Hearts are NOT quests, are NOT grindy

[Alaris]

I was saying that choice depends on outside factors (such as population)

Partly true, but also true of other MMORPGs. Mind you, the problem is less so in GW2 with scaling (which still needs work, but it's better than no scaling) and resource nodes many people can use.

If you could do 10/10/10 but decide to go for 0/0/30, the later activity fits better into the definition of grinding.

Anything above 1/1/1 fits the definition of grinding, in that you have to redo content in order to earn your progress. But it's unreasonable to ask for every monster be unique (unless it's Shadow of the Colossus, in which case you get 12 or 13 monsters in the whole game).

What's really under debate though is whether the grind if felt. People don't mind grind that they don't feel.

When you say 10/10/10 is less grindy than 0/0/30 without distinction made as to whether players could choose, that's a mistake. ArenaNet understood that. Both scenarios ask you to repeat tasks. But in terms of how it feels, if you can pick how to fill the counter it automatically feels less grindy because you will choose to go about however you enjoy it more.

And it is less grindy because say they don't fix the scaling properly, if you can't kill monsters then you can do something else to contribute. So you're not stuck there trying to catch monsters before everyone else, you can get yourself unstuck. If the quest had been "kill 10 rats, then kill 10 big rats, then collect 10 rat skins", at high population you would not be able to finish the two first parts.

Except instead of reading it I just put my game face on, my fingers firmly on the wasd keys, and then used my right mouse finger to scroll past all the walls of text.

The way you get stuck on ideologies, me gusta.

[Twyst Tye]

Okay, I agree with all the fanboys here, but I'm not quite seeing it expressed the way I think of it in my head, so here goes.

Seriously. Every time I see someone mention hearts as quests or as grindy, alarm bells go off. I don't know which game they're fanboy of, or whether everything has to be forced within a word, even if it means using the word grind for something that is no longer grind....

Here's another response option you can provide to the naysayers: Grind is having to perform the “kill 10 rats” series ad nauseum before you can move on. GW2 hearts are more akin to an ala carte menu of things to do before you move on, and you only have to select a small number of them.

Yes, you must complete some hearts to advance the linear progression of your character - linear progression is inherent to gaming - but you do not have to complete every single heart (as grindy games would require) and you certainly do not have to repeat killings multiple times or circle the map daily killing all the rats for ten days in order to earn enough XP to advance to the next area (as grindy games would require).

Grindy games keep you stuck in one place so long that you get bored and have to have some serious stamina or determination to get through to the next area.

GW2 is not grindy because there are more opportunities for earning XP within a map area than what you actually need to progress; there is no need to repeat (and repetition is key to the definition of grind).

[Alaris]

Grind is food. You need to eat to be full.

GW2 hearts is like a buffet. You eat whatever you want, and if you don't like something you can eat something else. You can mix and match too.

Regular quests is like eating at someone's house. You are stuck eating whatever they are serving. They might be disappointed if you don't like something, so you have to pretend that you like it.

[Twyst Tye]

GW2 hearts is like a buffet. You eat whatever you want, and if you don't like something you can eat something else. You can mix and match too.

I hereby petition ArenaNet to change the Hearts to Apples ... oh! or Drumsticks. Yes, little chicken drumsticks.

[RD]

No food icons; then I'll get hungry every time I play.

In LotRO, you could use food to regenerate your HP / Mana faster. At one point in the game, I seemed to always have Blueberry Muffins in my inventory. I ate so many blueberry muffins in real life as a result.

[harniq]

Not sure why this would warrant a separate thread as it has already been debated at length, but here we go again.

Hearts are a combination of traditional quests (kill, fedex, collect, etc.) that get automatically added/removed without the need to interact with a NPC beforehand (some parts require traditional NPC interaction).

Note how your wiki quote does not imply that grinding is about killing, but rather that it's about "engaging in repetitive tasks", where killing is one of many possible tasks. You can therefore turn a hearts event into a grind by choosing to complete it solely through repeating the same out of several possible tasks.

If you choose to make a non-grindy thing into grind, it's not the heart at fault but you. Big difference.

The main advantage is that you can choose to pick a balance by doing a bit of everything. So much in theory, practically you will simply do what's available at a point. You will hardly wait for a "collect" item to reappear and ignore the mobs you could kill that just spawned.

Therefore, the first perceived "freedom of choice" becomes largely irrelevant over time, as spawn cycles will dictate what you will likely be doing and the hearts events (aka quests) will offer the same few ways to complete them, they just dress up differently.

That's your perception, I felt I never had to go out of my way to do the thing I wanted to do and not the thing the game wanted me to do. Spawn cycles are pretty okay, even if the heart gets zerged.

Personally I think you should spend more time with the game and less quoting wiki and theory-crafting.

Speak for yourself. Hearts are NOT grind. If you played the game instead of theorycrafting old habits into new mechanics, you should know that by now.

[harniq]

4) Do you even realize that you're playing a game? I don't really know what people are expecting here, those who want no grind... I mean, I can't conceive of how you'd provide content that nobody would ever call grind.

Do you even realize that you're playing a game? You know, something you do to relax, something that should be fun. Those who accept grind... I can't conceive how people accept broken mechanics into something which is basically a past time activity.

A game with significant grind (korean, vanilla wow, eq...) is not playable by people who work, study, have friends or in any way interact with the real world. I know some people will hate me for this, but then again saying the truth is usually the best way to get hated. There is a world outside the room with your computer in. If you chose to spend any time at all in that outside world, you automatically choose to not grind in games. Too often that means not playing the mmo at all.

I like mmo games, but at an average of 16 hours real life a day, and 6 hours of sleep, it's pretty difficult to get any videogames in at all. So yes I'd really prefer my mmo grind free. I don't think that's a bad thing, quite the contrary. It is me paying the bills, not the person playing 16 hours a day. That might sound grudgy but in our society, it's not acceptable to design games around grinding.

[RD]

Do you even realize that you're playing a game? You know, something you do to relax, something that should be fun. Those who accept grind... I can't conceive how people accept broken mechanics into something which is basically a past time activity.

A game with significant grind (korean, vanilla wow, eq...) is not playable by people who work, study, have friends or in any way interact with the real world. I know some people will hate me for this, but then again saying the truth is usually the best way to get hated. There is a world outside the room with your computer in. If you chose to spend any time at all in that outside world, you automatically choose to not grind in games. Too often that means not playing the mmo at all.

I like mmo games, but at an average of 16 hours real life a day, and 6 hours of sleep, it's pretty difficult to get any videogames in at all. So yes I'd really prefer my mmo grind free. I don't think that's a bad thing, quite the contrary. It is me paying the bills, not the person playing 16 hours a day. That might sound grudgy but in our society, it's not acceptable to design games around grinding.

QFT. I agree 100%. I just don't have time for a grind and, as a grown up, even when I have the time (like this weekend), I don't have the patience.

[satenia]

If you choose to make a non-grindy thing into grind, it's not the heart at fault but you. Big difference.

I was simply saying it's theoretically possible. After all, the hearts events offer freedom of choice (or not...).

That's your perception, I felt I never had to go out of my way to do the thing I wanted to do and not the thing the game wanted me to do. Spawn cycles are pretty okay, even if the heart gets zerged.

Yeah maybe you should have played past the starter area.

Speak for yourself. Hearts are NOT grind. If you played the game instead of theorycrafting old habits into new mechanics, you should know that by now.

I'm quite confident that I have played the beta and its heart quests at length, so far nothing in this thread has convinced me you did anything close to it. Even the majority of replies here suggest that these events are similar to quests and have a touch of grind to them, I'm still waiting for a proper explanation past wiki-quoting to warrant your claims in the OP.

I like mmo games, but at an average of 16 hours real life a day, and 6 hours of sleep, it's pretty difficult to get any videogames in at all. So yes I'd really prefer my mmo grind free. I don't think that's a bad thing, quite the contrary. It is me paying the bills, not the person playing 16 hours a day. That might sound grudgy but in our society, it's not acceptable to design games around grinding.

Consider accepting that you simply don't have the time available to play a MMO. The reason why I love(d) GW1 immensely is because I could make the most out of the few hours (if at all) I had available to play each day, thanks to instances and heroes/henchmen. This is why I choose it over WoW or something like that, I could never free up the time to do endgame content there. I think it's quite unreasonable to ask for MMO's to fit any very casual gamer type who can squeeze in an hour or two a day at max. There is stuff like handy games for you.

This goes pretty much for any kind of hobby. If you can't spare the time required for it, just don't bother. It's still a great hobby for people who can.

[bearsfwd]

Do you even realize that you're playing a game? You know, something you do to relax, something that should be fun. Those who accept grind... I can't conceive how people accept broken mechanics into something which is basically a past time activity.

A game with significant grind (korean, vanilla wow, eq...) is not playable by people who work, study, have friends or in any way interact with the real world. I know some people will hate me for this, but then again saying the truth is usually the best way to get hated. There is a world outside the room with your computer in. If you chose to spend any time at all in that outside world, you automatically choose to not grind in games. Too often that means not playing the mmo at all.

I like mmo games, but at an average of 16 hours real life a day, and 6 hours of sleep, it's pretty difficult to get any videogames in at all. So yes I'd really prefer my mmo grind free. I don't think that's a bad thing, quite the contrary. It is me paying the bills, not the person playing 16 hours a day. That might sound grudgy but in our society, it's not acceptable to design games around grinding.

No one said designing games around grind is acceptable. However, you have to accept that there is grind in games. A game that has no grind would consist of the following:

1. No leveling system (gotta kill those monsters repeatedly or do those boring quests)
2. No quests (kill 10 zombies...then kill 10 zebras...then kill 10 zombie zebras...OK I GET IT)
3. No gear stats (lets see, my armor is +20, but there is +40 available, have to make sure I always have the best armor)

Shall I continue? If you can tell me one game that doesn't have grind, I'd love to hear it. Preferably of the MMO and/or RPG type...not sure if Tetris has anything resembling grind.

If you want to get into the real gist of grind, it's really determined by the player. If you were around for the beginning of GW, you should remember how in order to do PvP, you had to partake in the PvE portion of that game. There were a LOT of PvP people complaining about that. Basically, to them, the entirety of PvE was grind, since it was something they HAD to do to get to something they enjoyed. I wouldn't be surprised if on the other side of the coin, there were PvE people who HATED the required PvP that you had to do to go from pre-searing to post-searing. You HAD to do it (yes, I know if you log out and log back in, you start just after the PvP portion, but that's basically cheating the system).

Grind, while having a definition, is what you make of it. If you choose to farm the same group of monsters over and over and over for no real reason, that can hardly be considered grind. You obviously enjoy doing it, or else why are you doing it? However, if you choose to farm that same group of monsters over and over and over because you need to make some money because the in game economy is crap, that would be considered grind. You need that money to buy that max weapon mod you want, so you do the farm that is current craze, but you more than likely aren't enjoying it because you feel like you HAVE to do it.

YOU may not find the renown hearts grindy, but other people do. But, when you get right down to it, renown hearts are quests, albeit multiple quests smashed into one "quest". As stated before, in GW1, you could have 3 different, but separate, quests: Kill 10 spiders, gather 20 apples, and kneel at 5 monuments. Now, in GW2, one renown heart could have you doing all 3 of those different quests at one time to complete the heart. You can choose how many spiders you kill, how many apples you gather, and how many monuments you kneel at in order to finish the heart, but the fact is you still have to do those things. If you don't want to do them, then you won't complete the renown heart. And in that situation, the only thing you are missing out on is a bit of XP and the rewards for getting 100% completion in the area.

Proclaiming something isn't grindy doesn't make it not grindy. It just means you enjoy doing it.

Ok, I think I probably repeated myself multiple times there...but I don't care. I'm tired.