Force Sensitive Archive

Some food for thought this morning. I'm not expecting answers or the Devs to fix anything, but this has been bugging me and I wanted to vent.

I've been thinking about this over the last month or so since I've been glowy. The grind is a bad way to implement FS/Jedi. I'm not saying it should be easy - on the contrary, it should be a difficult, time consuming process.

Grinding is not hard.

Grinding is time consuming, tedious, and potentially expensive. Grinding is the same unlock process we've been going through since the Holodaze. Grinding is as difficult as running your favorite crafting/healing macro or spamming your favorite specials. (And yes, or lobbing grenades by the crateload.) Which is to say, painfully simple.

Grinding is not content.

The devs are obsessed with grinding, it seems. From a business angle, it makes sense - if everyone is spending weeks or months grinding, those are weeks or months they're continuing to renew. From a player perspective, we all tend to look at it as a means to an end. But why do we keep accepting this over and over? Why do we find grinding itself acceptable, when we were promised a quest based path? Sure, every three weeks there's a single quest to do, but then it's back to the grind.

What does the grind accomplish? It doesn't slow (most) people down, waiting for the next unlock in the village does that. It doesn't require any skill at or knowledge of the game, other than finding the fastest way to finish it. Grinding is there to keep us busy and hide the utter lack of content.

Ok, getting off the soapbox now. Next?

MC

their crying for content cause there is none ,and what is considered content has either become boring to them or way too hard i.e DWB , corvette ,krayt BOOM!. space isnt content imo so dont say it is..no one plays sapce except probably a few hundred people across all servers.jedi is content to people ..so if they want to make suggestions on the current and future ways to attain jedi ,whats it gonna hurt?

get soe to publicly show server population and how many people are on the ground and in space and i bet my numbers aint too far off..the problem is they put out a dumb space expansion instead of listening to the people who bought the game for what it provided them initaly (a crafting system unlike any other,vast planets and caves to discover and kill/loot enemies for better weapons / weapon parts ,armor componets etc). no one bought this game expecting to fly in space. they excepted a ground game complete with quests ,player interaction and endless content.

i been playing this game since june 04, i was completely bored out of my mind after 3 months , i had mastered about 8 professions ,had killed as many jantas as my gaffi could take made millions from missions and selling loot.. only thing left to conquer was jedi ,the corvette and dwb ,and at the time just seeing a krayt dragon would of been content let alone fighting one... nothing else interested me yet those 3 things seemed unattainable..(well not jedi ) but the 2 best places (and the only forms of content to me)were very much not attainable to complete -dwb and corvette-.

people want content, they want an endless number of profitable quests yet challenging ones also ..not just run 4 errands for someone get a ancient treasure map ,goto the wp in the krayt gravyard and loot a schematic that sells for 750k. lol, and that quest i just mentioned is the best one ive found in game to date. it has the best reward anyways.. BH investigation completely sucks .. i did it for about 6 hours and never even killed anything worthwhile ..maybe if we were hunting some jedi npc padawans or something that might have made it fun ,but no it sucked pretty bad travelling 12000m to kill some dumb meatlump type smugglers and loot 120 credits...

the other quests worth mentioning are the hero of tat quests which are not attainable by everyone unless a ranger is involved//and rangers arent exactly falling out of the sky on my server.. one of the rewards is a nice rez ring but other than what i mentioned in this post not much else remains in form of content .. oh the geo cave ,which is full of cave-camping-kill-stealing swordsmen or jedi so lets not even bother with that hole...

there is a vast resource of novels available to get ideas for quests and missions ..there is a few planets we hear about in movies or novels not in the game ..lets start to see some new stuff and maybe people will give up complaining about jedi this ,gank sqaud that etc.. the village quests sucks etc etc .. the devs brought all the complaints on themselves or whoever is assigning work to the devs needs to take a good long look at the future of this game and listen to the people who allready left the game, not the whiners who remain. jtl came out and for every 1000 players that quit i bet 1 newb bought the game to fly in space ..

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Implementor wrote:

the solution be simple, no?....don't grind. play the game and the xp will come. I haven't done any xp grinding at all, just played as i usually do. sometimes I am capped for days and days before I make time to visit village. And lo, another week and I be done.

I see it as a choice, grind if you wish or have fun and let come what may.

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This is an answer I've heard a lot since the unveiling of this new system

Thing is, I've hardly grinded since the village openedand I got glowysometime inSeptember, 2004. It was phase 1,because theAssembly FS Crafting box was the one I unlocked. Then I spent days grinding ABECs with my Doctor Crafting skill andI ground out 1 box of Assembly in Crafting, thendays more grindinga second box when Experiment opened up in Phase 3.

Then I 'just played'. I'm about 9/10ths done with one Melee Speed box from combat I've done over the past 6 months. Crafting normal items and factory schematics have yeilded about 1k FS xp total in that amount of time. I've unlocked a couple more trees, but haven't even got the Novice Box in their groups yet.

At this rate, by letting come what may,I should finish the 6 trees by around 2018. Grinding is the only way to produce the amounts of xp required by these trees. And I won't do it.

Quest-Based FSSystem. Bah.

I've gotten some neat items, though! That's all the Village is worth to a me as a casual gamer. My Bacta Tank sold for a pretty penny...

Message Edited by Rodian-Bob on 02-19-2005 04:02 PM

Message Edited by SalomonXsjado on 02-19-2005 04:14 PM

The only real reason I see to grind is that if you don't, SOE will change the rules so you can't make it to jedi under the present system. Happened to many in the previous system, and will happen again if they change much about the combat system or the village. They say that a semi-casual gamer should be able to do it in 6 months start->end, but don't leave systems in place that long.

If the CURB comes through and severely impacts our ability to gain experience, etc. Then this won't be true. Luckily, I still think the CURB is months away from going live.

Er... I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't think I'm being treated unfairly. In fact, as others have commented, I'm pretty pleased to be able to tell exactly where I am in the process, as compared to the "Grind X professions, hoping to hit your random set." I'm just expressing disappointment that the quest based system that they hyped turned out to be "Gather this set of badges, then do a minimum of six quests at the rate of one per three weeks. Oh, and grind 111,750,000 points of weapon XP and 11,175,000 points of combat XP."

Maybe I should clarify:

I was a casual hologrinder on a different toon than the one I ultimately made glowy. I did three, fourth was silent, and then did a whopping two more professions over the course of about two months. That aside, I left the game pre-Pub 9 due to burnout from trying to maintain an architect business while (only) harvesting my own resources. I was in a cycle of spending hours a day gathering resources, moving harvesters, and really, in the final analysis, enjoying myself far less than I enjoy the FS grind. When I realized that I basically felt like I'd taken a second job and was paying for the "privilege," I knew it was time for a break. The last thing I heard about jedi before leaving was "Hologrind going away! New quest based system coming! Everything changes in Pub 9 and Pub 10!"

I came back in December to see how this new quest based system worked. Before I checked out the FAQs, I was all geared up to start this quest process, expecting something like a cross between the themeparks and the Hero of Tat quest, only much longer and much more complicated. I was geared up for some epic quest series that would take me months, maybe years to complete. After all, this had been in the works for months both before and after I left.

I was horribly naive, and unbelievably optimistic. Yes, as others have pointed out, it's pretty unreasonable to expect such a thing to have been developed in tandem with JtL and at the same time as maintaining other updates. Mea culpa, I set my sights too high.

When I did finally look into it... Well, like I said, I was pretty disappointed. After chewing it over for a month or so, I made the decision to push on anyway, and as I said in my first post, I'm not expecting changes or anything. I wanted to vent my frustration and the FS forum - where, in theory, most people are going through/have been through the same things - seemed the place to do it.

Someone made a passing comment about the kind of process we're talking about here essentially requiring the kind of resource dedication of a full expansion. With hindsight being 20/20, I not only think that's a reasonable analysis of the situation, I think it could have been a great idea.

Ah well. The real content in this game is what we make of it anyway. Doing the Phase 4 melee quest with a couple of different groups of likeminded strangers was one of the best experiences I've had in this game, and that makes dealing with the rest of it that much easier.

See y'all in the village.

MC