Why is everybody complaining how much of a "grind" Elite is if every other MMORPG is exactly the same?

[Obsidian Ant]

The grind is in your perception, the CK2 forum is full of people claim it too is too shallow and predictable and repeditive
Perception
As you say Exploration is You just load, point, click ad nauseam but one can set your own goals, enjoy the vistas, ocassionally hit a contact binary or have to readjust your route to make sure you have fuel.
Why is it okay for Ck2 to be able to say "There are various ways you can achieve your goal in the game, and your goal can also vary and the randomness of events will cause you to react and adapt or modify your strategy." and it not be a grind when you can say and do the exact same in Elite and it be a grind.

The Optimization of CK2 Meta gaming, is not the use of all the trade tools etc to maximize the Cr/HR meta gaming too, and both a grinding but it is not forgivable in ED?
You dont need to meta game in either, you can set your own goals in both.

The difference is *you* feel like ED is grinding but CK2 isnt
I love CK2 but loath it MP as *I* find it a grind to keep up against the inevitable min/maxers who will remove you from the game as soon as they realize you are setting your own goals to have fun and thus are not min maxed.

Grind is perception

Any activity can become a grind, and usually adding other players is what creates the desire for min/maxing grinding behaviour

Doesnt even have to be competitive.
I have had some terrible pen and paper RPG games where someone has to meta game their way to a min max munchkin to be better than the rest of the party, for the some reason of ego, even when we are all part of the same team on the same side; to the point of actively criticising the other players for not min maxing

Doesn't matter how much emergent game play is possible, people will trend towards what gives them the most the fastest and call that the grind regardless of all the other options available.
Only one build or role of combo will be the best and all you do is repeat that then comment on how nothing is fun.


You is generally 2nd person plural usage in this post not the person I am quoting in particilar

Grind is perception indeed.

Example 1: Give a child a pen and paper and tell him to write the same line one thousand times - and he will perceive it as a grind.

Example 2: Give a child a pen and paper, along with some rich character descriptions, a vast world with interesting culture and history, as well as other things that spark his imagination, and then tell him to write a story about all of that content which must be one thousand lines long. He will be far less likely to perceive this as a grind.




Some people will say Elite fits into Example 1, others will say Elite fits into Example 2.

 

[Vasious]

Grind is perception indeed.

Example 1: Give a child a pen and paper and tell him to write the same line one thousand times - and he will perceive it as a grind.

Example 2: Give a child a pen and paper, along with some rich character descriptions, a vast world with interesting culture and history, as well as other things that spark his imagination, and then tell him to write a story about all of that content which must be one thousand lines long. He will be far less likely to perceive this as a grind.




Some people will say Elite fits into Example 1, others will say Elite fits into Example 2.

So you see Elite as a thing where you literally do the exact same activity, and only that activity, with no other option, repeatedly over and over again, with no possible input on the players end on creative interpretation of the game

Or

are you relying of absurdities of extremes to make your point?

If it really is example one to people, why do they "play"

If it really is that bad that you feel like you are writing lines why choose to do it.

This is a leisure activity, you are supposed to enjoy it, if you don't enjoy it why do it?

Why do something you don't enjoy and complain about it being something you don't enjoy.

There seems to be something flawed in there.

But Hey Sisyphus was happy

 

[Flavourless]

Give a child a pen and paper and he will say "That sucks, where is my iPad Air?"

 

[Vecter]

Grind is perception

So for some, carrying stuff from A to B for fortifying systems in powerplay is fun? It is just my perception that tells me I'm grinding.
So powerplay like this it's okay, no need to change anything, no need to add depth or emergent gameplay, people will just continue to grind anyway.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

So for some, carrying stuff from A to B for fortifying systems in powerplay is fun? It is just my perception that tells me I'm grinding. So powerplay like this it's okay, no need to change anything, no need to add depth or emergent gameplay, people will just continue to grind anyway.

What PowerPlay needs is added more tailored experience, that mixed with 'grind' can do wonders. I expect that to happen down the line. It's foundation, really. FD will add more interesting stuff for you to play with in PP. Sandro said it himself yesterday.

 

[Snarfbuckle]

I think the obvious solution is that we need space wolves, and wolf pelts as tradable commodities.

Do you have any idea how exhausting it is to skin fur from a power armour?

 

[Obsidian Ant]

So you see Elite as a thing where you literally do the exact same activity, and only that activity, with no other option, repeatedly over and over again, with no possible input on the players end on creative interpretation of the game

Or

are you relying of absurdities of extremes to make your point?

Yes to both.

And also no, it really depends on what you do in Elite. Fortunately we are fortunate enough that Elite has an open world and that we can interpret its very basic / simplistic game mechanics in a number of ways. I don't find Elite as a game to be a grind, and I have been playing it since early 2014 without stop. But then again, I keep away from the repetitive tasks.

That said each specific Elite game mechanic is simplistic, basic and "grindy". However the game galaxy is open world, vast with many places to go (and we can do things in any way and order we want) - in itself the game world is not grindy.

 

[Mephane]

Why is everybody complaining how much of a "grind" Elite is if every other MMORPG is exactly the same?

My complaint has been the re-grind. How reputation decay and merit decay force you to do the same grind again just to maintain the point that you have already reached.

 

[Hellhawk666]

What PowerPlay needs is added more tailored experience, that mixed with 'grind' can do wonders. I expect that to happen down the line. It's foundation, really. FD will add more interesting stuff for you to play with in PP. Sandro said it himself yesterday.

It must be a blue moon - I'm agreeing with Pecisk

Most of the game only feels grindy to me if I focus on attaining a goal, so it's a self-inflicted injury. If I'm not then it's just stuff to do. PP is a bit different at the moment as it is inherently goal directed (ie not just attaining but maintaining a rank) and the avenues for doing it are limited to a single specific action for each task. Currently it feels very strait-jacketed, and hence grindy, but greater variety in the mix of missions and a change in the goals each round would reduce the perception of grind for me.

 

[Vhaegrant]

There are a few aspects of Elite: Dangerous that work against it when considering the 'grindiness' of progression.

1) Everything looks the same. Most of the details are not in visual comparison but in a little bit of text. The size of suns is only really apparent when you target them and look at the distance you are from them on the HUD. Space stations blur. Most system names are unpronounceable or generically dull (some of the charm of the original Elite games).

2) High initial learning curve and then no further development. Combat retains the highest skill set (largely due to twitch mechanics) but again progression means that you will probably never be as challenged in combat as those first Sidewinder skirmishes. Trading (once you learn to ignore all the ingame aids and follow a few basic principles) is rote (and lets be honest, if E: D actually had some basic apps to manage your own purchases, rather than going to third party apps or a pad of paper and pen it would be even easier), you just have to go through so many steps to get the next bigger ship. Exploration (well, I didn't think anything could be duller than trading, I was wrong... and I'm not even going to list mining ) actually penalises you for being an explorer (taking the time to scan every item in a system is less rewardsing than just hitting the earthlikes)

3) Unequal progression of ships. Launching with gaps in the ships available means there are points when progression feels far slower. The low price of the initial ships and availability of missions means that you speed through their ownership and are then left with a sizable gap after the Asp.

By far the biggest issue for grind is the graphical sameness. The sort of mission types that you encounter in MMOs don't tend to differ that much (kill x many of y, collect p many of q, deliver a to b, collect c from d) but can feel very different depending on the environment.

 

[Shaamaan]

Well that's going a bit too far. I think the majority of us are comfortable with Elite being an online multiplayer game.

<and other similar posts>

There's a distinction between an MMO game and a multiplayer game, both in terms of gameplay mechanics as well as technical aspects. For example, you can have games with a LOT of players which AREN'T MMOs and you can have single-player games which have MMO-aspects about them.

In this case I think people angry that, rather than getting a SP-game with MP-elements we got a SP-game with MP-elements and MMO mechanics.

Note that ED, in it's current state, is hardly an MMO. You can only have a handful of people in once instance, and even then getting into the same instance with the people you WANT might be a big problem (technical gremlins and all that). Given that ED has no instance servers, only a transaction server and a matchmaking server it's unlikely that this game will EVER be a true MMO.

So we're in this weird state where ED isn't an MMO (because 32 people at most is hardly "massive"), but it has MMO gameplay mechanics. MMO gameplay mechanics tend to revolve around a mindless grind all too often (there are games which do this far better or worse - WoW for example might revolve around killing X amount of mob Y, but in recent years they managed to dress it with interesting locales and various ways to do said killing). Again, ED in its current state does this rather poorly - every system is mechanically identical. For example, once you've seen the inside of a station, you've seen them all. Once you successfully made a profit trading once, you've pretty much completely "exhausted" the trading gameplay element of ED.

THIS is the problem with ED, why it's too MMO-like in the worst possible way and why people are unhappy.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

My complaint has been the re-grind. How reputation decay and merit decay force you to do the same grind again just to maintain the point that you have already reached.

But why reputation would be static and never change? It's certainly add interesting element to the game and force re-think your stance and position. ED is clearly designed to add regular challenge and pressure for commander to change it's position, tactics, etc. I agree though that merits decay feels way too forced, and I would want to see that rebalanced.

 

[Renegade Roach]

I disgree. They were clearly put in for meta game foundation to which they can build around. People assume it's priority because FD said so. That's nonsense. Lot of things are designed in specific order because they need CG and PP in place to move forward later.

And you can already make your own objectives.

This is precisely what concerns me Pecisk. If the foundation they are building is that of repeating an extremely limited set of highly repetitive tasks it does not bode well, in my opinion. You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear, as my Gran used to say. If the mechanics they are implementing now are so simplistic in nature how are they suddenly going to create the wonderful living galaxy full of emergent gameplay which they touted?

People assume it's priority because FD said so. That's nonsense.

Not sure if it's a language thing, but that doesn't really make sense. Are you saying that FD are being disingenuous, or that people should ignore what they say because it's wrong?

And yes, we can set our own objectives but we are limited by the simplistic nature of the mechanics and tools available to us. The PP and CG goals are examples of simplistic and arbitrary goals, we can ignore them and say 'I shall travel to X and back flying solely with my feet', but it's still ignoring a portion of the game design because we don't like it. Are you really arguing that PP, in particular, is not founded almost entirely on the principal of players grinding to achieve goals?

Vasious - We'll have to disagree on CK2 I guess. To me it doesn't compare to something like exploration in Elite... point being that the only way something can surprise you exploring is if you make a foolish mistake. And yes, jumping into a binary from the wrong angle is a player error, not the game creating events which cause you to react. Once you are in the system it's even more apparent. I can indeed enjoy the vistas, did a lot of that on my last month long jaunt. That changes nothing about the process of exploration, which is point, click. It's horribly shallow and when you jump into the 1000th system you know it will offer nothing different than the first.

I'd agree that it's often meta gaming and min/maxing which causes people to feel like a game is a grind. However in the case of CG and PP it's very hard to view it as anything other no matter how you participate. I don't min/max or kill myself to undermine/fortify. I simply fly about doing what I feel like. I am very aware that this means my contribution is token at best. I am very aware that I am willfully stepping away from the direction the game is channeling me in and saying 'no thanks'. I am not saying that everything in Elite is a grind, nor that the game cannot be played in a non grindy way. But to do so means ignoring glaring aspects of the design implementation, or at best accepting that our participation has little meaning.

 

[Vasious]

So for some, carrying stuff from A to B for fortifying systems in powerplay is fun? It is just my perception that tells me I'm grinding.
So powerplay like this it's okay, no need to change anything, no need to add depth or emergent gameplay, people will just continue to grind anyway.

You could give people a million things to do and I guarantee there will be still posts like

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=168466&p=2571296&viewfull=1#post2571296

If you basically just want to farm credit, RES's are still the way to go. You must however reset the instance a couple of times in order for the big ships to spawn though.

**This** just quit to menu and back until you see larger pirates. Then farm that RES till you get bored. You can make 5+mil per hour easily with a Vulture in a good RES.

Because people will want to know which of the million things be they multi chain missions that dynamically change or static event like RESes will give the the most stuff for the least time. Best return on investment of player time.

Everyone calls out for end the grind, give us emergent and dynamic missions, but if we got those and it was possible that the event chains lead to an outcome that was sub part to "then farm that RES till you get bored. You can make 5+mil per hour easily with a Vulture in a good RES." they they would be derided as "useless" and people will grind and complain about the grind.

If here is an dynamic mission that has an outcome that is better, people will meta game to get that outcome again and again and again if possible to farm that result, and if it is not possible, back to the grind.

the biggest reward for the least amount of time will win over all other considerations once you average it out over the player base.

That is why 3rd party trade tools are so popular.

Heck it is why people still fall for scam isnt it.

Fast and high return no risk eh?

People will grind and people will complain about the grind, but they will also complain if there is no option to grind a consistent reward for thier time.

Look at all the trheads that pop up "RES Nerfed" Trading Nerfed" as soon as people don't make the expected reward from their grinding.
Ruins all the arguments for dynamic systems where RESes and systems become safer after the slaughter of all the wanted NPCS by players earning millions per hour for hours on end, and they get up in arms and post of the forums if their RES drops in income, they never want to move or change behavour.
Traders once they have their 4100Cr/Tn/Hr trade route, number based on the forums, never want a dynamic economy where supply and demand might mean that number changes.

We see the threads over and over again, demanding FDev not nerf RES or Trades when no nerf has taken pleace it is just some RNG

People hate grinding, but they hate unpredictable rewards just as much, if not more, Grinding predictable returns makes people happy.

Thing about it

Grind or risk

Grind for 5 million an hour or risk at 50% 10 million or 50% nothing from 1 hour
Which do you pick

What if it was 60:40
90:10?

You think people wouldn't still complain and say should have just grinded away if they were the 10 in the 90:10 for 10 million and hour.

Grinding is what you call stable predicable reward from investment of x time, when you would rather be doing something else, but don't want to give up that predicable reward by doing something else. It is when you want both but cannot have both.

No one wants to pay the opportunity cost of not grinding in certain predicate reward lost, as it never seems with the enjoyment that could be gained by doing an dynamic emergent activity if the reward doesn't match the grind, as enjoyment cannot be converted or translated to the in game CR

People will pick 5 million CR and 5 enjoyment over 1 million CR and 50 Enjoyment as they can see and spend the CR but the enjoyment becomes a vague memory

 

[Obsidian Ant]

You cloud give people a million things to do and I guarantee there will be still posts like

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=168466&p=2571296&viewfull=1#post2571296




Because people will want to know which of the million things be they multi chain missions that dynamically change or static even that gives the the most stuff for the least time.

Everyone calls out for end the grind, give us emergent and dynamic missions, but if we got those and it was possible that the event chains lead to an outcome that was sub part to "then farm that RES till you get bored. You can make 5+mil per hour easily with a Vulture in a good RES." they they would be derided as "useless" and people will grind and complain about the grind.

If here is an dynamic mission that has an outcome that is better, people will meta game to get that outcome again and again and again if possible to farm that result, and if it is not possible, back to the grind.

the biggest reward for the least amount of time will win over all other considerations once you average it out over the player base.

That is why 3rd party trade tools are so popular.

Heck it is why people still fall for scam isnt it.

Fast and high return no risk eh?

People will grind and people will complain about the grind, but they will also complain if there is no option to grind a consistent reward for thier time.

Look at all the trheads that pop up "RES Nerfed" Trading Nerfed" as soon as people don't make the expected reward from their grinding.
Ruins all the arguments for dynamic systems where RESes and systems become safer after the slaughter of all the wanted NPCS by players earning millions per hour for hours on end, and they get up in arms and post of the forums if their RES drops in income, they never want to move or change behavour.
Traders once they have their 4100Cr/Tn/Hr trade route, number based on the forums, never want a dynamic economy where supply and demand might mean that number changes.

We see the threads over and over again, demanding FDev not nerf RES or Trades when no nerf has taken pleace it is just some RNG

People hate grinding, but they hate unpredictable rewards just as much, if not more, Grinding predictable returns makes people happy.

Thing about it

Grind or risk

Grind for 5 million and hour or risk 50% 10 million or 50% nothing
Which do you pick

What if it was 60:40
90:10?

You think people wouldn't still complain and say should have just grinded away if they were the 10 in the 90:10 for 10 million and hour.

Grinding is what you call stable predicable reward from investment of x time, when you would rather be doing something else, but don't want to give up that predicable reward by doing something else. It is when you want both but cannot have both.

No one wants to pay the opportunity cost of not grinding in certain predicate reward lost, as it never seems with the enjoyment that could be gained by doing an dynamic emergent activity if the reward doesn't match the grind, as enjoyment cannot be converted or translated to the in game CR

People will pick 5 million CR and 5 enjoyment over 1 million CR and 50 Enjoyment as they can see and spend the CR but the enjoyment becomes a vague memory

You are totally spot on with this! This is one of the basic problems with what people perceive as a grind. And it is pretty much the entire problem with those types of game mechanics.

I never hear people complain about grinding in Project Cars, DSC World, The Witcher series or Freepsace 2. Few people complain about grinding in Minecraft, Terraria, or Freelancer. Why is that? It could be that it's because these games reward you in a way that is primarily aimed at enjoyment and function as opposed to rewards that are purely based on numbers and unlocks.

 

[Renegade Roach]

Vasious, while what you say is true I think you are ignoring certain important factors. Most notably the mechanics of power play. We can't really do PP at our own pace because all the goals are time limited and competitive. We either strive to achieve them as quickly as possible, which is pushing people to min/max, or we accept that we don't care about the outcome. Which seems an odd idea for a game, surely?

I also don't think it's entirely true that people hate unpredictable rewards, otherwise gambling would not be so popular.

 

[Midian27]

This isn't an mmo, it just pretends to be.

 

[Mephane]

But why reputation would be static and never change? It's certainly add interesting element to the game and force re-think your stance and position. ED is clearly designed to add regular challenge and pressure for commander to change it's position, tactics, etc. I agree though that merits decay feels way too forced, and I would want to see that rebalanced.

Imho any player character state in a game should only change due to their interaction with the game. "Dynamic" does not mean it needs to happen without any the player even doing anything, or even playing the game. There is no better way to scare off people again from coming back to the game after extended breaks than to present them with some of their earnings and achievements simply erased.

 

[Shaamaan]

Because people will want to know which of the million things be they multi chain missions that dynamically change or static event like RESes will give the the most stuff for the least time. Best return on investment of player time.

Sure, in any game you'll have people who feel that there's too little or too much grind. Outliers ALWAYS exist. It's a problem when it's the outliers who are happy with the state of things, while an increasing number of players are dissatisfied.

The example you've given in your post is a bit simplistic. It seems to revolve around pulling some arbitrary one-handed-bandit lever and either getting the payout or not. If the game is reduced to this state than it's a sad sad state indeed. Generally there needs to be an element of player skill involved in the process. If making "big bucks" revolves around rolling the dice, then it's NOT good game design.

Also, another question might be: why are people into credits? I haven't played WoW for a long long time, but if we're on this whole MMO comparison... I didn't care about gold in WoW almost at all. I cared about gear and stats and how well I performed as my role of choice in a group. I also cared to look the part, because I was on a RP server. In ED there's nothing BUT credits unless you really go out of your way and start imagining things are far more than they seem. This... shouldn't be needed, really.

 

[smartroad]

Just do what I done. Record an hours worth of video doing trading, then use some hyperlapse software to speed it up and add some annoying beat'y music
.
This is how my mind see's ED... probably...
.
[video=youtube_share;rfYKH_orGJw]https://youtu.be/rfYKH_orGJw[/video]