I liked Chris' response in the AMA about the definition of grind, something to the effect of repetitive tasks that are not fun. I think too often repetitive tasks is all that is used by some people to define a grind.
Yes, that made me very happy. A short and sweet "repetitive gameplay that is not fun" is a very good single-phrase summary of the concept, while not 100% specific.
Essentially, it's a ludicrous premise to expect there to be
nothing repetitive in (at the very least) any multiplayer game- in order to keep people playing with each other, you have to account for the fact that there will constantly be people doing things for the first time. Thus designing content to be repeatable is innately more valuable than designing one-off content, exciting as it may be from time to time.
Fun repeatable content is essentially the best thing an MMO can have. It is what a good MMO
is, really, once you get past the initial experience of plot and power-progression with your character.
And as I noted, even though we almost always discuss grind in terms of MMOs, quiiiiiite a few singleplayer games throw in heaping mounds of grind to pad their lengths. This is a problem that literally goes back to the early days of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Castlevania II requires you to buy plot-advancing items with hearts collected from enemies. If you reach a point in the progression where you don't have the necessary hearts, or- god forbid- have to use a continue, losing your entire stock of hearts- you just have to go find enemies and kill them and get enough hearts and go back to town and buy the item. It is
incredibly manipulative design, and I really feel like GW2 did a remarkable job of avoiding it altogether.
People are mixing up having a personal goal they want to achieve (say, getting an Ascended back piece or a legendary weapon) and the requirements for that goal being extremely hard to attain, with the kind of grind that literally prevents you from progressing
forward unless you do things you don't want to do. It's a matter of perspective, sure, but if you're going after a Legendary or other difficult goals that require (or almost certainly require) you to repeat content, such as a full dungeon gear set, or a full set of T3 cultural armor, you are
doing what you want to do. At this point, any complaining about grind is a tacit admission that you just want whatever you're going after to be easier to achieve. And I can understand that. Plenty of the time it's a reasonable thing to bring up, and I'm all for balancing mat requirements and adding additional avenues to obtaining special items and yadda yadda yadda- hell, I'll probably be glad to never see a skelk again when I finally get my quiver.
I just don't think it's quite intellectually honest to call it grind; or, to be less inflammatory, I just think we're using the word very differently.
