The goal is to punish you for not playing the game by their exact and very narrow vision of how you should be playing the game.
If you want an MMO that doesn’t punish you and values your time, FFXIV: Endwalker releases in a few days.
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Congratulations 
…
Misled is a bit strong.
Every single MMO I’ve ever played had a grind. And many ARPG’s for that matter. Be it for PvP rewards, crafting, faction rep, loot…whatever. There is always some degree of grinding shit out (with varying levels of course). How much time you want to invest in it is up to you. No one should want a game to be a ‘second job’ (unless of course you have the means and the time to play that much).
I’m not trying to be a douche here (honestly). I’d strongly recommend a different genre if you don’t want to grind stuff out. It comes with the territory.
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All MMOs are indeed about grinding and repetitive gameplay at the level cap for power growth. So you can’t really complain about grinding per se. However, there are ways and means and degrees of grinding. Every MMO has grind, but that doesn’t mean that the grind in FFXIV is the same as the grind in EQ.
This game was designed to be quite heavy on the grinding scale. The reason is that there is not much in the way of PvE content, and so without a heavy grind, the content and advancement track is completed too quickly. So, they created a brutal grind and, as players (being what they are) have found ways to brute force the matter and speed up the grind, AGS has taken steps to block those efforts and slow things down (again).
That will, of course, never be popular with players, because players are never happy with measures which are blatantly designed to slow them down. Even WoW, which is the one of the most casual-friendly MMOs ever made, has ways and means to slow players down in their endgame power grind, and these means (which in WoW’s case are mostly time-gates and daily “chores”) are exceptionally unpopular with WoW’s playerbase to the point of causing a mass exodus from the game.
It’s hard for developers because players will burn through content much faster than it can be produced no matter what. If you’re not okay with that, you slow them down in various ways, which pisses them off. The alternative is to worry less about the players burning through and then leaving until the next content drop (like GW2 and ESO do), but you have to base your model and internal baselines of game performance around that if you want to approach it that way. ESO’s team has said that their expectation is for the playerbase to swell and drop off quite a bit depending on content drops, and they are ok with that. WoW’s devs obviously not so much, because daily “engagement” is the key metric for Blizzard (since WoW derives so much revenue from its shop). It would appear that, similarly, AGS is focused on slowing players down, rather than having them burn through the content, then stop playing until the next drop.
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I say misled because it was literally a bait and switch. All my professions are at 100-150 and all gathering are at least 170. The thing is, i thought i could take my time, farm a little bit here, and a little bit there.
But no. I cannot do this anymore. My server is dying, Lv5 crafting tables are all over the place, they made the best way to acquire reagents extremely hard and at the same time completely necessary, nerfed the best way to farm wood, life/earth motes and lodestone.
I was led to believe that one could tackle one profession at a time, without much hurry. And that WAS the case.
And i never felt this way in ESO doing the main quests to gain champion levels or raiding in WoW for BiS gear and hunting for rare ingredients, after thousands of hours. Most MMOs know how to dress up their grind, it’s not a blatant: “Now you will need 64,000 Red Ores, 277,224 iron ores, 178,654 pieces of wood, and 50,000 reagents. Have fun! ”
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People grind because they want something as fast as possible. I don’t know what the game will be like at 60 (I’m 46) but I could chop trees for hours, I could do the same thing over and over to get what I want. That would be grinding. I choose not to do it. It’s a choice as there are many things to do and as long as you enjoy it then it’s no grind. But maybe others’ definition of grinding is different than mine. It’s hard to tell.
You had to know it was not intended to kill a wood wolf and gain more xp and wood from a entire tree right? This game is still in beta. Non sub mmos tend to be the most Grindy games out their. No monthly sub means devs have to time hate everything even more and make the game less fun
You had to know it was not intended to kill a wood wolf and gain more xp and wood from a entire tree right? This game is still in beta. Non sub mmos tend to be the most Grindy games out their. No monthly sub means devs have to time hate everything even more and make the game less fun
Nah it’s intentional.
175 to 200 Logging takes 1 to 2 hours tops if you sit in Edengrove’s Ironwood route.
Because Ironwood trees give as much as 40x (or greater) the EXP that young and mature trees give [~1.3k small ironwood and 4k to 5k for a large ironwood tree.]
I am confused.
What bait and what switch? We all sign up knowing full well things can change on a dime. It’s in the ToS. I know, no one reads those things.
Frustration is valid, however, it’s not what you are using for terminology. You are implying this is nefarious by using terms like ‘misled’ and ‘bait and switch’. It’s not nefarious (not saying it’s not a fuck up or simply bad execution). But be real, it’s a MMO and things are always going to be fluid (both positive and negative).
Did you have to grind out faction to play a different race in WoW? Or grind out Timbermaw faction (how many of those things did I have to kill again?). Or grind out Cenarion rep? Or farm up stuff for the pali quest…(arcanite was a bitch early on). Then they changed it all…for better or worse. Even in the latest expansion…lots of grind and a lot of it was time gated.
Hell, in WoW it was a grind to level a new weapon you wanted to use. Granted it wasn’t as long as farming mats in NW…but still a grind no matter how you slice it up.
And let’s not forget the whole flying fiasco…they took away something you could do in game and put it behind…whaddya know…a grind. Time gaited at that.
It’s not bait and switch. It’s simply a grind…no matter what game it is. Whether or not you ‘felt it’ hunting gear or not is irrelevant. You still were grinding. Dressing up a pig and all that.
Do you really think they would have sold so many copies if people knew the amount of grind needed for anything? 1 alpha and 2 betas confirming I would me able to max out almost everything in a timely manner. And now the amount of materials needed can’t even fit in the damned storages.
I can only talk for my close friends, but with the exception of one, none of us would have bought the game if we knew how the end game turned out to be.
I’m ok with some grind, especially the crafting, makes me feel like I accomplished something. I just wish the crafting was more intuitive and useful than it currently is. The one I’m not a fan of is the HWM grind. I run a lot of elite zones and do a fair amount of chest runs, and I just get garbage all the time. I’m rocking full voidbent, luck on the bags, luck on the jewels, pearls on the gear, x2 t3 and x1 t4 trophy, and its just a straight slog, and I get like… 505 - 520 gear. That part to me is not very fun or rewarding.
MMOs tend to have parts in them that are grindy.
I think a certain point of grinding is justified and okay. When it comes with a reward.
New World lacks the reward and is very heavy on grinding, not just a little.
There’s basically nothing you gain from grinding.
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Grind is an ubiquitous term thrown about haphazardly to justify poor design.
When I climb the ranked ladder in a MOBA or Fighting Game, that’s a grind. It’s a grind that engages me in the natural focus of the game and rewards me appropriately for my performance/efforts.
New World has layers of grind. You need to find a way to grind gold so that you can effectively grind trade skills, which you can use to EVENTUALLY grind out the RNG lottery system for gear. That last bit is important because this game is incredibly gear-based/stat-based, putting very little value on player skill. A quick reminder that this game was heavily advertised as being skill-based, we now have objective and empirical data showing that’s just not true.
There are good grinds and there are bad grinds.
New World has chosen bad grinds with the presumed hope of selling conveniences for those grinds early next year. (Official Developer statements promising not to sell QoL until 2022.)
They’ve chosen QoL cash shop boosters to try and make the inconvenienced game more “fun” rather than focusing on making the game authentically fun and letting it stand on its own merits and using that good will to sell superficial things in the cash shop.
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Exactly! Almost nothing in the crafting is useful after the first few weeks in a server life span.
They just made a huge sink for materials that would be used in the end game brutal RNG. Reagents prices are absurd because everyone needs them to be able to START having a chance to be rewarded.
Have you played GW2? GW2 only has cosmetic or QoL grinds. You can essentially hit max level, buy, craft, or do dungeons for a few hours and literally never have to grind again.
edit: technically- you can PvP, PvE, gather, Raid, dungeon, fractal (just harder dungeons), or go to their WvWvW to gear up… There’s a lot of ways to gear up and hit end-game armor and none of them are hard/grindy.
Everything I read about starting New World mentioned endless grind. Have fun! I hope you enjoy your next game more!
Yes, on release and for about a year…until I got tired grinding levels. There was a grind in GW2…it may have changed since then but there definitely was a ‘grind’ to it. It was fun, for sure. But I haven’t played in years.
I’m not here to say what Amazon is doing is right or wrong. The fact is this is a MMO and by default ‘grinding’ is to be expected. To think otherwise really is not setting expectations in line with reality. Don’t misconstrue the message. I personally don’t like unnecessary grinds (here is looking at WoW for that one) and won’t do them. So, I understand the frustration the OP is explaining. But it’s not nefarious nor is it ‘bait and switch’. We all sign up with the ToS in which it states they can change the game at any time w/o notice. Whether or not we agree is irrelevant as we pretty much said do as you see fit by clicking the ‘Play’ button.
I’m hoping AGS removes a lot of this going forward and makes it so there is less monotony, however, I am not holding my breath (nor do I feel like they ripped me off). If they don’t, so be it. That’s their choice (and it is my choice if I continue to play or not). It’s not personal on either side ;>)
According to early forecasts there should be boosts added to the cash shop soon to alleviate some of these frustrations, for a nominal fee of course.
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