The Grind(tm)….It’s part of every MMO out there, whether it’s about collecting gold, status, faction, resources, crafting, spawning of rares or simply getting a less creative quest done. And yes, I did my own share of whiningly bitching about it.
Ofcourse there’s a difference between blatently grind as a simple timesink and a grind wrapped up in a nice questy setting, but my guess is that The Grind(ugh) will be more or less a part of every future MMO too, no matter how many an avid MMO’er will spue discontent mixed with the latest e-Slang on every single web-board in existence…so why not just try and learn to deal with it?
Then again, how the hell do you deal with clicking the same 5 buttons over and over again, in the exact same frequence and the exact same order without going completely and utterly mad? At the start of my own MMO-career(Ffaffners wife: “Pff, career? It’s an addiction, stupid”) I simply clicked the buttons until the in-game music got tattooed into the inner ear of my very soul.
Later on I had the brilliant idea of actually turning off in-game music, and putting on a CD instead. A lot can be said about music, and I personally both love and practice it, but is it really “entertaining” in the long run?
My next move to fight the boredom of powergrinding was to watch some TV during the emptiness of it all. This way I accomplished 2 things: In-game I died a lot and out of game I had no chance following even the simplest plot of the easiest accessible sitcom (I was born before multitasking…OR got dropped on my head by the midwife).
I do actually remember almost overloading my brain one evening during my WoW-days, as I was lying in bed with the laptop doing some horrible, horrible faction-grinding in windowed mode, while having some episodes of Blackadder running in another window AND watching footie on my television…couldn’t walk for days after that. To be fair, I should probably also mention that I learned quite a deal of guitar, playing EQ1 while waiting for spawns, groups, groupmates or raid-setups, so it’s not ALL bad!
Today I think I’ve found my balance on how to cope with the e-Nsanity following a lengthy session dedicated to The Grind(omg). I discovered that to me, radio + grinding really is an effective mixture in getting some cyberwork done and still being entertained. As i have plenty of music in my own cd-collection I am not interested in different charts and playlists, but I am finding more and more talk-radio stations that are quite interesting to listen to. Especially the comedy-orientated ones.
There are plenty of online radiostaions playing loads upon loads of different US/UK standup-material, and I would suggest any other fan of standup-comedy to surf around and look what is available. I have also expanded my own collection of comedy-CD’s in coping with my phobic fear of being bored. It is also possible to find quite a few podcasts of different radio-documentaries on all kinds of interesting subjects, so try rummaging around your local staions websites…or overseas for that matter.
A few years ago I decided to subscribe to the US-based sattelite radiostation Sirius. Most of their channels are streamed online for subscribers, and the fact that hilarious US shock-jock Howard Stern has 2 channels on Sirius makes for hours of great fun while tradeskilling wobbly chairs or dull kitchenknifes in-game.
And now, after droning on about myself, back to what this entry was all about:
What do YOU do to cope with The Grind(ffs)?
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MMOYeti:
mmosymposium:
WodgeFTW:
MMOSres:
Back in the days of EQ1, I managed to cope with The Grind(damn and blast) by… err… leveling a runescape character to level 71, so I think the way to beat The Grind(boring!) is by doing it twice, it possibly works if you multiply The Grind(wtf?!) factor by an integer, I believe it is quite easy to run 3 at once, Eve with it's time based skill leveling, EQ with its tedious waiting for groups, and runescape with it's low system requirements would be ideal.
I tend to just ignore it and always find mini aims for my character. At the moment my aim is to tidy up lower HQ's I havn't done and find and work on new ones. I am also trying to visit areas Yetian hasn't been to before for the AP and exploration.
One of my general ways of going through levels is to just find and complete quests, sure it can get a bit tedious if you've done them before but I always find some I havn't.
I don't have a problem with grind, I tend to surf the net while doing specific camps, or chat in guild.
However podcasts are my bread and butter when things are boring, using iTunes there is a whole host of free podcasts, you just have to delve around in there to find them.
As an example, here is the Tiesto club mix podcast, a new 60min podcast every week;
http://www.radio538.nl/clublife/podcast.xml
There are also a host of BBC comedy podcasts like The Now Show or Friday Quiz show which are all equally funny to listen too.