tedium
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The Daily Grind: Are you sick of raid progression?
If there is one concept I would love to see struck from every MMO past, present, and future, it's raid progression. "Progression" even sounds like slow, tedious, unrewarding work, and since I already have a job, I kinda like my video games to be about having fun rather than about spending my evenings inching through raid content designed to kill me repeatedly and make me cry when we get that stupid two-hand axe for the 20th time and not the gear we need to keep... progressing for progression's sake. Raid "progression" is problematic on multiple levels. Games with raid progression create unnatural barriers to entry in guilds (who'd want to recruit someone who's a tier behind in content?). The trappings of raid progression cause powercreep and shatter balance in seemingly unrelated content (like PvP). Only a small number of people ever get to take part. And come the next expansion, of all your progress is effectively nullified. So what about you Massively folks? Are you also sick of MMO "raid progression" being a thing? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Do you think MMOs should be harder?
For every person I see cheering the rise of accessible games, I see another lamenting the "dumbing down" of MMOs. And while I've always liked a good challenge, it seems to me that "challenge" is usually conflated with "tedium" -- most MMO "challenges" test my patience, not my skill. I can understand not wanting a game to be a faceroll, but I'm also glad that we don't have to be professional e-sport champs to participate in this hobby. Still, there's plenty of room between those two extremes for upping the difficulty of combat and crafting without resurrecting obnoxious mechanics like corpse runs and experience loss. What do you think -- should MMOs be harder? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: What game did you spend the most time not playing?
Picture this: it's Saturday afternoon, and you're absolutely determined that you're going to spend some time leveling up in your game of choice. It could be World of Warcraft, it could be Star Trek Online, it could be anything. But you log in, and you note that before you go to town, you just need to check up on your auctions. And, oh, right, there's a bit of crafting you should do. Plus an old friend sent you a letter, you should respond, and the next thing you know four hours have passed and you have to log off without having gotten a single experience point. This doesn't mean that the time spent was a wash, naturally, but looking back you didn't really wind up playing the game so much as existing in the game space whilst doing other things. Sometimes you might even have more fun playing the auctioneer, but it's still time spent in a game all about orc-punching wherein no orcs were punched. So when did you spend the most time not actually playing the game you were logged in with? Was it in-game business that needed your attention, or were you alt-tabbing away until you lost track of time? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Today's most tedious video: Picking weeds in Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing: Wild World for the DS loves guilting its players. Turn the game off before saving? Mr. Resetti shows up to give you a piece of his mind. Go several months without playing the game? Your once-beautiful town will be overrun with weeds that you'll have to pluck one by one if you want to re-beautify the landscape.Today's video shows just how absurd this process can be. It reportedly took 35 non-stop minutes to remove all the weeds that had grown over eleven months of non-play. Still, our videographers aren't without compassion: to alleviate the sheer tedium of the process, a clever editer has chosen to depict the entire process "Benny Hill" style. You can still see how ridiculous it all is, but at least now you can giggle instead of pulling your hair out. Check out the wacky gardening antics after the break. Update: Fixed the number of months.[Via DS Fanboy]
