MMOs 101: Advanced Grinding Strategies

Budding MMO players are spoiled nowadays. Grinding isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be. A lot of games hold your hand to max level with massive questlines, events, and various experience buffs that make the climb from level one to max a cake walk compared to the MMOs of yesteryear. That isn’t to say newer MMOs don’t have grinds, but it’s certainly becoming less common for players to wake up and grind away for a particular level, or item drop, for a full day without achieving their goal.

Whether or not you like the lighter touch of recent MMOs is inconsequential. Games and players change over time—it’s a simple fact of life—but what happens when a modern day player runs into an MMO with an old-school grind philosophy?

The Grindy Nature of Tree of Savior

Korean MMORPG Tree of Savior is the spiritual successor to grind-heavy Ragnarok Online. It’s being created by Kim Hakkyu, RO’s original creator, who still believes in the old school model of high octane MMO grind.

With a rumored release level cap of 600, with up to level 250 having been confirmed by beta players, there’s sure to be a lot of grinding to do in Tree of Savior. Even with a primary storyline that hands out EXP cards the level grind in Tree of Savior can become a real nightmare if you miss a few side quest NPCs or don’t find a glowing-blue–ultra-rare experience mob while you’re running from one objective to the next.

But we’re not here to talk about experience grinding (it’s pretty straight forward after all: form a group, murder the best experience-giving mobs you can find at your level, rinse and repeat). What we’re going to talk about today is your inability to item grind effectively.

A Scenario Involving Vubbe Fighter Blood

In the Tree of Savior closed beta players have a dire thirst for an item called Vubbe Fighter Blood. Seriously, if you happen across this item you can sell it on the auction house for 150k silver—the in-game currency—and watch it disappear in minutes, which is a nice chunk of change to make in the first few hours of play.

“So what? There are items like that in all MMOs,” you say? The interesting factor here is that Vubbe Fighter Blood is an incredibly available resource. A level 30 character —keep in mind the level cap is 250+—can grind the item at a rate of one-per-hour with ease.

If that’s all it takes then why is the game chat constantly flooded with “WTB> Vubbe Fighter Blood”? Why does the item fly off auction shelves so quickly? Why are there Reddit posts about the mob’s “slow respawn rate” or the item’s “very low drop chance”?

To Put It Bluntly, You’re Doing it Wrong

I’ve been a hardcore item grinder since the early days of FFXI. I spent hours upon hours grinding away at placeholder mobs and competing with real money traders just to get a shot at murdering a Leaping Lizzy or Valkrum Emperor for a highly unlikely chance at Leaping Boots or an Emperor Hairpin—you know, what the rare drops used to be called way back when you could actually trade them.

Since FFXI I’ve refined my item grinding techniques to ensure the odds are as much in my favor as possible. While many games don’t have rare highly sought after item drops outside of instanced dungeons anymore, you never know when a game like Tree of Savior is going to crop up and make it possible for someone with item grinding experience to become a quick server millionaire, or billionaire, in a couple of days.

For those of you struggling to get that recipe ingredient or armor piece here’s a few tips that might increase your overall grinding effectiveness.

Grinding Tips

1. Channels are your friend.

A lot of MMOs split their servers up into channels in order to alleviate high population server stress in any given area. There’s usually a function or menu option that allows players to move between channels freely in order to team up and play with their friends, and the abuse of these functions makes grinding a laughable cake walk.

Tree of Savior is a perfect example. The highest population of Vubbe Fighters, which drop the coveted Vubbe Fighter Blood, is on the third floor of the Crystal Mines. Anywhere from 3 to 6 Fighters spawn at any given time. With a drop rate of about 2.5%, you can imagine how grinding Vubbe Fighter Blood can become a long, infuriating process.

However, Tree of Savior is split into channels. Instead of killing a few Fighters and waiting for them to respawn, you can simply hop into a new channel and grind while Fighters you killed on the previous channel procreate. The game has 20 channels, leaving more than enough mobs to go around. Just be sure to avoid the first few channels because that’s where the unwise grinders who camp respawn locations tend to sit.

This tactic can be used in any MMO that utilizes channels, which is the vast majority at the moment. Your favorite MMO probably uses channels and you don’t even realize it.

2. Make note of spawn timers.

It’s common knowledge that mobs in MMOs spawn in specific time frames, even field and world bosses that aren’t given a specified time of day to appear have measurable spawn timers. These timers can’t be made truly random because doing so could easily throw off the game’s economy and progression system.

The key to noting spawn timers is understanding that they’re not rigid. Usually mobs, especially field and world bosses, are set to spawn within a time window. For common mobs the window could be 8 - 12 seconds, while rarer mobs may have a range of 8 - 12 hours.

Once you know a mob’s general spawn timer you know when you need to be looking for it and when you don’t. Knowing you have a couple of minutes or a few hours to go do something else can greatly limit the amount of time you waste while grinding.

In the Vubbe Fighter example knowing the spawn timer means knowing how many channels to cycle through before going back to the original channel you started grinding on. This makes it easy to claim a couple of channels for your own, because you’re killing the mobs as they respawn.

An ArcheAge Example: Using spawn timers to my advantage I was able to lock down an entire area of mining resources in ArcheAge. I knew the exact second each node would spawn, and was able to run from one to the next and collect ore continuously while passersby perpetually saw an empty field. I didn’t have any problems obtaining resources even during the Day 1 chaos. All I had to do was get the route going and it was smooth sailing.

You don’t have to write the timers down or wait with a stopwatch to use them to your advantage either. After a bit of grinding you’ll probably develop a natural sixth sense for the timer. How rigid you have to be depends wholly on the amount of competition you’re dealing with.

3. Be aware of spawn locations.

Nothing is truly random in MMOs. Hell, RNG often isn’t as random as you think it is.

There’s no such thing as truly random spawns. Usually there are a handful of locations where mobs are likely to spawn in any given area. Knowing where to look as you run from mob to mob will drastically cut down on your overall grinding time.

Again, you don’t have to write anything down or create a spreadsheet. Be mindful of where you run into the target mob each time you kill it and before long you’ll know where it’s going to be.

4. Queue up and hotkey your quickest abilities.

The method changes depending on how claiming—which determines who gets the drop out of two or more people vying for the same mob—works in the game you’re playing, but the idea remains the same. If you’re fighting for control of a mob or resource then optimize your claiming be as fast as possible.
When I played FFXI and ArcheAge the claim depended on who aggro’d the mob first. To beat competitors to the punch I would hotkey my quickest long range ability and have my finger hovering above it. I often beat people in ArcheAge resource competitions by using the “F” key instead of clicking on the resource.

Every millisecond counts when you’re fighting for drops or resources.

Getting Heads Twice in a Row

Despite those four crucial tips the most common cause of grinding failure is impatience and an improper state of mind. It’s easy to find out a certain drop you want has a .01% chance and you give up before you even start or quit after trying a few times, but the drop could be right around the corner.

The way I look at it is that each failed attempt makes it more likely the item will drop on the next kill.

When you flip a coin there’s a 50% chance you’ll get heads. However, if you flip that coin twice in a row there’s only a 25% chance you’ll get heads both times. I apply the same logic to item drops. The more I kill the mob the less likely it’ll continue not to drop the item I want.

Sure, that viewpoint is statistically flawed. As any statistics professor will argue—and I know because I argued with four separate college professors on the subject—technically every chance is the same regardless of number of attempts.

It’s the general idea that’s important though. If that doesn’t work for you try something else. Think of whatever keeps you at it until that moment of sweet release occurs that makes the entire process worthwhile.

Keep a positive, persistent state of mind while employing the tips I listed and you’ll start having an easier time getting the rare drops you salivate over while sitting around at school or work bored out of your skull.

I’ve shared a couple of my stories. Want to share some of yours? I’d love to hear about them in the comments section below.

Until next time, keep on grindin.