I avoided it for as long as I could but it seems as though I'm giving in. I'm talking about grind. You know, that horrible "gameplay" mechanic solely designed to keep you playing for an inordinate amount of time for minimal benefit. The rant atm is about a title in the game Guild Wars. Perhaps I should first elaborate. A title in Guild Wars is a measurement of a certain activity.
These range from the common: Number of missions completed, amount of world explored.
To the comical: amount of time spent intoxicated, number of sugary treats consumed.
And the insane: Amount of faction gained for one side or the other particularly in Cantha (one of Guild Wars' featured continents).
Each title has a range (that is a series of markers denoting how far you've gone on that title and how much it takes to max or finish that title. The Savior titles (Savior of the Kurzicks or Savior of the Luxons) is the one with which I have the biggest problem. To max this title you need 10,000,000 faction... yep, that isn't a typo. 10 MILLION!!!
I currently have 157,000 (notably, I haven't spent a LOT of time working on this title but let's do some math). It is said that a repeatable quest on the Kurzick side is the de facto fastest method to completing this title. This quest rewards 400 faction for about every 1.25 minutes of time spent (this is with quick runs in and out of town and neglecting going to drain your faction when you reach the max [you can only carry 10,000 faction at a time otherwise it won't accrue any longer.])
The difference between the max and my title is 9,843,000. At a rate of 400 faction every 1.25 minutes lets see how many minutes it'll take me. It will take me 24,607.5 runs to complete my title. These runs, in total, will take me 30759.375 minutes. Take that an divide by 60 we get 512.65625 hours. Say we do this for, on average, 2 hours a day. 256.328125 days. That's right 71.96% of a year given 2 hours of play time, every single day.
Oh, and why am I doing this? What in the world could make me want to take part in this masochistic behavior? Because I "might" get some reward in Guild Wars 2... way to go ambiguous reward system!
*Edit* Oh, I should probably update this. Once I got home I remembered that if you use the faction to get skills or to transfer for guild faction you get double the points in your title. So I've basically cut my time in half... though, 128 days is still a LONG time in my book.





