'mind numbingly repetitive' ?

**cloudwolf** · 01/08/2007 12:52:19

A piece of a post i recently made elsewhere and i thought what the hell, i'll post it over at DN1 SMILEY

Thought it deserved its own thread since its a commonly brought up issue.

On the subject of 'mind numbingly repetitive' a popular phrase comes to mind, "what you put in is what you get out". That is to say if one grinds on the same thing ( in this case standard randomly generated missions ) then they obviously will gain an experience which is 'mind numbingly boring'.

The thing to remember is there are other things to do, other choices available to break up the monotony.

Ran a few standard missions and are starting to feel bored? Then go check out that exile hideout over there, fight the boss and see if the loots good for your class, it is? Then stay around killing mobs for some xp/info and wait for the boss to respawn, try to get the highest level item from there.

That's the monotony broken.

Don't feel like doing more of the same again? Then go do some contact missions in the neighborhood at your current level (for fairly level appropriate xp and individual 'side questy' storylines) or go progress with those archive missions (which tell the story of the game so far giving pretty decent xp and, imo, are far more interesting and involving than standards).

That's the monotony broken.

There's tons of stuff to break up the grind, join a faction and have some good times with them (missioning with mates helps battle the grind so much in my experience), progress into other districts by hunting access codes, have a look at local collectors and see if the loots any good for you, if it is then go farm the mobs for a bit, check out the special loot available in your level range's construct and if its good for ya work at that.

My single greatest piece of advice to anyone thinking of, or is, playing MxO is take things slow and enjoy the content around you. Don't rush to level and grind on standard missions - you'll 'burn out' before ya know it and never appreciate what else was there.

/Discuss

P.S I wasn't sure if i should post this in general or redpill (since its aimed mainly at potentials and newbies), so mods, if ya feel it needs a moving then feel free.

**Abigor666**

I think trying to suggest people pace their content because Sony is to under-funded to develop more of it might be one of the dumbest things I ever heard.

**cloudwolf**

I think the direction of that sentence was missed, i was basically saying that if one rushes in leveling then they miss what content was there aimed at their previous levels.

If that makes sense =P

**weaselgrrl**

The problem is that there is only one way to gain faction reputation and that is to go through the grind. Critical missions help break the monotony but if you are trying to get your rep higher, you have no choice.

I recently had to go from Max Zion to mid level Machine in rep. I was ready to plug myself back into the pods....

**Abigor666**

cloudwolf wrote:

I think the direction of that sentence was missed, i was basically saying that if one rushes in leveling then they miss what content was there aimed at their previous levels.

If that makes sense =P

Oh ok fair enough than. There is some descent content at lower levels so rushing through it in that sense I can see where your coming from.

**cloudwolf**

weaselgrrl wrote:

The problem is that there is only one way to gain faction reputation and that is to go through the grind. Critical missions help break the monotony but if you are trying to get your rep higher, you have no choice.

I recently had to go from Max Zion to mid level Machine in rep. I was ready to plug myself back into the pods....

Agreed, that is an issue. One i hope the devs recognise and will work to rectify in future development.

**Ic3b3rg**

This is a good post for those new players and I would like to add one thing. The constructs. Yes, you might focus to much on leveling your character before you hear about these little gems. At lvl 15 you can start entering these constructs and get some really nice gear.

I remember back when the drops were so bad it took 11 levels and i still did not get a single drop for the sakura bandana. But now its what? every 3rd loot? Anywho, great for lowbies and newbies but for those who have been with it for awhile and have done all crits, all mishes for max rep, all neighborhood contacts, all hardlines, all access nodes, and has a rather large sum of info probably wont find this post worth while.

/twothumbsup

**zeroone506**

cloudwolf wrote:

I think the direction of that sentence was missed, i was basically saying that if one rushes in leveling then they miss what content was there aimed at their previous levels.

If that makes sense =P

Yea, some people think that the lack of "end game content" is lack of any content at all, and you try to deceive them by pointing them to levelling content to distract from the lack of end game. Doesn't make much sense, really.

But archive missions and contacts can actually be done at any level - and if you don't value the challenge, same applies to Hideouts (yawn), gang collectors (yawn since the certain thread was posted) and PB (which is cool SMILEY

).
It's just, why first grind and then doing them all on fifty without XP reward if you can run them instead of standard missions? SMILEY

The only thing you really miss are constructs (not terribly diverse in gameplay, but awesome to look at and be in - audiovisual experience seems to be an unjustifiedly neglected aspect in such discussions, although it's pretty much equally worthy imo), and gang danger (which can be perceived both as exciting and annoying pain in the arse).

So, although I don't agree with each of your points (for a change), it's true that standard missions are the last thing one should judge the game's content after - the content, not the levelling process to be fair.

**Denary**

weaselgrrl wrote:

The problem is that there is only one way to gain faction reputation and that is to go through the grind. Critical missions help break the monotony but if you are trying to get your rep higher, you have no choice.

I recently had to go from Max Zion to mid level Machine in rep. I was ready to plug myself back into the pods....

yeh but thats because your a 50 and the only way to check your progress is to type /reputation and I do know what yer talking about because I switched from zion to merv about 2 weeks ago, doing that is very boring. When yer doing lowbie missions it's not as difficult, between 0-100 rep then I'd do normal missions but beyond that theres no point, you get all the benefits at level 35, you receive notices from your org leader concerning events with that rep, you can enter org outpost, and you can get to 120 rep by doing normal missions and the whole machine archive missions to get the system shades till yer lvl 44.

**Vesuveus**

CloudWolf, I agree with your overall statement that you should anjoy the content while you have it. But when I was a lvl 30, I didn't go into constucts. To be honest, I really only wanted to be a lvl 50. Although unethical, I can see why people pay to have someone else grind for them. As for the loot, it can always be bought on the marketplace.

The other end of my spectrum is that the game really revolves around a social factor. Construct bosses require a team to defeat. Especially when farming them where you may not get the good loot on one kill.

Recently, I started running contact missions and I kinda like them. Does anyone have any suggestion for what order I should run them in? ie Richland contacts, Westview, then Int'l, then Downtown?

redalibi

I think this game has lowered your standards of what "content" really is. exile hideouts? lol please..

**RemagDiv**

Yeah, let's not sugar coat the fact that this game has a poor and pretty boring leveling system, which is why it's very tough to keep new subscribers.

**zeroone506**

Vesuveus wrote:

Recently, I started running contact missions and I kinda like them. Does anyone have any suggestion for what order I should run them in? ie Richland contacts, Westview, then Int'l, then Downtown?

That's how I did it, but there isn't any real order.

All Richland contacts except Digger, The Bag Lady, Sister Margaret and The Chessman belong to one group, called "The Elements".
All Westview contacts except Mockingbird belong to a family, "The Spectrum"; their parents are Mr. Black in Downtown and Dame White in International.

So, you might want to run them as groups. But the relations between them (and the gangs) are really intervowen and spread across all four districts. There is, however, no real "storyline" to them as a whole, the storylines of each contact don't really interact with each other I think.

So don't think too much about order, just screenshot them for reference :)

**Fondo**

redalibi wrote:

I think this game has lowered your standards of what "content" really is. exile hideouts? lol please..

Hey back in the day of low level, I used to love going in the hideouts.

Laters

**Tytanya_MxO**

The grind is a probelm for new players, I know of a number of people who enjoyed the game, loved the matrix but just couldnt stick with the relentless precession of missions and minute progree made once level 30 is exceeded. There are alternatives but on an exp/time basis they fall well short of the missions hence the percieved bias or at least encouragement to 'grin and bear it'.

A percentage boost to all NPC experience granted would imo, make hideout raids, frag farming, construct visits more in line with missions in their usefulness to gain experience, and as a consequence more players would spread their time between these actvities.