To grind or not to grind...? (Patreon)

WAIT! Before you vote, please read the full post. It's an important one this time.

Hello everyone and welcome to another poll. This time we're talking about~.... grinding.

So grinding has gotten a pretty bad reputation over the last few decades. Be it from spending hours grinding in mmo's, to micro-transaction filled mobile games that require you to grind your life away. Now the truth is that there are also good aspects to grinding.

In this post I'm going to go over the good and the bad and finally allow you to decide whether you want there to be any in Camp Mourning Wood.

The good

-Added value: Spend a little more time working towards a goal (getting a CG, continuing a story) may cause the pay off to feel more rewarding. Imagine getting a rare mount in an MMO. If everyone was guaranteed to receive it on their first run, then it would lose its value and become uninteresting.

-Shifting perspective: A short grind to reach another story segment is often not so bad. Sure, people might mutter or complain about it a little bit, however it also helps in another way. Without the grind, people might simply focus on the story bits and start to consider that to be the grind of the game. So now a story bit, which used to be a reward, is considered a chore.

-Feeling closer to the character: You might get to appreciate the character more if you need to spend some more time with them. Sitting around the campfire eating dinner, buying gifts, doing side-quests. If there was none of that, then you could just rush through their story and risk forgetting about them later on in the game.

The Bad

-Respecting time: Many games simply do not respect their players time. Therefor balancing grind is very important in games. Too much grind is simply bad.

-Un-expected grind: A good example would be Orange Trainer. At one point in the game, I asked players to get a insanely high amount of the ingame currency. Not believing that anyone would actually grind that out, I put in the follow up quest that would give you that amount simply by doing a few missions. What I did not expect was for players to spent hours actually grinding for it. The quality of the game went down due to players thinking that they needed to grind, while in reality they really didn't.

Final thoughts

So for my final thoughts... I want to keep a little bit of grind. It gives the player a bit more agency as well (having to decide between grinding reputation or simply buying gifts for example).

But I'd love to see what you guys think. There's a lot to be said about grinding. Both good and bad. What do you think CMW should have?