Disclaimer: Faction grinding is not actually fun

by Seraphina Brennan Jun 8th 2008 at 7:00PM

Filed under: World of Warcraft, Fantasy, Game mechanics, Endgame, Opinion

Faction grinding may be a bore, but it is a necessary evil in games like World of Warcraft. As much as you may not like sitting around an area and killing the same creatures over, and over, and over again for items, you may be doing just that once you hit the level cap and have nothing better to do. All of a sudden, that faction grind is looking mighty tempting.

Kaliope heard through the grapevine that Blizzard might be considering a new method of achieving faction points. One of the possible ideas mentioned: letting faction unlocks occur on an server level rather than on a per-character basis. Instead of doing the grind with every single one of your characters on a server, only your main would have to grind all the way up to exalted. Then, all of your characters on that server could claim the benefits of having the exalted level.

Obviously this would mean some angry customers and more high-end items hitting the market, so the idea isn't perfect. But there's an interesting discussion going on at Kaliope's blog about how to ease the grind so it actually can become fun, rather than a slow and painful gameplay element.

Tags: blizzard, faction-grind, faction-recipes, faction-reputation, grind, rep-grind, reputation, world-of-warcraft, wow

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Ash said on 7:12PM 6-08-2008

Rep grinding is a nightmare, and anything to make it easier would be great, of course a better way would be to take the system and make it fun, but sadly I don't see it happening as grind-fests in wow (and pretty much every other mmo at the moment) seems to be the only way of slowing people down, rather than providing ample content, so you end up with a week of dull, crap repetitive shit, for 2 days of fun. It would be nice for one of the figure out a system that is fun to do as well, rather than just feeling like a desperate attempt to throw a time-sink at you to slow you down.

torak said on 1:02AM 6-09-2008

I agree, its no fun at all and thats why I don't play WoW.

However, it has worked and captured one of the largest player bases in the genre.

Unfortunately, people apparently need clear, simple, linear, pre-determined goals in an MMO these days. These games have changed a lot since they started. It was a sad day when "kill 10 rats" became a "quest".

Coherent said on 2:05AM 6-09-2008

We have to ask the question: what's the point of faction grinding at all? Obviously it's intended to keep people playing longer than they would normally without it.

So any alternative that they consider would have to be something that caused you to spend the same amount of time in the game as regular faction grinding.

BUT maybe they've looked into their magical crystal ball and found that most people only faction grind with one character anyway, so allowing all of their characters to enjoy the benefits of it would not adversely affect the time spent grinding normally.

ScytheNoire said on 2:21AM 6-09-2008

This is just news now? Faction grinding wasn't fun back when the game was released. It's never been fun. It's a dumb system that does nothing more than kill a lot of time. It's one of the huge flaws with WoW that needs to go, and hopefully they won't have in their next MMO.

NekoAli said on 7:18AM 6-09-2008

I'll have to agree here as well. The first time around, it's not absolutely terrible. Especially since you're probably doing it at the same time as your friends, and the content is fresh and new, so people don't mind doing the same content many times to get the required rep. But by the time now that people are bringing alt characters up, it becomes a boring chore, and difficult to put a group together to make your 20th run on the dungeon of the week.

I know I'm working on a warlock now that has been my last pet project, an enchanter and jewelcrafter. Which means I need to be revered or exalted with pretty much every faction to get the crafting patterns that are useful at level 70, and it's hard getting those reps.

I actually like how they do the Tranquillen rep in Ghostlands. I know it was meant to be sort of a 'reputation primer' for new players, but they made it work without unnecessary grinding. As you do quests for them, you gain pretty much a percentage of the rep to Exalted. So by the time you've done nearly all the quests available for them, you've topped out. No muss, fuss or grinding necessary.