A tale of grinding, sucking and snowboarding
by Kyle Horner 
Jan 17th 2008 at 8:00PM
Filed under: World of Warcraft, Fantasy, Game mechanics
Cameron Sorden has an interesting post about grinding and why it sucks over on his blog, Random Battle. It's mostly focused on World of Warcraft, because like many of us he plays the game quite a bit. We can all agree that grinding endlessly is no fun, but some of the suggestions made by Cameron seem a bit strange. Such as the idea of having a snowboarding mini-game in WoW to off-set the tedium of grinding. Now we get what he's trying to say here, "Add more stuff other than monster killing, quests/raids and battlegrounds please." And sure, putting in a mini-game where you snowboard down the Alterac Mountains wouldn't be the usual grind-fest, but it also has nothing to do with WoW. Then there's his claim that wow needs to become even more casual, which we're not even sure how it could do that without renaming itself "Club Wowkinz" or something. Cameron feels it will be a necessity for World of Warcraft to add new and interesting ways to alleviate the grind, but from what we've seen there are mostly more raids on the horizon. Yet we would argue that even though people say that grinding isn't what they want, they don't seem to realize it's what they keep buying. It's not as if World of Warcraft is nearing 10 million subscribers, right? Oh wait, yeah, it is.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Manu said on 3:21AM 1-18-2008
Well, maybe snowboarding wouldn't work, but... how about some engineering mini-games?
Think Shimmering Flats. Then, settle some 375 engineering mats on some mechanical boss (Mechanar?). Have players buy "pods" from engineers and participate in races where you basically use habilities (nitros) triggering "cooldowns". The better the timing, the better the outcome.
I'd certainly play it. And it would give Shimmering Flats a purpose other than the couple of quests that you currently get.
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Scopique said on 8:55AM 1-18-2008
I don't think the WoW community would know what to DO with anything that doesn't involve smacking each other with their epeens.
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Cameron Sorden said on 12:30PM 1-18-2008
Just because we buy it doesn't mean we like everything about it. There's always room for improvement. ;)
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Ghen said on 1:25PM 1-18-2008
Well, I stuck behind my dislike for the future of end-game (IE: raiding) and canceled a while back :P
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Bleri said on 2:53AM 1-21-2008
Well Snowboarding was just about the only thing in Dark and Light that worked, along with Hang Gliding. They were great fun (shame about the rest) why not introduce something similar?
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