The notion of daily grind in MMOs isn't new. Leveling has always constituted a sort of
grind, and craft skills have, in turn, also always represented a particular
kind of repetitive activity guaranteed to saturate your MMO experience. In the early days, in Ultima Online, the grind had an element of risk to it: you could
shop around for supplies to tailor, but you might not actually find any. You could practice sword fighting on dummies
or with your friend, but you might hurt yourself. You could go hunting for money, but you might
die. You could mine for ore, but honest
to god bandits might come and fuck you up while you're mining. World
of Warcraft modified the craft material meta, adding things like skill
nodes and craft material drops to the mix, shifting the notional end-game daily
grind from a risk based activity centered around acquiring resources defended
by other players to a sort of constant patrol mixed with engagement in a
lottery. Still, these end-game grinds were
all craft based. WoW also introducing raiding as an end-game activity, but the
immensely social nature of raiding occluded its grindy-ness: raiding involves
other people and, as such, has a certain warmth to it that the MMO grinds of
old (even UO's hostile ones)
lacked. Grinding, then, real grinding,
constant work for a handful of resources, centered around crafting skills.
This was more or less the way of things until Star Wars: The Old Republic broke the
mold and made crafting into a set of timers instead of a series of repetitive
activities. With the grind taken out of
craft skills something had to emerge to replace it. An MMO without grind is like a horse without a
bowler hat: something is seriously wrong with it. SWTOR's
streamlined approach to everything MMO left a gaping hole in the grind
department. Something needed to be done
to keep the MMO late game good and grindy.
Thus the daily quest was born.
SWTOR's dailies
involved a sort of perpetual chore set that rewarded players with
currency. That currency could then be
spent on useful items that would prepare players for late-game instances, but,
at a certain point, after around three months of farming, the value of that
currency became questionable. Sure, one
could farm Daily Commendations, but one could also just run a few hard-mode
instances and end up with a fresh new set of kicks that would boost stats just
as easily. Black Hole Commendations
remained useful throughout the game, but they required participation in grind
once a week, not once a day. Thus SWTOR created a system with furtive bits
of grind saturating it that, in time, de-escalated into a comfortable framework
permitting player to continue to play and benefit from playing without requiring
the same sort of sustained attention and passion that MMOs usually require.
The grind of MMOs seemed to be a thing of the past, at least
under the SWTOR model of MMOs, and it
largely was, at least until Neverwinter
entered my life.
Neverwinter's
systems are heavily derived from SWTOR,
a simplified version of SWTOR's class
and skill systems adjusted for cross platform integration and ease of
access. Its leveling system, its
inventory mitigation system, its crafting skills, and its party roles all borrowed
heavily from SWTOR, and playing Neverwinter feels very much like playing
a version of SWTOR reskinned for D&D.
I even play similar classes in both games: I'm a Marauder in SWTOR, I'm a Trickster Rogue in Neverwinter. The symmetry is not unpleasant. Thus it only makes sense that Neverwinter would borrow SWTOR's end game model of daily
commendations mixed with weekly commendations, and so it did! But, in doing so, Cryptic ignored the
down-scaling method that Bioware employed to sustain player engagement and, in
generating a game around a free-to-play model instead of reverse engineering a
model to fit their game, they managed to create a mostly defunct crafting
system and a late game experience that feels distinctly grindy in all the ways
that SWTOR did not.
How did they manage to do this while essentially borrowing SWTOR's systems wholesale? By never effectively tapering their system
off towards the end-game.
See, Neverwinter relies
on the interaction of a multitude of variable currencies. Each of their end-game grinds, in turn,
progresses based on the acquisition of a handful of currencies unique to said
end-game environment. Meanwhile, a
larger end-game structure orients itself adjacent to Neverwinter's freemium structure, which turns on purchasing in game
currency, referred to as Zen, from one of two sources. There's the traditional freemium point of
sale source, which is fine and dandy for most players, and a second, seemingly
innocuous source: astral diamonds.
Astral Diamond, rewarded throughout progression in Neverwinter, can be traded on an open market for Zen, which can in
turn be spent as if it had been purchased from a traditional point-of-sale
source. The end result is an end-game
structure that relies on running a series of chores to acquire various
currencies, sometimes concurrently, but in a finite manner that eventually
terminates, and an unending grind pattern that orients itself around acquiring
Astral Diamonds to circumvent purchasing currency from the publisher. This pattern doesn't end and, what's more,
it's actually gated by a system that prevents players from acquiring more than
a certain amount of fungible in-game currency per day.
By imposing the freemium transaction system on to a daily
quest model, the diminishing returns presented by the daily quests are
paralleled by a sustained drive towards acquiring currency to buy "good
stuff" that can usually only be purchased for money. That means that even after it's no longer
worth your while to run Shandahar Campaign quests or Dread Ring campaign
quests, you will be, not for the gear you'll be finding, but for the end-game
currency you can spend.
It also means that the grinding you're doing at the end of
the game doesn't go towards any new content.
The most recent end-game expansion mitigated this a little by allowing
players to acquire additional skill points and useful items after maxing out
their characters, but these benefits remain, at best, tenuous: they permit
players to experiment with new methods of playing long after they've fallen
into comfortable ruts, serving the interest of a non-existent. That they came with the addition of new
content also hints at the other method by which Neverwinter perpetuates grind: Cryptic is constantly releasing new
content.
This isn't a bad thing by any means. Their player base gets rewarded for their
loyalty and enthusiasm and new players get a bigger world to sink into. It's a big win-win. But that means the grind sequences that might
fade in a given player's life will suddenly peak again every once in a
while. I was about done farming Dread
Ring for things other than refining ingredients (high value items that allow
you to improve items that improve other items [Neverwinter also perpetuates grind by presenting an insane number
of interconnected systems]) but then, sure enough, with the new expansion I
found myself running daily quests again in a new setting.
This last bit isn't terribly negative, and it actually
mitigates the issue of how the Astral Diamond late game currency grind
perpetuates itself: by presenting me with new environments and experiences, the
grind parallel to those experiences suddenly vanishes, and I'm not running the
same old quests to potentially get purple items anymore, I'm exploring a whole
new world. But it remains fascinating to
me just how grindy Neverwinter's
systems feel in a way that SWTOR's
never did. Instead of working towards
particular goals, goals that I will eventually meet, I'm mining money so I can
spend it to get around spending actual money.
The end result? A sort of grind I
thought I'd abandoned, the sort of grind that made me leave MMOs, that is,
slowly but surely, generating a diminishing return for me as a player.
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