HANDS ON GUIDE

1 - Camp and grind

Sit and stare at your computer for hours on end while you wait for the fifth piece of a crystal to drop. All to complete a single quest that has been in your journal for over a year

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If you play online games for several hours a day, most days of the week, for a couple of years or more, you probably won’t want to think about how much time you’ve spent grinding and camping. These are the aspects of online gaming that will cause so many of us in our Autumn years to wonder, ‘why the hell did I waste my youth doing that?’ This is where you pay the piper; this is where you sink the time.

Camping in an MMO isn’t like camping in a first-person shooter. The five minutes you might spend at the underpass in Counter-Strike with an AWP are nothing compared to the hours and hours of mind-numbing, spirit-crushing tedium that comes from sitting in one spot for hours, waiting for a specific enemy who might drop a vital item. There’s nothing like camping to provide a wake-up call to a player about how deeply addicted they are to a game. There are legends about the longest times people have spent camping a target – different players have different tolerances – but 24-hour long camping sessions are not uncommon in some games, with some guilds even working in shifts to cover a key point for longer amounts of time.

While the camping element of online gaming is vast and disturbing it’s perhaps not quite so stultifying as the grind. Grinding is the noble art of doing a very simple task over and over and over again in order to gain money, experience points, items or anything else. This is the scariest area of gaming, the area where a game becomes work; and not fun work such as stealing rare sports cars or overclocking graphics cards, but proper, soulless drudgery that resembles something from a clichéd Victorian mill.

Every game has it’s variations on grinding, from mining ore in EVE to killing the same old mobs in WoW and harvesting at resource nodes in Everquest 2. Every game finds some new way to take your character, a hero of spectacular power and skill, and turning him into a worker bee for a sizeable chunk of his time, and all because said character wants to reach the maximum level, own the most epic items or fly the shiniest space ship. You can go far in online gaming through skill, smarts and a flair for comedy forum put downs, but you can get twice as much of with time on your hands and a stomach for the grind.

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