Many games with online components have tasks that either need to be done on a daily/monthly/yearly basis or that give you a sizable bonus for doing so. Many of these tend to be things that a lot of players end up doing even if they don't want to, because they will be beneficial to their standing in the grand scheme of the game. When they stop being fun, I tend to think of these as gaming chores. Examples include: Daily quests in WoW or other MMORPGs Managing buying and selling on a real-time Auction House in WoW, Eve Online, and other MMORPGs Managing player-operated-structures or switching skill training in Eve Online (really, there's a lot of this in Eve Online - still a fantastic game, though) Even mostly offline games like Animal Crossing had some similar things where you had to play on certain days or at certain times, I believe. I guess if you wanted to, you could include mindless grinding in single-player games (i.e., repeatedly farming souls in Dark Souls to upgrade stuff) I'm mostly posting this because in Guild Wars 2 I need 18 more WvW kills by the end of the month to get my monthly bonus. The monthly bonus would be really nice, but I don't really want to play WvW that much in the next few days. I'd rather play XCom and a few other games. But I'll probably suck it up and play for a few hours because I'm so close and it would feel like a bit of a waste not to finish up all the monthly quests. So, thoughts on gaming chores? Are you able to not do them when you know they won't be as much fun as you could have doing other stuff? Examples of good and bad ones? It's kind of crazy to play games when you know you won't have that much fun (grinding dailies in WoW was probably the worst example of this) but many of us do it. It might be inevitable in MMORPGs since you can't play a game for 1000 hours and have every single minute be a pure shot of fun.
Much of that style gaming went away when I stopped trying to shoe-horn MMO's into my overly busy life. Even before I made that move, I had to have a sort of private dialogue with myself late one night when I realized I was logging into a game way too late at night to try and pound out a few activities I really had no interest in, simply to achieve whatever virtual carrot was being dangled. It's so counter-intuitive, and I was immediately struck by how strong the allure of these incentive based "chores" became regardless of the fact that they were, in and of themselves, direct impediments to my enjoyment. I cut them out, and stopped paying even remote attention to anything I didn't find fun. This eventually led to me understanding that, as a whole, I don't really enjoy MMO's all that much either (Darkfall excluded) in fact most of my continued play was based entirely on doing things I didn't really find all that exciting.
One man's chore is another man's fun. Personally I always like putting my auctions up at the end of the day, it's like a game within a game. I also don't mind grinding in JRPGs, it can be relaxing in it's own way. The grinding I'm doing in Dark Souls is great because I'm experimenting with different tactics and weapons while doing it, plus it makes me better at predicting an enemy's attack. It's not as mindless either, you still have to pay attention. Chores I don't like are having to craft the same item over and over again to grind up a skill, like crafting in WoW or in Skyrim. Levelling up weapon skills was a pain too in WoW, luckily they removed that. Another chore in games I despise are mini-games that aren't optional (and sometimes no fun like the ball game in FF X) and vehicle sections like the Mako in Mass Effect 1 and flying the Ebon Hawk in KOTOR.
I'm sure the threshold beyond which something becomes more work than fun is different for each of us, but I try and make a point to disengage whenever I cross my own line. It may not mean anything to anyone else, but I despise pointless crap like that. I have a similar attitude towards Achievements on XBL - I'll do them if they sound like a fun challenge, but if they end up being more frustrating than entertaining, I drop it and move on. Same approach recently to 100% Synchronization objectives in AC3 - some of them are downright ridiculous and attempting them results in a net loss of fun for me rather than a gain. If I feel like I'm close and it's a mission I enjoy, I might replay or load from checkpoint to keep trying, but early on I just decided not to care overmuch about hitting 100% completion throughout - it's just not worth the time and frustration.
I actually like having to do a task to get better at it, like in the Elder Scrolls games. It feels more believable to me and helps in games that make more than a token attempt to provide immersion. The problem is they often make the advancement feel grindy or unnatural so players are tempted to game the system to improve their stats. Morrowind was replete with bunny-hopping adventurers improving their acrobatics, for example. In general I find I'm now able to move past the things I don't enjoy and just stick to what I find entertaining. If the game starts putting up blocks in the form of activities that gate my progress in the overall game and I don't find the activities worthwhile, the game gets put aside, clearing the way for the next in my million mile backlog.
Shouldn't 18 WvW kills be relatively quick? like 20 minutes or so? Some time at the beginning of this year I bought a cheap two month subscription offer for WoW to try it out. However, like before (it was the third time I tried WoW) It didn't even keep me entertained for 2 weeks of sporadic gaming. Still having more than a month left I decided to try another facet of the game. I scraped together 1000 gold and experimented with the auction house. It was actually great fun. While the individual WoW servers are relatively small (+faction splitting) the high activity of players and great variance of playstyles made that a very entertaining venture. There were quite a lot of ways to make money. New players and twinks always needed lowish level items, creating a very stable market of small profit but effortless trading. Gathering materials likewise followed a rather predictable cycle. Weekends drove prices up, weekdays drove them down (amount of players, depending on the goods it could also be the other way around). Older tiers of gathering materials had much higher profit margins than the newest tier, because many players always play/farm the new end zones and those crafting materials. The old tiers still retained value for crafting levelling and certain recipes that didn't become obsolete, with few people farming those "worthless" low tier materials. There was a hideously huge gap between what value a player saw in a stack of netherweave he picked up over time just levelling and what someone who just wanted to level tailoring asap was ready to pay for it. Quite often the 2nd tier of materials was actually more expensive than the highest tier, with a market much more volatile short term (high profit margins!) but very dependable long term. Then of course there are certain rare drop items people just got rid of without having an idea of a standard price. Easily exploitable. Individual crafters often sold large quantities of high value products far below standard price too, just to get rid of it. Which could then be sold at a nice profit over the next few days in smaller stacks by the alert entrepreneur. Just exploiting the inattentiveness or lack of caring of so many players you could easily make a virtual fortune. In four weeks, starting at zero knowledge on the WoW economy, I managed to turn that 1k gold into 75k, with an additional 30-40k in goods ready to be sold. Just by buying and reselling. So much more entertaining and fun than the actual WoW! And much less time consuming. Once you established a certain knowledge level just 15 minutes can earn you thousands of gold. Sorry for the slight derail. :P I guess you could take away from it that some people's chores are other people's entertainment.
I've actually had different reactions to this question at different times. There have been times when I felt the various dailies in WoW were fun and relaxing and other times when I felt like they were a hassle. Part of me wants to say that the design was either better or worse depending on the expansion but another part of me thinks I just have a shifting tolerance/enjoyment for that kind of thing.
That's what you'd think. My last 18 took at least a couple hours. It was hard to find a good-sized battle where two sides just traded kills for a while - mostly it seemed like the different factions were on different maps and the zerg would cap lightly defended points and pick up a few kills here and there along the way. Also, sometimes my Guardian wasn't always able to do enough damage quickly enough to get credit. I guess it might go a bit faster on my Mesmer.
I definitely go through different moods on this. Right now anything that's just "click here a lot to win" is on the shelf for a while. Even though I generally like MMOs or games like Torchlight, recently I don't even want to think about them and instead I'm looking to play with some actual skill requirement, like racing or a new FPS.
Like you mention there's a lot of this in Eve. I spent half an hour of Eve time last night assembling ships for the week ahead. The monotonous cycle of: assemble frigate, equip predefined fitting, name and insure takes about 1min per ship if you're concentrating, and in a typical week I'll lose 30-50 of the things. I also need to buy the ship hulls and fittings off the market, then organise a courier to take them to my staging system, but that time is filed under "fun" when for many people I suspect it wouldn't be. Apart from this near inevitability (you can avoid it by going to null and flying doctrine fleets) my Eve time is highly productive right now. Like others in this thread I try hard to minimise gaming chore time.
I very rarely play games like this. Grinding usually means I'm done playing. But, I'm working through Borderlands 2 again just to go through the new game + mode with a character I like more. So, spending like 20 hours in a game so I can spend 30 more hours in the game....
Speaking of the first post, Animal Crossing is a nightmare example for anyone that gave a crap about getting certain accomplishments. For example, in the Wii installment, there are breedable flowers that have to do with an invisible, but vaguely checkable town rating in game. And if you don't have an OUTRAGEOUS, gameplay-hindering ammount of flowers and trees present and maintained in town every day, your town rating is lowered. This penalized how lon git take for characters to move into town if you have space, and prevents you from getting the 'golden watering can.' The can is mostly just a trophy, but this is the ONLY way to unlock it - 15 days straight of being told you have a perfect town rating. Which means watering like, 300+ individual flower spots daily. It takes a long time and it's nail-pullingly tedious. The benefits of getting this watering can are that ALLEGEDLY, it waters more than one flower at a time. But it's IMPOSSIBLE to tell, since the graphic doesn't change. So if you just guess at what space si beign watered, invariably a bunch of your flowers die. Aside from that, it can turn withered black roses into gold roses. This is 'exciting' because they're worth the most to sell of all flowers at 500bells. That ammount of money is minicule by the game's standards and could easily be made in two minutes through buging or fishing as opposed to the OUTRAGEOUS ammount of real time and effort needed first to make black roses, let them wither, then sell them as gold the next day. Seriously though, anything that was fun about the original two Animal Crossing games was slaughtered horrifically by the third one. The game feels like one huge troll on you for playing sometimes.
The worst for me is when I get sick of a single-player game but feel like I'm close enough to the end that I want to finish it. Inevitably it turns out I'm about two hours further from the ending than I think I am, so I slog out that last two hours with my teeth clenched and end up disliking the game. Best example for me is Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2.
Now I have had kids I have absolutely no patience for any game element that isn't fun. Makes buying games a lot easier (MMOs are basically right out, for one).
That was hilarious Raife! I hate grinding/dailies. I hate them with a passion. Which is not good when I'm a bit of an achievement whore on the Xbox as well and a family man. Hard to balance all those. But a game has to be really, really interesting for me to grind out. For instance I have all but the flag/feather-gathering achievements in Assassins Creed 1+2 and those are some of my favourite games of all time. Even those games could not get me to grind out those last 2-3 achievements.
