Editorial: The Treadmill

Greetings!

So if you’re reading this there’s almost no chance that you don’t know what I mean when I talk about the treadmill. Regarless of necessarily what the grind is about, be it experience levels, or skill levels, or reputation levels, if you’re playing an MMO there’s almost certainly going to be some grind or another involved.

That might have been acceptable some ten years ago when MMO developers were still trying to figure things out. It’s forgivable that they should have a fairly simple method of advancement when they’re trying to essentially invent an entire new genre of games and pioneer technologies. But come on guys, all that hard work has been done now, we know what works and now you certainly have a little bit more time to devote to finding ways to make what is essentially a horrid excercise in tedium at least slightly more entertaining.

For the uninitiated out there, a grind is a horrible thing wherein a player is expected to find a comfortable area in which to roam, and mindlessly gut whatever poor creature happens to inhabit that unfortunate region. I know it’s not just a lack of creativity on my part, there is just no way to make that sentence even sound interesting. The frightening truth is that actually trying to accomplish it is far more mind numbing.

In the absract sense I can understand where the concept comes from. The very nature of this type of game thrives on character progression, and gaining experience for completing tasks seems obvious enough. I only find myself wishing, with ever increasing regularity, that the tasks I was asked to complete were occasionally a little more entertaining in and of themselves, rather than banking on the sense of accomplishment that comes with completing a long term goal.

I think everyone who has played the original everquest knows how awesome it was to hear the ding after you filled up that accursed little bar ten times. That was a great feeling and I really do think that particular philsophy should stay in future game designs, I only would like to suggest that there be something for players to do besides staring at that little bar and seeing it inch towards the top.

In fact, it seems to be a fairly common occurance when I start a new game, that I have a great deal of fun in the earliest levels, even before I get all the fancy spells or skills or abilities of whatever. The reason that I personally think that is, is because I’m explicitly not forced to pay attention to the XP bar, and occasionally I’ll get a flash of light and a happy sounding sound effect and say to myself, “Oh new level, I wonder what I can do now?!”. My point in general being that character development is much more fun when it’s not an explicit goal when you’re sitting down to play.

It’s easy to sit here and say “That’s not good enough, do it better!”, but I find that’s a lot like people yelling at athletes from their couches. Rather than simply tell people they’re not doing it right, I’m going to go over some thoughts I had on the subject if anyone cares to listen. First I don’t want anyone to read that last paragraph and think I’m espousing the cause of making level ups happen more often. Like I said, I want to keep that feeling of “FINALLY, NEW STUFF!” happening. But what I do want, is to have something else to do than sit there and watch my XP bar rise.

My first hought was this. City of Heroes had some truly egregious bits of grinding. I mean some of the worst if you happened to want your character to level up in anything that resembled a reasonable amount of time. Then occasionally you would find yourself in the midst of a story arc. Being very much modeled after the classic comic book style they were what you would expect out of say a six issue series.

You would find yourself completing some seemingly simple task only to find yourself being pulled deeper and deeper into the evil plot of some mastermind or another ending with an epic showdown against said mastermind. Quite frequently you would find yourself gaining a level (or more if it was one of the earlier arcs) without even realizing you were filling the bar simply because you were too engrossed in the next task. At least that’s the way it worked for me, but I’ve always been a little bit of a comic book nerd alongside my computer geekishness so that might be a personal solution that doesn’t survive too well in the real world.

Fine then we’ll try something else that perhaps will be more widely accepted. Let’s see if we can’t do something about questing. Obviously every quest can’t be on the same level as a Homerian epic or Dickensian drama, but just think about this for a moment. There are three kinds of quests; kill quests, fetch quests, and courier quests.

Almost every quest I’ve ever been given by an NPC has been at the very least some minor variation on one of those three simple tasks. It’s easy to understand why those are such ubiquitous experiences across nearly every game I’ve come across, they’re fairly simple and it doesn’t take a great deal of retooling to make the mechanics work in a vast number of situations. That said, it would be ever so nice to get a quest that required the application of perhaps a little bit of lateral thinking, if not entirely forward thinking.

To get into it a little bit more in depth, almost every quest that is given to a player needs clearly defined completion criteria and endpoints. That much is obvious and is not likely to change any time soon. The issue I have is that both are given to the player in the most straightforward way possible. Even the simple quest archetypes above could easily be improved immensely, in my humble opinion, if the solutions were left up to the player to discover.

Obviously enough clues would have to be given, otherwise the mundane quests just turn into similarly mundane brain teasers the solutions to which are propagated nearly as quickly as they are figured out, but if the right balance is struck it would simply become a much more engaging experience in problem solving rather than simple instruction following. The clear problem with a solution like this, is that at some point a certain amount of knowledge of the game world would have to be assumed by the quest designer, and if history has shown us anything there are a whole lot of lazy players out there, but I’m going to get into that in a whole other rant.

Another little thing to think of. Traditionally experience rewards are gained in one of two ways. Killing something, and clicking on an NPC after you have killed enough somethings for his or her liking. The first thing that I wonder is why we can’t get experience rewards for other things that we as characters might do in our travels. Things that might perhaps equate to the life experience that the experience points that we so seek are supposed to represent. Off the top of my head not a whole lot comes to mind, but simple things such as crafting or performing certain mundane tasks exceptionally.

I personally think that there are some serious flaws in the “Experience Level” model, and that’s very likely to be my next topic, so if you want to hear about that stay tuned for a couple of days and we can have a nice in depth debate about it. But back to the topic at hand, at some point it does seem like the connection between experience points and what they are in fact supposed to represent has been lost, and things that might in some not entirely contrived manner provide an actual adventurer with worldly knowledge and life experience are not granting the point rewards that they deserve.

I know there are likely dozens of things I missed or simply didn’t even think of that could easily fit into this discussion, but I think I’m going to leave it there before this turns into something you need a weekend to read. I’ll definitely be checking the comments and we can try and see if there are even more improvements to the levelling treadmill for the next gen games. I know that all of you out in the great big internet are surely better at this than I am, so let’s hear what you would do to make the grind a little more palatable .

Until next time!