I've no interest in writing something elaborate but I'll give my 2 cents:

Grinding blows. I'm sorry, but gettign from point A-B to enjoy highend content is too damn long if you have a life. i'm sure most of you can say it took a year or 2 to get to your desired profession loadout.

my solutions?

-offer FUN new missions (team PVE battlefeilds, bodygaurd missions or gladiator combat)

-decrease XP needs

-make creatures give more XP

-make crafting more interesting by creating assemblyline mini games

seriosuly, I will never play another star wars game where I kill grauls for hours only to get to level 9 where I can't do anything with my friends.

I'm gonna have to disagree with you.

Grinding is fun. It doesn't have to mean killing 90,000 womp rats on your own. You can get with a grinding group and hunt whatever they are hunting. You can wander round one of the adventure plantets, killing things as you go, and actually stand the chance of being killed or having to take evasive manouvres.

Yes, it's possibly a little slower than the "ultimate power grinding" method, but who cares? It's about the journey, not the destination.

I think i enjoyed the grinding period more than being "fully ground". There was more to plan, more possibilities, a clear goal ahead.

I met so many people doing grinding groups that if i hadn't had to grind I don't think I would have experienced the SWG community properly without it.

I'm 100% against these:
-decrease XP needs
-make creatures give more XP

The levels were fine as they were. Even a casual player could fully grind a combat character in a month. That's not long at all.

However:
-make crafting more interesting by creating assemblyline mini games
This can only be good. Crafter grinding was not fun, it was not social and it was not productive. It only served as a way of putting people off crafting unless they were 100% behind the idea. If there were a way to make crafting grinding more fun and more social (although not quicker) then it would be a good thing for sure.

-offer FUN new missions (team PVE battlefeilds, bodygaurd missions or gladiator combat)
Sure. Extra content is always good, as long as our known and loved activities aren't taken away to make way for it.

Im going to have to agree with khargash. I like the fact that it takes time to get to where you want to be. I remember getting my Jedi unlocked, i know this sounds sad but it was a reall achivment after 2 years (hmmm mabe i am sad . The new virsion of SWG lets you start anywhere you want and that killed the game. I usd to love gtting in grps with ppl and playing thats what MMO's are all about right.

I also find that swg grinding was always fun and part of the experience that you had to endure to gain what you wanted. It needs to stay that way. Theres way too many games out there now that have taken that out of their games and making it too easy.

I personally would like for it to take several months....or yes even a year or 2 to get the temp i desire. I played SWG for 2 1/2 years. A year of that was building a jedi.

Ditto

Let me put my experiences with grinding in SWG like this:

Spending two hours grinding, only to find out that no appreciable progress had been made in the end? Bad.

Spending considerable time trying to figure out how to maximize the XP/minute ratio? Bad.

Doing the math and realizing that the number of creatures you need to kill in order to get what you want has six digits? Very bad.

Succesfully macroing things so that the game grinds itself while you are sleeping/attending school/not feeling like being a worthless cog in a virtual automated slaughter house? Extremely bad.

Having to kill sixteen million critters in order to enjoy tiny bit of content is extremely frustrating and off putting in a game.

Sevain, you are referring to Jedi though, no?

I think the OP was referring to grinding in general. But perhaps i'm wrong.

I hate to be the "OLD" guy who says "What's wrong with kids today?"......

I grew up playing various PnP RPG style games, where there really was no "end-game" content. The fun of the game was the building up and sharing the experiences your character has been through. For the most part, SWG's open sandbox style of play offered that same kind of gameplay in a different medium. For me atleast, it was never about "when am I gonna be able to solo Krayts?", "when am I gonna be the PWNsauce at PvP?", it was about the "journey and history" of my character. Building my toon up and creating friendships with the people I played with was the best part of the game to me. If Blue Frogs were added to the server to just let people instantly max out full templates, I think the majority of the players would get bored very fast. Imagine how boring the Star Wars Trilogy would be if it started with Luke Skywalker already as a jedi wailing on Darth Vader, it would have been a huge failure. It was sucessful because you learned so much about the backgrounds and history behind the final fight between the two characters and you cared about them.

The main problem I see with the majority of people who play MMO's, atleast these days, is they see PvP as the ultimate "end-game" content. Any "lower level" content in the game designed to help you "grind" up your level is seen as garbage to be "zerged" through as fast as you can in order to get to the PvP. Honestly, I sucked at PvP. I never cared that much about it to learn to be better at it. The "quality" of the people who I experienced who were the big PvPer's also turned me off from learning to be better at it. The ones that every other word was PWNED!, n00b!, etc. (not saying all you PvPer's are like this, just the ones I experienced when I was new to the game). Once I finally talked my wife into joining me in playing SWG we would occasionally try some force on force PvP. She couldn't understand how they (Rebels) were having any fun waiting around all day with nothing to do because they out numbered and wasted any attacking force 5:1 (the same goes for the Imperial side also, seems they would just swap forces). I tried to explain to her that "THIS" is the end-game for them. It doesn't matter to them if they win because they out number us 5:1 or even if they "win" because nobody shows up. It all serves to feed their over-inflated pre-pubecent egos that they can beat people up in a game. I have no problem with the concept of PvP, I just seem to have a problem with the type of player who's lifes self worth is based upon it. Ideal PvP to me would be two fairly even matched teams killing each other and having fun at it, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

Well, I think I have ranted long enough. I don't think everyone should play the same way I do, just wanted to voice my opinion.

I cant agree with you more vader. You hit it right on the head.

Oh, and dont worry...your not the only "old" guy here.

I was referring to the jedi, yes, but if you cut two digits from the number of creatures to kill and leave a minimum of player involvement in the macro the same went for my regular template grind.


Vader, you can call me picky but I don't think the "journey" of randomly killing a lot of animals is a very interesting one. The first two movies showing nothing but Luke going to Dagobah and slaughtering the local wildlife before fighting Vader in the third one would have also made for a very bad trilogy.


The problem with grinding is not that it takes a long time to max out your character's skills. The problem with grinding is that the only way to improve your characters skills in a reasonable time frame is through repetitous activity.

In addition to that if you want to take part in the Galactic Civil War you have very little value as a combatant until you have most of your skill points in combat skills. Worst of all you don't earn any XP from PvP so the only way to change that is to go and do your grind. The PvE side of GCW also requires a lot of combat capability and a lot of dead NPCs before you have enough faction points to buy anything.

If you want to become rich or to build or own rare items you can't craft anything anyone else would want to buy or survive for two seconds in the places you need to go until you do your grind. Houses, cities and other such things all require money which is very difficult to get with an unskilled character.


The only thing you don't need a highly skilled character for is collecting location badges. A good friend of mine who started playing the same time I did had all or at least very close to all of them when he quit the game. He never mastered a combat profession because he felt that killing thousands upon thousands of creatures was a waste of his time and not particularly fun.

I think you missed my point.

Nowhere in my post did I say killing thousands upon thousands on critters was fun. I said the experiences you shared while doing it was the fun part. Such as meeting new people, goofing off with them, swapping stories, etc. Now judging by your posts, you may not have experienced any of that because, until you hit your full template "fun-level" you were all business mathmaticaly computing how many things you had to kill and looks like you AFK Macroed most of it. How could you have experienced any of that?

What I was trying to say is, kids today are of the "I want it NOW!", instant gratification generation. They don't want to actually work to acomplish something, everything should just be handed to them so them can enjoy the fruits of something without the labor. The "HORRIFIC GRIND!" was designed to make people enjoy the satisfaction of earning something they worked for. That was the whole reasoning behind the Holo-grind, it seperated the people who really wanted to work for jedi as opposed to the kiddies who just wanted to click on a picture of Luke Skywalker and POOF! you're a jedi.

You say that all this is just because the lazy youngsters of today want everything handed to them. I disagree.

What the majority of people want to be able to do in the game is something with at least semi-permanent meaning.

Most games, just as SWG did, have a system of exponential growth which rapidly undermines the meaning and value of previous achievements as the player advances in the game. The ability to make 2 000 credits in twenty minutes today devalues your yesterday's experience of working hard for your 500 credits. Since you know that tomorrow you will be able to make 5 000 credits in twenty minutes you don't focus on today but instead try to achieve the tomorrow's power level as soon as possible. The game allows only so many steps of this exponential growth, so the final level is the level according to which everything is ultimately judged once the game has matured.

The "youngsters" are not lazy, they are smart. They delay their gratification of having credits until they have reached the final level in order to make their credits as efficiently as possible. They know the power curve would turn all of the things they could collect during the journey to ash by the time they rounded the next corner so they don't bother with those things.

TL;DR: People grind because the exponential growth in power devalues everything done before the final level.


But why is the grinding bad in the first place? Because the experiences you can have when you kill thousands upon thousands of critters mostly consist of killing critters. You can't make friends and group up because that would lower your grinding efficiency so you set out alone. Even if by accident you run into someone while out there you can't stop to have a chat and swap stories because it stops the slaughter and thus the flow of XP.

TL;DR: Grinding is bad because it drives people away from each other and the truly interesting things in the game.



Whenever the power curve is as scewed as it is people will resort to grinding in order to achieve the ability to give their actions meaning as soon as possible.

You make me sad

I grind because i enjoy the journey and the anticipation of the next stage.



I met some of my greatest e-friends while grinding.


Perhaps you're just going about it the wrong way?

grind groups were the most efficient way of leveling pre-CU AND CU, so I am bewildered as to why you would say they drive people apart.

pre-CU: you got into a group and went out your separate ways and ground out separate lairs. But you were still in a group and spoke to each other to pass the time. thus building social interaction.

CU: things got rebalanced and group hunting became the most efficient way to grind a template (you could fill 1-2 rows of any profession in a few hours with a good group and available trainers).

So no, I don't think the grind for non-Jedi professions was all that bad. In fact, I enjoyed the game more before I found out about grind groups than after. Sure it took longer, but me and my buddies would roam all over the place hunting various lair for credits (pitiful amounts, I later found out). But it was fun damnit xD