Do you work, or tend to be occupied? How do you handle grinding in games?

Edit: This is about singleplayer games. There's always time for PUBG and BF1!

I'm addressing those who have moved on from their "I got all the time and energy for games" phase.

Games are very, very dependent on stretching the content, sometimes to a tedious point. There's so much backtracking in Bioshock. In Fallout: New Vegas, you're going back and forth through the same neighborhoods many times. Shadow of Mordor wants you to fight what feels like an infinite amount of Orcs that you will run into frequently, which is exhausting.

I'm really in the mood to dive into the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R but I know that I'll be spending so many hours just looking for loot and backtracking and going back and forth between the same towns.

• Do you crave playing games, but feel like you don't have enough aggression anymore to keep fighting and fighting/get challenged too much?
• Are you busy with work and don't have enough mental or emotional capacity to go through time-sink campaigns?
• Do you find singleplayer filler content exhausting and would rather use your time another way?
• If so, what have you been playing, and how do you deal with this massive barrier called "filler content" or "grinding" in games?

I am certainly in the period of my life where the time for playing has lessened and have been caught in a similar internal conflict too. I used to have no problem slowly grinding through games, Fallout 3 and New Vegas were huge time sinks for example. However, it's now just a case of if I start to notice the grind I tend to drop off the game. I found Fallout 4 felt too much like a grind so sort of fell out of playing it, but I was playing far less grindy than I had 3 or NV.

I think the biggest change though was finally dropping that 'I must do everything' mentality, especially when replaying games. Replaying the Arkham games, I enjoyed them so much more just doing the story and only really picking up the Riddler bits that I naturally came across. City in particular was nearly ruined when it came out by my stupid brain shouting "You HAVE to collect everything!" Those game are so much more manageable that way. I've not played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. so can't comment on potential skipping stuff aspect of that came, but if the going between the towns is the enjoyable part of the game for you, although it is a grind by definition, it might not be for you.

Time is tight - play the parts you like of the games you like in the way you like; that's the beauty of games. Just don't tell the internet as you'll almost certainly be doing it wrong.

Depends, I only grind or collect crap if I think it will be fun and worth the effort.

I'm in college with a part-time job but I'm lucky enough to still have the odd vacation weeks to myself, and I usually relegate those to getting through long games like Persona 5.

Played through the back-end of Horizon recently while I haven't been on vacation, and it burned me out on the open-world formula entirely. I skipped as much side content as I could, sprinting between objectives and avoiding all the (constant) combat because I just wanted to see the neat story stuff. I'm pretty sure the fact I wasn't on vacation just added to all my frustrations with that game.

That said I haven't had much issue playing Divinity Original Sin 2 for a few hours every couple of days, everything is compelling enough that I actually feel accomplished even if I don't finish out a quest line in the session. The fact that every enemy encounter is a unique, 1-time endeavor also makes exploring/backtracking/fighting feel much smoother and worthwhile, in direct contrast to Horizon where I felt like I was fighting the same few enemies every couple of feet and not getting anything good out of it. Also, fast travel is instant in Divinity.

I'm actually not sure I have anything saved up for my Xmas vacation anymore though, the year was really front-loaded for me. Probably going to get sunk into some of those SNES Classic games when I can justify having cables stretched all over my living room.

I like watching numbers going up so grinding to me is fun. I like the feeling of maxing out a character or pushing my stats up higher than where the game expects me to be.

But where do you get the energy to invest yourself in such an endeavor after your workload or personal life has taken a big bite out of your endurance to do things?

Depends on the game.

I play games like New Vegas and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to explore and experience the world. If I'm not in a place where I can casually go check things out at my own pace, then I don't play those games. It's not fun for me to play games simply with the goal of finishing them, especially open world games.

Some open world games I do it all, because I am enjoying it and it's not hard to 100%, like Horizon Zero Dawn. Some games I try to set certain goals as I play the game and realize what is possible, like simply doing all the side mission in NieR: Automata and not trying to get every weapon or possible ending. Right now I am playing Breath of the Wild, and my goal is to do all 120 shrines. Anything else I choose to get along the way is cool, but not required. Like I will probably upgrade half my armor to 3 stars, but I am not going to get and/or upgrade all the armor.

Ironically, NieR: Automata and Breath of the Wild are probably going to be in my top 5 games of the year, despite not doing all the content. Even though I got platinum in Horizon Zero Dawn, I am not even sure it will make the top 10 yet. (It probably will, but no guarantees.)

I also try to focus on the journey and not the destination. Yeah, I could have beat probably 10 other games while I finished The Witcher 3, but I really enjoyed The Witcher 3 and the time I had in that world. It's not a game of quantity, where 10 finished games > 1 finished game. As a gestalt of time played, that 1 game was as worth or worth more than 10 other, shorter games I could have finished in that time.

As for how I play:

I play goal oriented but with the acknowledgement that it's okay to go off the rails once in a while. Last week I was trying to finish the towers in Breath of the Wild, when I discovered the lightning puzzle shrine. So instead I spent the next two sessions figuring that out. It was fun. Then I could go back on track once I was done there. If my only focus was on finishing the game, that would have stressed me out. I just try not to put a time limit on it.

Oh, and I have a wife, two kids, job, dog, cat, a house in need of constant upkeep, and a vague semblance of a social life. I also don't watch TV, so that frees up some time, but I'd still say 50% of my free time is spent trying to get the baby to stop crying with a scream that can pierce the heavens. Man, that kid is loud. I thought the first one was going to be 'the hard one.' Nope. That was practice.

I work a full time job and have a busy schedule of anime to watch. So the fact that I have no energy to invest in anything after that is why I grind in games. Mindless grinding takes little to no endurance and the fulfillment of seeing progress refills me mentally. So whereas some people might just take a nap on the couch or veg out in front of a TV to relax, grinding is that for me.

It really depends on the game. If the grind is engaging enough, and is mostly the point of the game, than I'm fine with it. It's a way to relax after work while catching up on podcasts or GB videos. (Not entirely singleplayer, but I've been playing a lot of FFXIV the last few months, and its been enjoyable like that)

But if the grind is poorly designed and is clearly there just as a way to stretch content between story missions, I've got no time or patience for that kind of thing anymore. Just let me play the good parts already! It's why I fall off most open world games these days (unless even the grind is crazy-well written, like The Witcher 3; or its constant bonkers fun, like Saints Row 3/4).

@howardian said:

• I'm at that point with the latest Batman game and the first Shadow of Mordor. For whatever reason I can't put forth the effort to fully utilize all of the great combat mechanics. It's like there's a level of complexity I can't be bothered to engage with. I keep going back to try again thinking it's a headspace thing, but I keep bouncing off of them. It's strange because I know I like those types of games.
• I've got a low pressure job in a laid back workplace, and I live a block away from work so time-sink campaigns are kind of my jam as long as there's not a lot of grinding involved.
• Not at all. I much prefer single player games. Single player > co-op PvE > PvP
• Grinding is a strange concept to me. If you're repeating the same things, but you're enjoying it is it really grinding or is it just playing the game? For me, it switches from playing to grinding as soon as I no longer enjoy it, and once that happens I just stop playing. I don't grind.

• I've never looked at gaming as an aggressive pursuit, but I'm someone who can count on one hand the amount of first-person shooters I've purchased in the past...decade? Bioshock Infinite, DOOM, Wolfenstein New Order (which I put down 1/3 of the way through), Destiny 1 and 2. I play games to unwind and experience other worlds, and I'm far from above turning a game down to the easy difficulty if Normal isn't giving me that relaxation. I can play MLB The Show on Hall of Fame difficulty, but I mostly play on Rookie because I just want to get in some at-bats.

• I am a bartender, so for the most part my work either ends when my shift ends, or consists of going to another bar and trying another bartender's cocktail / swapping ideas. Again, gaming lends itself to living life in a perpetual buzz, and drinking in moderation opens a lot of mental and emotional pathways that make consuming entertainment all the more enjoyable as we all know.

• I find multiplayer content exhausting; specifically in the case of Destiny, I only consumed the "grind" with one character this week because when I logged into my Warlock and realized I was going to be "grinding" Crucible matches as I'd just done with my Titan character, I got a little exhausted by the idea and watched the first half of Danny O'Dwyer's Witcher III documentary instead. I engage with MLB's online modes from time to time, but again, I mostly just want to get in some at-bats when I log in to that game, not focus intensely on each and every pitch. I used to play 600-800 games of NBA 2K online every year, but the advent of MyPlayer has flooded that game with people who play anything but sim-style basketball, and the series has catered toward that crowd even in its 5-on-5 modes just enough that it's a completely frustrating experience at this point. Not to mention the God tier input lag that makes it feel like you're playing an entirely different game.

• If you can't tell from the above three answers, I've mostly been playing games that involve "grind". Specifically, MLB The Show's Diamond Dynasty (on which I've likely spent about $300 to open card packs over the summer, because I had the money and wasn't buying other games) and Destiny 2. I don't touch NBA 2K's MyTeam mode because it is an absolute dumpster fire. I play these games because I enjoy them greatly, and while both communities I find kick the word "grind" around like a bunch of high school stoners with a hackey sack, I don't look at whatever the game's challenges present to me as must-dos or fast-as-I-cans. I try to complete the challenges that appeal to me, and I look past the ones that don't. I'm glad that these games are constantly feeding me new goals to accomplish with my leisure time, and while I do slightly resent them for keeping me from an increasing backlog of games to play (I've rarely been a backlog gamer before this generation of digital PSN sales and live, games-as-service production cycles) I can't be too angry. After all, if they weren't fun enough I'd have given them up once I was satisfied.

I don't mind grinding since it makes me feel like I'm progressing and getting better. Unlike work where you grind and grind but you never get anywhere. There has to be more to the game than though. I wouldn't play a game I didn't like and grind.

I've recently started my first full-time job, so time has been harder to come by than games these days. This past summer, I was tearing through single-player games at an incredible speed while mixing in some online multiplayer as a buffer. Now it's different.

I have to take weeks on games that would have taken me a day or two. I don't do multiplayer because it doesn't feel like my effort is amounting to anything. I'm not willing to take a chance on open-world/grind-based games because it just doesn't fit my lifestyle. If I still worked part time, I'd pick up Destiny 2 and Shadow of War, two games I'm almost certain I won't like, because I wanted to be in the know. Now, not only do I have less actual time for them, but I have a sense of obligation to not waste my time on games like these, which seem to make time wasting their goal. For some reason I've started playing more Civ--probably because it has an extremely deliberate progression that leaves no room for people like me to feel like their time has been wasted. I used to listen to a bunch of podcasts while playing games. That's how I made the time feel useful. That's not a fix that works for me anymore, though.

@howardian: I had a personal experience with this recently while playing through Horizon: Zero Dawn. I'm one of those people who felt the need to obsessively clear their quest log in RPGs. I started not picking up quests that looked procedurally generated or filler a little while ago, but I still liked to clear out whatever organically finds its way onto my todo list. Not so with Horizon. It was my first Far Cry pattern game in a long while, but after clearing that first bandit camp and literally getting sent out for animal pelts, I made conscious effort to only do things in the Main and Side categories. It was liberating in a really strange way, but still, fighting that feeling that you're "missing out" on content is tough.

For comparison, back in March I hundred percented (well, actually like 98.5% because bugs) Mass Effect: Andromeda because I absolutely, positively needed to know if that game ever "got good." Spoiler alert, it doesn't. My 70 hour run through that game could be condensed into 20 using the same criteria as Horizon.

Someday I need to go back and finish the Witcher 3 now that I have the capability to ignore boring filler.

After a day of work, I rarely want to be challenged... I just want to relax. So for me that usually means I play whatever I'm playing on the easiest setting.

I don't like grinding, so if a game has some kind of experience boost or time saving DLC, I don't mind paying for it if it allows me to skip what I think are the boring parts, two recent examples for me:

• I just finished Tokyo Mirage Sessions, which I was only able to do because of the DLC which gives you a dungeon to quickly grind out some XP.
• I also just finished Assassin's Creed Black Flag, in which I bought the resources pack a few times... because I don't like the ship battles that much and that seemed to be the only way to get enough materials to fully upgrade the ship.

I do like collecting stuff and doing all the side quests in games. Especially if you don't have a lot of time it seems open world games seem like a good fit, because there is always some progress you can make which fits into a 20 o 30 minute play session. It might take months to finish a game that way, but that's OK. I'm not reviewing the game, there is no deadline, I'll keep playing it as long as I'm enjoying myself.

So in Assassin's Creed, I don't try to go for 100% memory sync, because replaying the same mission again if I mess up the extra objectives would be boring to me. But I can see someone else enjoying that challenge, and finding collecting everything to be super boring. So play the game the way you get the most enjoyment out of it. Similarly, you don't have to play everything (and you cannot even if you tried), so try to only buy games you can play the way you like playing games.

I do find myself coming home after work and not wanting to play the new Y's or Dragon's Dogma Re-release and just end up playing some Overwatch or a couple matches of Gundam Versus as it is less of a commitment of time. But I find that most games that are the big RPG-ish grindfests there is a path that the dev gives you to get through the game at a good pace while experiencing the games world and story without having to grind to much and go side questing to much, it also helps to have difficulty setting that go toward the "tourist" aspect of the video game. If I enjoyed the core game enough like I did with Persona 5 I will go back to it on any time off I have and replay through the game to experience every little thing. There is a stigma on trophies or achievements but some (not all) are a good guide to what are the things you might miss normally and should go back whether its a fun secret boss or powerful weapon that would otherwise take time trying to figure out when one might not have enough time in the day to do so. I still have a back-log of video games I hope to get to someday since this year is turning out to be a bountiful year for games, but doing this has helped me consume the medium I love so much.

Short answer - I avoid games that are designed to waste my time.

Longer answer - OK, I actually play some games with time-wastey design, but I tend to stick to the critical path. At this point I'm pretty good at identifying junk content and just playing around it. 100%ing video games is not how I want to spend my life these days.

If you enjoy the game and its loop play it. If not, don't.

I usually tend to mainline games, i have no interest in side/optional content if it's not entertaining or has a good story attached to it. As soon as a game starts feeling like a second job i'm out.

I relax rather than powergame. I don't mind grinding at all if its not too excessive in doing the literal same thing over and over again. Doing the same thing in different looking worlds is not a problem for me though.

For instance, I was close to finish the thousand levels in Populous 2. The game gets insanely difficult later on, so even though you basically do the same thing over and over, the way the game plays out may be different and thus it keeps me occupied without getting bored.

@warpr: I'm on the same boat when it comes to Black Flag. Its one of the perfect games to grind it "your way".

I've been playing Beyond Divinity Original Sin II and it has ruined any RPG with grind for me forever... There is a finite amount of battles, all unique with the majority of which are being completely avoidable, usually through peaceful quest resolutions. The game is still massive, probably a 100+ hour game. But it's all RPG content, not fighting more generic orcs, goblins, bandits, w/e.

I remember that quick look of the final fantasy game with the fast forward button where you can have the AI controlled characters fight for you and fast forward through dungeons... It looked miserable. Fighting the same enemies over and over again with no challenge is unthinkable for me now.

I grind into late night and then im tired as fuck at work, then rinse and repeat.

• It depends on the game. I used to love fighting games but have found that I don't have the energy to play them anymore. the amount of time and practice to be decent is too much for me. I also used to like games like Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, etc. but those are a little too intense for me these days. However, more methodical action games like Assassin's Creed or Middle-Earth are still totally fine.
• Again depends on the game. I love RPG's but I do have a hard time motivating myself to settle in for an 80 hour campaign these days. However I can pour hours and hours into a game like Stardew Valley. I think it might have more to do with the ease of jumping in and out of Stardew versus the difficulty of keeping up with or jumping back into a RPG after an extended amount of time.
• No, I still prefer single player games in most gaming situations. These days I tend to gravitate towards games that will be a relaxing experience, fun, and interesting. I work all day and play games to get rid of that stress. High tension games aren't very good for that. I only like multiplayer in a local setting.
• I don't have a problem with "grinding" as long as it's fun. Recently I've been playing Golf Story, which is quite lengthy, but I never feel like I'm grinding. I do keep having to do quests but they have paced the game so well that it never feels like work. It feels fun.

@frytup said:

I envy you, I guess. Even my favorite games from my teenage years are failing me when it comes to just how much they demand of me, time-wise and challenge-wise.

Sticking to the critical path is an unknown gamestyle to me, because I'm under the impression that if I ignore side content, my character rank/progress will be lower than intended which will make me weaker in later main missions. What do you think?

Please read my second paragraph to @frytup as that's my response to you too.

Damn, that actually sounds brilliant.

I did play the first Original Sin when it came out and stopped 2 hours in because I expected that it's probably another endless grind fest with complicated systems - I guess I was wrong! Can I go straight to Original Sin II or is playing the first game crucial?

I've wrote and deleted my post and over and I think I came to my conclusion.

My work currently has highs and lows like no other games.

My work is also about time, risk and control.

I feel like I can't play games without applying what I use at work. Try to optimize and minimize risks. The highs from that are shallow.

This is probably why I like watching streamers and youtubers. It's out of my hands for once. I can also drop it quickly without feeling bad.

I do still like thinking a lot about games, especially just what kind of game could get jaded farts like me to relive the thrill of not knowing how deep the game is, or what could surprise them, or what kind of story could make twist and remix tropes in such a way that it'd be new.

Critical path was probably an exaggeration. I do a good bit of side questing, but I refuse to do collect-a-thons and I couldn't care less about making all the quest markers on a map go away. Games are generally designed so that you're sufficiently leveled without doing optional content, so I rarely worry about being underpowered.

I've got a full time job that sometimes requires an extra weekend day and a part time job that takes some of my other weekends, so time is definitely at a premium for me. What this made me is far more selective with what I even begin playing. What I'm willing to put up with also depends on my work schedule. When I worked nights for 18 months, I played 200+ hours of FFXIV. As soon as my boss switched me to days, I found MMOs to be too much of a drag for my off-days now that I was back in a "real" schedule. I don't know why, personally. Just don't feel like it anymore.

Right now I sink most of my time into portable based games because I'm traveling and spending a lot of down-time in the office. The Nintendo Switch has been a godsend.

In terms of "filler-content," I find I don't really consider it filler if I'm enjoying the game. If I'm not enjoying the game, I bounce off it really quick since I'd rather spend my limited time having fun. I bounce off hockey games really quick even though I like the NHL and watch games when I can. But I do pick it up and play a game or two when I feel like it. I guess what I'm saying is that I just don't engage games I consider to be "filler."

Cheat. Works wonders vs grinding. Removing weight restrictions in fallout/witcher. Recently in shadow of war after beating the first two overlords and realisizing theres a lot of xp grind involved. I used cheat engine to go from lvl 25- 45. Now it is moving along at a nice pace and I can focus on having fun while progressing at a pace that I prefer. its like I fixed their bad game design choices :)

Edit: This is about singleplayer games. There's always time for PUBG and BF1!

If you have time for a game of PUBG or BF1, then you also have time to pick up an RPG and finish a few quests, even grindy ones.

Good RPG's and open world games tend to have something for you to do if you need some money or levels or whatever. I don't grind so much as I happen to gain levels or money or whatever while naturally playing through the game. Exploring, picking things up, etc.

The difference between picking up an RPG for an hour every evening and playing your multiplayer shooter of choice for an hour every night really is just "one is social, one isn't". PUBG and BF1 seem way more grindy to me than Skyrim or Fallout or Witcher 3 or Horizon or whatever else you can think of. It's kind of weird to see people who play the same twelve maps over and over on a multiplayer shooter complain about how games are long and bloated these days.

I've been on both sides of that before, by the way, but for the most part I just stick with single player games.

active duty military taking 2 college courses, and somehow i find time to play everything, albeit at the expense of a social life haha. I have been faster to drop games though, mordor isn't a quality title worth making time for, but i still make time to play through metal gear 1-V every year. I miss the days when i was in high school and could play skyrim/fallout 3 for an entire week, multiple characters each at 100 hour marks.....but i suppose we all move on

I don't. If any grinding is involved, I drop the game immediately (only one exception - the "Borderlands" series).

So after this thread inspiring me a little bit I went and beat both S.T.A.L.K.E.R games within 1 week (Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat).

I did it but cutting down on exploration and side quests and just focusing on pushing the story forward.

I had a fucking blast, my appetite for gaming is bigger now.

I find in many games that there's a meta-gaming aspect to the grind. I approach it like a puzzle: given objectives (need X of A, Y of B, etc) and variables like drop rates by enemy, time it takes to move between areas, etc., how can I minimize time-to-completion while still having fun? Solving the puzzle is actually part of the fun of it for me. Not all games are built for this, of course, but for example the Souls games and the Assassin's Creed games usually make it possible to pursue multiple grinding objectives at the same time with some variety of approaches.

I feel like I'm always stuck on the MMO concept of a grind and am never quite sure what most people mean when they bring it up.

@howardian: Nice work! Good to hear about people loving games again.

When playing a multiplayer game, I will get to "the end" of the action every 30 minutes or so. It's a small package, beginning and end (I'm talking about a round of multiplayer).

When playing an RPG with "things for me to do," it just feels like an endless spiral, it feels like the conclusion of the "adventure" is so far away, hidden behind so many hoops of sidequests and character building that I must jump through.

If the singleplayer games had less filler and more "moving things forward" it wouldn't be so bad. But the backtracking and repetition of the assignments feel like I'm burning away my time.

It's interesting in that as I've gotten busier and busier with full-time work and less free time, I also find myself playing much more demanding games (Street Fighter) than I normally did when I had more time.

For me, one think I like about a game like SF is even if you only do 30 mins a day or you have that one weekend day you do a bunch of hours, the pool is so damn deep you are always feeling some form of progress. This makes it feel way more worthwhile than playing through a simple game because it's easier to do, for example.

Open world games offer something interesting too I think in that a single game can have many different tones you can match to your mood. So you can play a little something different from time to time, but still "move forward" in a game. The Witcher 3 is a big deal for me in this way. When my energy is very low, I'll sometimes just walk around and enjoy the sights while listening to a podcast, maybe do a really low key sidequest or something. Talk to villagers. But, when my energy is high, and I want to do something more involved, well, there's lots of quests / etc that you can pour hours and hours into or more challenging fights to chase down.

All that said, I do also like a few bite-sized games. Something like OlliOlli2 or Resogun I can play in that perfect state of Not Thinking At All / Focused on the Game.

Easy. I use the internet to speed up the process of completing those games while also doing everything they have to offer. I'm currently catching up on some old RPGs I missed out on last-gen even though at this point in my life, I have less free time than ever before. I'm not wandering around these games, backtracking back and forth while trying to find the "correct" path or solution to a quest. I pretty much have a browser running at all times to look up missions/quests and find the best character builds because I'm not wasting my time with an inefficient "build" either. I look up where special items and such are. This is probably controversial, but I look up the outcomes and choices I can make, so that I don't get stuck deciding and/or angry with an outcome, thinking of reloading a save. This is pretty much mandatory for me with games like Dark Souls. Those games are so vague that they pretty much demand an online community to pool information together. I take advantage of that information and play through those games with no issues because I've essentially cut out the most difficult aspects of them.

This also applies to open world sandbox games. I do pretty much complete everything. Once I get to a certain point in the game, I go on a side-content spree where I'm sprinting to get that "checkbox" of content checked. Honestly, sandbox games are borderline not worth it because at least in an RPG you're exploring the world and leveling your character in the process. Ghost Recon: Wildlands is definitely a game I would consider NOT wasting my time with even with a guide. The sheer amount of low effort copy/paste side-content in that game is unbelievable and using a guide doesn't even help because it's all the same and they're repeated HUNDREDS of times. I actually regret how much of my free time I spent on that game as the story missions wound up being almost exactly the same as the copy/paste side content.

As for multi-player games, I don't really bother with any I'm not already comfortable with. I'm never going to bother with any MOBA's. Even if I didn't hate them, I wouldn't waste my time learning. (Also 30-45 minute matches with 5-10 minute waiting periods between? I'll pass.) I'll stick to what I already know because I know that I'll do well enough and adapt to the game quickly. I gave up on fighting games because the way in which you learn a new game is by memorizing so much about each individual fighter. The moves are mostly the same save for a new mechanic introduced, but you have to memorize the timing of a characters individual animations to pull of combos and counters well and that's just not fun. I hate figuring out the correct timing to perform combos and such. Eventually it becomes muscle memory and you don't even look at your character, but that takes a lot of time... not really enjoying the game very much. When you have limited time, that could mean it takes you multiple days to really get to grips with a new character. That's just one... out of the whole roster.

I make more time for games, if anything. If something's been sitting on my backlog for years, I'll just charge through it on easy or cheat through it. It's a losing battle.

I can see that.

However, can't getting to the end of a quest in an RPG be analogous to getting to the end of a multiplayer match? At least, it is to me.

I have to break up RPG's into tiny chunks so that they don't feel so overwhelmingly massive. If I have a limited amount of time to play one, I usually sit down and say "I'm going to accomplish this today" and usually I can do it. If I don't do it, oh well, I'll try again the next day - which isn't really that different from having a string of bad multiplayer matches before you have to get up and go do something else.

It's also worth noting that I don't finish games that often. I've gotten better about that over the years, what with learning how to manage my time better and being better about choosing which games I want to play. Still, I don't have to get to a game's conclusion to feel satisfied - I usually know when it's time to turn it off and go do something else and I usually feel satisfied with my time spent when doing that.

Out of curiosity, what RPG's are you playing? All of them have filler to some extent, but some are better about it than others. Unless you're counting everything that isn't the main quest as "filler".

Plenty enough free-time and access to any games I have desire to play that I can be picky about what I spend my time on, while still grinding when I want too.

So if I find whatever 'the grind' for a paticular game is fun, then that's the point and I'll spend time doing it. Diablo 3 for example is just a bunch of numbers going up and up, and up to about 20-30 hours, that's enough for me. The same with a lot of the clicker and mobile games I'll play. Grindy, sure, but I enjoy the gameplay that makes up the grind, so I'll keep at it.

If on the other hand what I want out of a game is not the grind, but things the grind locks me out of, typically the story, then I will avoid it any way I can. If I'm not interested enough in the story to deal with the grind..I just won't play the game, period.

Otherwise I will turn the games difficulty all the way down to its lowest level. Or I will cheat, either via cheat-engine or altering save/init files. To wit, I only do this or condone it for purely single-player games. The last examples I could think of I did this for was Sunless Sea. I found the grind to be boring and annoying, but wanted to enjoy the great writing, atmosphere and story. So, hack the save file, now I have unlimited money, the best ship, and can just play it without the grind. Or Persona 5, which I rushed through the non-story bits as quickly as I could (and started the game on easy and never raised it higher).

I don't condone that cheating option for games in which it would give me an unfair advantage over other players? But when the only person effected is myself, I see nothing wrong with it.

I have a high-pressure, high-stakes and zero room for error type of job when it comes to residency. Therefore I prefer to not waste my time with videogames during the week. Don't have the time, the motivation, energy or willpower for it. I just come home and eat, and sleep. It's like having a functional depression.

I do not play grindy games, I have really come to despise them as useless time sinks. I also really hate games with bad save spots, with overly long cutscenes and whatever. Sometimes I want to play just an hour and save point is very far off. Games have become really bad time-sinks lately due to useless padding. Just give me a shorter game, more condensed.

I solely use the weekends to play some round-base online multiplayer games like Fortnite's version of PUBG.
On a vacation I play like a couple of games to get it out my system, i.e. Persona 5.

Despite my dwindling time for playing games, depending on the time of year, I have still maintained the same gaming habits I've always had, for the most part. I like to take my time and explore if it's worth it. It can sometimes lead to me taking way, way longer to complete a game than it used to, but in a way, I feel like my dollar goes further because I won't buy something new until I finish what I have. It took me 5 months to finish the Witcher 3 because of how busy I was. I played maybe one or two other shorter games in between. I'm happy to consume a game of that magnitude that slowly, though. It enabled me to set specific goals for myself as to what I wanted to accomplish each session, which was maybe 1 or 2 hours a night, 3 nights a week on average. The game never got stale for me and actually gave me the time to think about it and sink into the world. I was incredibly invested in it by the time I finished it since it took me nearly a half a year.

Right now I'm playing slightly more, a few hour chunks over the weekend. I would've finished Evil Within 2 by now if I played anymore, but I enjoy thinking about playing it during the week when I'm busy. Makes coming back to all the more satisfying.

I don't play games that are built around such garbage design gimmicks.

Never have.