On the third day of my roundtable, I took the talk in the most controversial of directions: the grind. More specifically, why do designers gravitate towards class-based, level-based experience-point based RPG systems for their advancement models? What’s wrong with them? Once again, the responses listed below are not necessarily my own, but are rather responses that came out of the group. However, many of the responses that appear are very similar to those that I mentioned in my AGC talk a year ago.

The group’s responses included:

  • Rewards devotion. Our current billing model, the monthly fee, works better if we have game mechanics that encourage long-term retention. The grind makes creating a character hard enough that its hard to walk away from the character.
  • Allows for soloing. The grind lets players play by themselves, as well as group.
  • Classes allow for mutual contribution. Fighting the AI is a minigame that involves multiple players in different roles.
  • Classes and levels are easy to compare and communicate. It’s easy for players to find potential group members and guild members that fit their needs.
  • Familiarity. Classes and levels are easily understood by nearly every gamer on earth – the learning curve is low.
  • Classes and levels are parallel to the real world. This, needless to say, provoked a lot of discussion.
  • Provides an archetype. Your average player wants to know the play style of his selected character from character creation. We know how the major classes play.
  • Easier to balance. Sorry, Raph, it’s still true – classes and levels are much easier to balance than freeform systems.
  • Forces teamplay. Players are not self-sufficient in all cases, and need other people from time to time. Dissenters noted that WoW succeeded in part because of its high soloability.
  • Diversity. Shockingly, freeform systems almost always devolve into 2 or 3 killer templates. Class systems tend to result in more strongly different archetypes.
  • Strongly different play experiences. It is easier to make stealth very powerful if the powers that it can be constrained with are well defined — if it can be combined with anything, stealth has to be weakened to account for all possible combinations.
  • Provides direction. Level-based systems offers a very quickly and easily understood goal.
  • Constrained choice. Players get overwhelmed when there are too many choices, and there isn’t enough information for them to make the right one. Classes help constrain those choices to ones the players feel will be fair and balanced.
  • Pacing. In a level-based system, it is much easier to pace out your content in a way that players have to go through it at a certain rate and in a certain order.
  • Continual rewards. The guinea pigs like their pellets. Attempts to make experience-less RPGs have never escaped the niche players into the mainstream.
  • Occupies time. Players want to play the game for 500 hours. What will you have them do for all that time?
  • Replayability. Classes that provide enough of a different experience provide replayability to the game.
  • Tactical transparency. Classes provide imperfect information about your opponent’s capabilities – which makes fighting him a tactical game. If you don’t know anything about your opponent, your tactical choices devolve to one primary attack pattern.
  • Low intensity. Believe it or not, a lot of people play MMOs for low intensity entertainment a lot of the time, similar to popping bubble wrap.

Unsurprisingly, defenders of the class system was strong, whereas few wanted to defend the grind. And when I asked “What’s wrong with the grind?” they were chomping at the bit.

  • It shrinks the game. When advancement is so slow and yet so central, it creates a feel that any time you aren’t advancing is wasted time.
  • It’s not challenging. Grinding up mobs does not offer the tactical challenge that we hoped players would find when we talked about combat on Day 2, largely because players find the optimal reward for the lowest possible risk.
  • Risk-averse behavior. When players don’t take risks, they end up boring themselves to death. In most MMOs, players are hysterically low-risk (and low-intensity players) until they decide to run an instance or a raid. I argue that this actually is a pretty nifty breakdown.
  • Boring and infuriating. I don’t feel this needs more elaboration, but it was mentioned quite a few times.
  • Hard to prop up the content with grind behavior. Quests in MMOs tend to be dull, simplistic affairs. Some feel the grind is definitely holding back the quality of the stories and the quests.
  • It’s a crutch, stifles innovation. We’re unoriginal hacks, yadda yadda yadda.
  • The grind enables macroers and eBayers. If it’s hard to grind up a character, it creates a secondary market for that character.
  • Genre reputation. The fact that most of these games devolve into the grind is holding us back from reaching a broader market that is used to getting to the good part of the game faster.
  • Creates unhealthy play patterns. You know that feeling you get after you’ve played 12 hours straight?
  • Separates from friends. The level system makes it so friends can’t play with each other, which really should bug more people in this largely social genre.
  • On classes: restrictive. Not enough ways for players to represent their own identity, or create truly innovative character builds that surprise the designers.
  • On classes: immutable choice. If you decided you chose the wrong class, you’re stuck with it. In MMOs, it is frequently the only balance-based decision you can’t undo.
  • Forces grouping. People don’t want to depend on mouthbreathers to enjoy their game.
  • RPS problem. Too many designers use Rock-Paper-Scissors at the class level instead of the tactics level, which results in no-win (and therefore no-fun) situations, especially in PVP.

Overall, it should note that participants had far more favorable things to say about classes than the grind, and far more unfavorable things to say about the grind than classes — which probably suggests where innovation should try to focus.

As my closing thought, I stressed, in terms of the grind: don’t confuse the delivery mechanism with the reward. The grind is not boring because it has experience points and is level-based. It’s boring because killing 2500 of the same monster makes you want to kill yourself. I pointed out that one of WoW’s strongest innovations is having their quests be rewarding enough that people do them, resulting in people actually going to different places and killing different things (my article on pattern breaking discusses this more).

I hope that everyone that came to the talks enjoyed them – they’re always a lot of fun, and I think we had a very good and interesting discussion. The room was full all three days, with one of the days having greater than 80 people, but still didn’t seem to have problems communicating. And this year, we didn’t have anyone ranting about their Druid being nerfed.

Now I need to think of a topic for NEXT year’s roundtable.

Original comments thread is here.