The Daily Eagle

Looking for Party

Written by Tommy Sandrin, Grade 11

In this series of articles I’m planning on looking into various aspects of MMORPGs (Massive Multiple Online Role-playing Games for any non-gamers out there) and how they’ve changed over the years. In this one, I’ll be looking at grinding. The act of grinding is killing the same monsters or repeating the same quests over and over again to gain EXP (experience) and money. Grinding is in pretty much every single RPG known to man. When you just walk around and look for monsters to fight? That’s grinding. Grinding is usually the answer to a hard boss fight; can’t beat him? Grind up some levels and then try again.

Now today we will mainly be looking at two MMORPGS, ones that I’ve played a lot, World of Warcraft (WoW) and Maplestory (MS) , both take different approaches to grinding and the level system in general. Let’s start off with WoW. When I played it was in the Burning Crusade, the max level cap was 70 and you spent a fairly long time in Outland (which by the way is one of the most beautiful video game worlds I’ve ever seen. I’ll try not to gush too much about it), starting from level 55ish. Each level took a fairly long time, about a day of decent playing, not just messing around in town, and every level felt like a battle. When you levelled up, you got rewards right away in the form of talent points. Each of these could be used to further increase your character’s damage and skills; you could gain extra spells you wouldn’t normally get just by levelling, as well as just a general increase to your effectiveness. You looked forward to each talent point because you could see everything you could get! You could plan out your builds, see which talents appealed to you the most, it made you want to level up and it gave you a good reward to look forward too, along with the max level bringing flying mounts and a whole lot of new and exciting raids, which I’ll cover dungeons in a later article. Now in WoW levelling is a lot easier, and to balance that, the talent point system was changed wildly. In Cataclysm, you got one point every few levels; and in Mists of Pandaria, you only get a few points in total! The changes made sort of balanced out how easy it is to level now, when I played in Cataclysm with my friends we all levelled so fast it was crazy, and I found it very… hollow. You didn’t feel like you achieved much.

Now Maplestory, is a whole different beast, the max level in that is 200, excluding the Cygnus Knights, and you are meant to level faster than in WoW because the level cap is higher. Maplestory does an amazing job of giving you many little rewards. If you are playing as a Magician, your magic claw spell changes colours as you level up, making you feel stronger. At level 10, 30, 60 and 100 you get a job advancement, giving you a flashy new title and a whole host of new skills to play around with, as well as the ability to do more things, like MS’ version of raids, more party quests, and new places to train, which in an incredibly grind heavy game like Maplestory, is pretty dang awesome. However back in old Maplestory, pre big bang patch, everything was pretty different. Back then level 30 was amazing, it took literally a month of good solid playing to get it, and anything past that...? That was damned impressive! When you saw a high level back then, you had respect, they’d earned what they’d got and if you ever managed to get that high you felt like you’d achieved something. What does this all mean though? What does it mean for the genre as a whole? It means games are evolving and changing. The fact that it is easier to level means that more casual gamers can get in and get to the more interesting parts of the game quicker, but is this good? Well, that depends. If you are a hardcore gamer you might not feel it’s fair that someone can work for a short amount of time and get huge rewards, and it might directly impact you. MMO’s have an economy, again which I’ll go over in another article, and if suddenly a lot of people are high level they’ll need higher level gear, and this could have radical effects on you and your enjoyment of the game. My thoughts are that I don’t like the way WoW is going with it, but on the flip-side I like what Maplestory is doing to an extent. I enjoy the easier levelling, but I still want enough of a challenge so that I feel like I achieved something; not just me slamming through a ten levels an hour- that’s not fun, that’s just mindless busy work, and I do enough of that in school! On another note though, on the topic of addiction to these online games, someone might say that making it easier to level will lessen the addictions. I personally feel like it will do nothing; if you can spend the same amount of time to get one level as it is to get three you might actually worsen the addiction, but that’s just my thoughts. I want to know what everyone else thinks, however! Avid gamers, leave some comments on your thoughts!