Making grinding feel less grindy

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the introduction of World Quests in World of Warcraft. This new quest type reduces the grindy feeling of repeating certain tasks over and over again.

With the release of Legion, one of World of Warcraft’s (WoW) repetitive gameplay elements received a major change making it feel less grindy despite still requiring players to repeat certain tasks over and over again: Daily Quests were replaced with new World Quests.

Previously, when a player wanted to increase the own reputation towards one of the many factions in WoW, there mostly were only two options: killing a high amount of enemies or completing certain Daily Quests on a regular basis. Both methods rewarded the player with a particular reputation bonus and ultimately allowed the player to reach a faction’s highest reputation level. Reaching higher reputation levels often grants the player access to special items that increase the player’s power or provide them with new toys, pets or mounts.

Getting access to those rewards mostly is the main incentive for players to periodically repeat the same quests until they finally reached the highest level. Although players were motivated by this ultimate goal, this process began to feel very tiresome and grindy after a few days.

World Quests are scattered all across the Broken Isles.

The underlying principle of increasing the own reputation towards a particular factions has not changed in Legion. However, the Daily Quests got replaced with World Quests that are scattered all across the new continent „Broken Isles“. Each World Quest is given by one of the new factions and rewards a player with a reputation bonus upon completion. In addition, the World Quests are also combined with a meta quest for each faction of which each player can have three at maximum. Those meta quests require a player to complete four normal World Quests given by the same faction. Afterwards, the player receives an additional reputation bonus for this faction.

A meta quest requires a player to complete four World Quests.

In the end, although a player is still repeating certain tasks over and over again, the concept of the World Quest successfully reduces the grindy feeling of increasing the reputation towards a particular faction. Unfortunately, dispite the new variety, the tasks are still the same across all the factions: kill a certain amount of enemies, kill a very strong enemy, collect a certain amount of items or craft a new item. However, this does not feel as repetitive as there are so many different World Quests available at a time that a player can skip quests.

In sum, WoW’s new World Quests have successfully reduced the grindy feeling of repeting certain tasks over and over again. The underlying principle has remained the same, but as it feels different to the players, their motivation is much higher and they derive more fun from the gameplay.