, but most games don't design or balance that well enough for me to care.

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But what do you do when those quests end? Or when you're blocked by node progress and have outlvled any current mobs or quests or even your chosen artisan branch. Should there be something for people who have done all those things and want more or should it be the FF14 way of "play the game to its current fullest and go touch grass"?

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If it's a good grind I'm only going to remember the good part.

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FFXI - required full group coordination when fighting at level targets, required more than just bodily participation even when fighting lower level targets in group. The tactical points system really incentivized paying attention and trying to get your group coordination down even when the fight wasn't particularly hard. Since enemies also had access to tp, it made them more responsive to group pressure and let rudimentary ai lift far above it's weight class. https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Tactical_Points here's the full explanation of what they are if you are really interested.

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Well golly deadmansprice aren't you asking the tough question today. Grind is a basic necessity of any mmo or becomes a different genre (monster hunter). Make your mobs mean, responsive, adaptive, and smart. Make your battle system require tactical thought and coordination with a high skill ceiling. I genuinely think TP attacks are the way to most effectively achieve this in basically any game. I'm hoping 'proc' attacks have a similar place in Ashes.

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Intrepid intends to have 45 days of leveling 4-6h a day. Most likely at least some of that time is calculated with Nodes advancing slower than people's lvls.

So considering that, if a person plays 16h a day instead of 4-6, what will they do once they outlvl node's mobs?
They'd probably go do their artisan and social stuff, right? That'll most likely also be blocked by node progress, so there's a ceiling on that progress too.

So the player will go do random menial quests, right? And if those are semi-randomly generated, how can they not become grindy to a person who's done everything else the game has to offer at that point while still wanting more content? Or do you think Intrepid can somehow make enough unique content that a super hardcore player will never run out of it?

Cause I personally don't see how that's in any way feasible.

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Dygz, I'm talking exactly about the first few weeks when no other nodes have even gotten to lvl 5-6. Let's say I'm playing 18h/d cause I'm hardcore like that. Nodes level up waaay slower than my adventure lvl or any other content that is present within a lvl 2-3 node.

I've done any and all unique quests that are in the reasonable vicinity from me (and I doubt that going across the world will all of a sudden provide me with more unique quests that would fill up my gametime).

I've leveled up all my possible artisan professions to their max, or at least to a point that requires higher lvl content that comes with higher lvl nodes.

I've done all the social org stuff, because it too requires higher lvl nodes.

Castle sieges are nowhere close because people are underlvled and are just getting used to the game and node sieges are too expensive, considering that we've only gotten a few lvl 4 (if any), and in the current alleged design there's a 21 day ban on sieging lvl3 nodes too.

All that I'm left with, content-wise, are caravans. And caravans are just running back and forth between nodes. And imo there's a fair chance that caravans won't even be run often enough to support a 18h/d playtime. But even if there is enough of them, that to me seems like a grind, because it's a repeated same task.

So again, how can a player like that avoid grind? Is it impossible or do you just not consider that kind of repeated task a grind?

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Didn't you just describe your own definition of grind?
"Grinding: doing a repetitive task because it's required to get to the next step in any endeavor."

Doing an easy task over and over just to upkeep the item that you need in order to progress.

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That would be some shitty gear system imo. But we have no clue about what Ashes will have, so who knows, maybe that'll be it.