Delete: Grinding.

Grinding describes a player behavior in a game, not an objective feature in a game. One could say that some games encourage grinding more than others, but it's difficult to say that grinding objectively exists in a game like Persona 4 Golden. If the page does stay, it needs massive, more specific reworking.

It should definitely stay. I don't like the idea that the wiki excludes behaviour. For example Turtling is a behaviour in fighting games and any FG wiki worth its salt will include it. Even consider something like Cancels, which in some FG arent designed but accidental and then things get real murky.

So yeah rework it I guess! Thats my thought anyways.

No, it should go. The wiki is about what is specifically found in games, not player behavior.

I think it has its place in the Wiki though I'll have to agree that a re-working is needed. I'm not much of a guy who has had a lot of experience having to do that in multiple games or specifically MMOs though so hopefully another duder who is more qualified can step in and at least start doing some edits.

It should stay. Grinding might be a player behavior, but there are many games that necessitate it by design. There doesn't happen to be a name for that design, so if anyone were looking for it, it would be under 'grinding'.

@geraltitude: (Is there an entry on the Turtling page for FPS'es, too?) Another vote to keep and rework it, just explaining the behavior in general (maybe based on genre, not citing specific examples).

For example, here's how I'd do it:

RPG's (Turn-Based):

In a turn-based RPG, sometimes there can be a huge jump in difficulty between one area and the next, forcing the player to stay in the first until they are overleveled to ensure survival. How much grinding is required depends on the game, and how steep the difficulty jump is. Another reason to grind in an RPG is for specific items, which may only drop very infrequently in a specific area.

No reason to delete this as it's a very real gameplay pattern that many RPGs include in their design. The first one that springs to mind is the Kingdom Hearts series, where you have 0.0001% chance of beating endgame enemies like Sephiroth unless you spend extra time grinding to level up past where you'd need to be to just complete the story.

VGK is right that the page needs a lot of help, but that's no reason to completely throw away a very real gaming concept.

How do you define when it is mandatory? There are games where some might think grinding is required when all that's really needed is a change in strategy. And then there's the basic problem of defining grinding in a way that is necessitated by game design.

Well grinding is a concept related to video games so it should definitely stay in one fashion or another. Maybe rename so it becomes more describing of the game in question, like "Grind demanding" or something I dunno...

I think it's fair to say there is a steep level grind in some games (e.g. Final Fantasy) and not a level grind in something like a Skyrim but perhaps the distinction needs to be made between scaling enemy levels and static ones rather than describing the behaviour that it necessitates.

The Disgaea series for example has a lot of features (post-game, "Level 9999") that necessitate the concept of grinding- simply playing through the story will not get you anywhere close to being able to access these parts of the game.

There already is a level scaling concept.

I think this is a pretty "objective" example of the grinding concept. When the xp gained in an RPG by critical path questing/completing the story doesn't give you everything you need to finish all of the other game's content. In those cases, grinding isn't player behavior so much as a levelling mechanic intended by the developers.

We might have to make this one of our "island" pages, divorced from all others, like the many concepts we have that are so ubiquitous (such as "boss fight" or "Earth" or "grass") that there's no point attaching them to almost every game page in our database. Grinding's a common enough video game term that it has its place on the wiki, but you're right that attaching it to any one game can be highly subjective. I'm sure with the right combination of player skill, RNG and/or exploitable glitches, any game can be beaten without needing to grind.

Of course, I have no idea if this island page feature is included in the upcoming wiki update. The necessity for them has come up enough times in instances like this, though.

Also I don't understand why "it's a player behaviour" is reason enough to delete a wiki page. The wiki rules even says that these (gray areas) aren't necessarily a bad idea:

"Concepts that have little to no relevance in the actual workings of a game, typically memes created by the players themselves, i.e. tea-bagging. This is often the subjective nature of the concept that hangs your submission in the balance between being approved or denied. We don't really have a better way to document things of this nature at the moment, so as long as it has significance to a video game and the potential for a well-written article/other stuff to be linked to it, it's not necessarily a bad idea. That said, ridiculous stuff will of course be denied, and our official stance on hardware failure is a "no." I'm pretty sure Microsoft didn't come up with the amazing concept of mass-hardware failure."

In my opinion, Grinding absolutely has significance to video games and I wouldn't qualify it as being "ridiculous" stuff.. but each to their own I guess.

By that logic, we should also have a page for speedrunning. (Then again, I can imagine that working under very specific conditions. Braid comes to mind.)

We probably should- the concept of "Beating a Game as Quickly as Possible" has been built into games for as long as I can remember- at least back to Metroid: http://metroid.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Metroid_endings

So... did you answer your own question there? ;)

Some games are obviously designed with speedrunning in mind. Volgarr the Viking even has an optional on-screen timer to facilitate it. That should absolutely go on a speedrunning page. Any other game could have a speed run, but if it's not clear the devs intended it, it shouldn't be categorized that way on the wiki.

So with grinding, the Disgaea example mentioned above is the same kind of case. Any RPG with regenerating enemies could allow grinding, but in that series, it's clear that the devs intended that as part of the game to complete the end game content.

Basically, as with most of our wiki pages, there are just too many attached games that aren't relevant. I'd say just go ahead and delete the ones that you don't think fit, and explain why in the Edit Comments thing that pops up.

Or even better, start a thread in the Grinding page forum so that we can have a discussion about the specific definitions there. Fun!

Plenty of games encourage something like speedrunning by including level par times and stuff like that (the Doom and Quake series come to mind), I think there's probably a better general term for a concept page than "speedrunning" to have for that, but speedrunning could certainly be a subsection of such a wiki page.

Ah grinding......... so much of that i had to do in Final Fantasy Type 0, still a spectacular game.

Something just occurred to me: Street Fighter Alpha games change your victory symbol depending on how you achieved that victory. Cheesing through a match gets you a cheese icon, while cherry tapping gets you two cherries. Should games like these that overtly reference such practices be the only games that count for those pages, since they're the only ones with concrete proof?

How do you prove that a game has that feature in it if it's centered entirely on the player? Other people have pointed out that you can get through a traditionally grindy game with no grinding whatsoever, if you play your cards right.

I think grinding should stay on the wiki. Player behavior or not it's a major factor in a lot of RPGs. It's also used a lot to describe games. It doesn't make any sense to remove it from the vocabulary used to describe a game so don't remove it from the wiki.

I'm all in favor of it staying. Its absolutely a concept that is intended in some games.

Even if it's possible to beat every game without grinding there's no denying that some developers do in fact intend some players to grind. It might be because the player fucked up or simply because they're dedicated and just want to find the dopest rarest drops or whatever.

Some might even call raiding in WoW grinding... All you do is kill the same shit over and over, hoping you find your epic items and what not.

I've played some games that after you beat it you get a 'Speed Run" option on the menu. Braid and Dragons Dogma come to mind.

I'm generally in favor of being more inclusive in a wiki than less, the more information the better, I'd rather player behavior be in there in general.

It seems like many player behaviors are already in there - spawn camping, teabagging, griefing pixel hinting etc all have pages

The rules on this could use some clarity because I can also see why @video_game_king interpreted the rules the way he did re:grinding.

If we're going to have those, then they should be their own section on the site. In fact, I'd be in favor of more clarification and sections. Split concepts up into things like Groups, Species, Mechanics, Player Behaviors, etc. Even introduce indexes for more specific stuff, like Pokemon, or Kingdom Hearts Concepts, etc.

But with the wiki as it is now, there really isn't a place for grinding.

I'd be in favor of that added classification and depth, heck I wouldn't mind tropes even being in there. I'd rather the reader have access to more information than less, even if said information occasionally crosses the line into subjectivity.

I guess though I don't see how you can justify deleting grinding when there are so many concepts that have similar issues unless you delete all the player behavior ones. because the wiki as it is now does have them even if it shouldn't. If that is what you are advocating, than I agree, that would be consistent with the rules as I understand them. But if you are saying we should delete grinding only, then no I don't think that makes sense.

From a practical sense I don't think deleting any of these makes sense at this point. They are there now and look to have been for awhile now. Chances are as soon as you delete these someone will try to recreate them. Their exclusion in the first place is probably non intuitive to most editors.

There are just far too many common player behaviors that developers didn't intend and players commonly perform that yes, they should be included, whether or not they are necessary or by design.

As one of the oldest of these behaviors, "grinding" should definitely be a page on a wiki. "It isn't necessary if you play your cards right" and "it's just a player behavior, not an objective design choice" are pretty weak reasons to keep it off. Even if it is optional, the option is still there and it's still quite common.

However, someone above mentioned that it should be an "island" page, and I agree with that. Perhaps instead of "player behaviors", we should have a section of definitions specific to gaming jargon. Grinding, tea-bagging, camping, turtling, kiting, speedrunning, etc. No other pages attached since you can get through most grind-y games without grinding if you know what you're doing.

We already do, it was one of the first concepts ever added to the site and it's really good too (but it's one of those pages Mento talked about above that can't have every game linked to it, they need a good reason to be attached): http://www.giantbomb.com/speedrun/3015-179/

We also have concept pages for camping, turtling, grenade spamming and numerous other player behaviours.

Here's to hoping that Concepts get split up in any future wiki update, because right now, they appear a mess.

I'd follow that up with "the current rules don't allow this", but I wouldn't know where to point to reference that. We need a wiki guide for these things.

They fall under the Grey Areas paragraph of the Concepts section in the Wiki Rules.

I agree that the wiki could use some more page types, right now concepts are pretty much a catch-all for anything that doesn't fit in the other sections. Articles on subjects like turtling and grinding are totally valid in an encyclopedia of gaming knowledge and we don't currently have a better place for them, which is why they have been allowed as concept pages ever since the site first went live.

I'm going to close this topic, it can be addressed again if the situation changes.