Grinding

Grinding is a major concern to a lot of players. It is in fact prevalent in a number of game to different degrees. In some games grinding is in your face. In these games you get to a point that to level up quests just will not do it and you're forced to kill massive amount of monsters until you have enough XP to level up. Other games do this subtlety but its still very frustrating. In these games you will get to meet an NPC, he will tell you some crazy story. He will say something like "I weave shirts for a living but I ran out of material, go kill  some specific animals and get me 20 hides " okey fine, so you spend a few minutes to get to this horde of animals, you exterminate them one by one while the other animals just look at you with no worries at all. Then it turns out while all animals should have a hide this does not drop with each kill, I guess I can understand that as maybe I am botching some of the skinning procedures and ruin some of the hides. Ultimately you end up killing 50 animals to get the 20 hides, fine you walk back to the NPC. Happily you present the NPC the hides you so painstakingly collected but it turns out he's missing buttons to complete his shirt. Surprise Surprise he creates the buttons off the teeth of those same animals, but obviously he couldn't think of that before, oh no he needs to send you back again right back where you just came from... FINE you walk back kill an animal and what no teeth? It can be plausible that I don't get a hide with each kill but that just does not make sense for a tooth! each animal has a mouth full of the stuff how come I need to kill 5 of them before I get just one tooth? Anyhow you exterminate the animals and walk back and suddenly the NPC realizes he needs fur too.. Geee you got to be kidding me! If you played a number of MMOs I am sure all this sounds familiar.

Guild wars is different, NPCs do not ask you to go kill a number of monsters, that doesn't exist in Guild Wars. Each mission is part of the story-line and your objectives will be aligned to that story line. While achieving your goal you will come across monsters and enemy patrols and some of these will need to be engaged while others you can just walk around. One might see this as just another type of grind in disguise however not once did I feel like this was boring or irritating to me, It's probably just psychological but it does feel different.

This is even more apparent if you try to achieve the Vanquisher Title. Guild Wars as already stated is made up of a number of instances, these instance are really large and they are populated by a number of monsters and enemy that patrol around. To get the Vanquisher title you need to go through each instance in hard mode and kill all the monsters and enemy in that instance. On average that means killing 250 monsters and hard mode is actually a little hard. Technically this should be really bad grind, takes about 2 hours to finish one instance however it actually feels enjoyable. I cannot fully explain it but I really find I actually quite enjoy doing it. It's either cause you have a specific objective or because there is purpose to the grind or perhaps even cause the whole endeavor is challenging. The whole vanquish process is rewarding in that while doing it, the progress actually contributes to three different titles, The vanquish title, the explorer tile as well as faction title.  What maybe even more important is that you're not forced to get titles, that's entirely up to you however if you go for it, the rewards do not end in Guild Wars 2. Titles contribute to the hall of monuments points which in turn will give players rewards in Guild Wars 2 when this is released.

What makes Guild Wars different is that it doesn't go with the accepted formula. It might be frustrating but when playing other MMOs then Guild Wars we do not question the major fallouts like how can a monsters not drop one single tooth when killed. In reality it doesn't make sense yet we accept it as in MMOs this is "normal" way of things. This is one reason why playing Guild Wars is such a pleasure! Better yet from what ArenaNet have been saying so far, these kind of questions are at the core for the design of Guild Wars 2.