Worst Grinds/Time Sinks In Gaming - Achievements, Reputatons And Cosmetics Galore

[Judge Dredd]

Four of the worst were Stanley Parable. Witness, Bravely Default, and some World War 2 game for Xbox 360 (I want to say Brothers in Arms)

Stanley Parable had some joke achievements that required you to tap a couple of buttons once every few seconds for 3 hours for an achievement. Was a parody of 2deep4u art games. There was also some achievement for playing the game once, then playing again years later.

Witness had a similar one. There was a cinema you unlock with various videos. To get 100% one of the puzzles required watching a video while drawing a line. Said video was 45 minutes, and you might have already watched it already.

The 360 World War 2 game had an achievement for logging into Xbox live every day for a month, or something like that. Sounds easy, but Xbox Live would go down for maintenance every so often. As a result, getting that 30 day streak was next to impossible.


Bravely Default is a real piss take though. Spoilers. When you beat the game, things go bad, causing a time loop. You either break the loop and get the bad ending, or you play the entire game again, and get the same time loop ending with no obvious change. What you're supposed to do is beat this JRPG something like nine times, in a row, on the same save.

 

[Disastrously Dumb]

Shiny Pokemon collecting in gen2,3,4,5

 

[fentanyl tester]

Farming for some specific drops in Phantasy Star Online. Your drop rate table is determined based on your name - better hope you picked a good one, otherwise you might end up in the eternal niggerhell of farming 1/40000 drops for that gun you really want.

 

[Agares]

Time limited battlepass shit in modern multiplayer games. FOMO turns gaming into a chore and sucks all the fun out of it. It's a big reason why I don't bother with modern CoD and Battlefield games anymore.

 

[verissimus]

I think the standard playtime across that genre is like 24 hours beginning to end

Not quite. I'd say it's usually between 25 to 35 hours for the main game. Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross may take you about 25 hours on your first playthrough (ignore New Game plus). FF7 I know took me about 35 hours just for the main game. FF10 about 30+ hours for the main game.

Mario RPG was a different matter. I played the remake not too long ago and the main game was only about 12 to 13 hours.

 

[The Feline Solution 2]

path of exile no doubt
it's a grind so you can get stronger so you can start another grind
it's made by grinding gear games, it's a game where you grind for gear

100% this. I tell anyone who asks me if they should get into the game that it's a game made for the unemployed, the time investment needed for this game is just ridiculous. My hours into it are in the thousands and i still never reached anything close to the top level of players, both from a gear and gameplay perspective. Started in Talisman and left around Delve, got totally burned out on leagues and their respective grind, came back once in the Mirror of Kalandra league and the mechanical bloat and grind made the past look like a dream.

I debated on trying PoE 2 ever since its first unveiling but i don't think i will ever take that plunge, i am too old for this shit.

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

Bravely Default is a real piss take though. Spoilers. When you beat the game, things go bad, causing a time loop. You either break the loop and get the bad ending, or you play the entire game again, and get the same time loop ending with no obvious change. What you're supposed to do is beat this JRPG something like nine times, in a row, on the same save.

This is a gross lie, you get dumped into a resettled world, but you can essentially run right to the next reset immediately after the first go.

Its absolutely shitty but you don't have to redo the game 9 times.

Anyway, 100,% completing WOW is one of the worst, faggots here mentioning JRPGs are way out of scope what a grind looks like.

 

[DumbDude43]

100% this. I tell anyone who asks me if they should get into the game that it's a game made for the unemployed, the time investment needed for this game is just ridiculous. My hours into it are in the thousands and i still never reached anything close to the top level of players, both from a gear and gameplay perspective. Started in Talisman and left around Delve, got totally burned out on leagues and their respective grind, came back once in the Mirror of Kalandra league and the mechanical bloat and grind made the past look like a dream.

I debated on trying PoE 2 ever since its first unveiling but i don't think i will ever take that plunge, i am too old for this shit.

what i find particularly insane about poe is that while almost every other game tends to get easier and more accessible over time, poe seems to do the polar opposite. it keeps getting more punishing, more complicated, more time consuming, more grindy, and the amount of effort you have to put into a build to make it truly endgame viable keeps increasing.
like, i remember back in synthesis and legion league, i could make a simple spectre summoner build (with solar guards) using just basic life/resist rares and a handful of relatively cheap uniques, and it would clear everything up to uber elder (the highest end content in the game at the time)
but today, trying to get to that same "can do all content" level in modern poe would require an order of magnitude more time and effort because of all the extra shit they added to the game and all the nerfs and changes they applied over time.

poe truly is a game for severely masochistic giga autists. it's extremely good at what it does, but you have to be a very special kind of person to handle it. i used to be that, but by now the autism levels of the game have increased so far that even i have been left behind and can't keep up anymore.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

This is a gross lie, you get dumped into a resettled world, but you can essentially run right to the next reset immediately after the first go.

Its absolutely shitty but you don't have to redo the game 9 times

Yeah, it became a meme complaint about the game, despite the fact that you can speedrun that part in an hour, and it's way better than some singular dungeons in other games. Supposedly there is a lot of new scenes with the previous bosses showing about their personality each loop, but it doesn't have a lot of appeal after the first loop.

Thread tax: Gacha, the dailies seem innocuous but add up significantly to dozens of hours per year of busy work.

 

[WULULULULU]

Since no one here mentioned it but it HAS to be WAR THUNDER

War Thunder has to be the only game where the grind actively harms the gameplay. At first glance, seeing war machines used from the 1940s up to the late 2010s with semi-realistic damage models seems nice. Hell you've seen ads of using the M1 Abrams, T-64, AH-64 or any other modern-era vehicle in the game (and as of recent, they've added the Super Hornet few months ago, as one of the latest additions that is close to real-life usage). So your first instinct is to jump in and have a crack at modern tech without having to spend your entire life on military school.

That is until you boot the game and the first greeting you get is an M2A4 Stuart, a light tank from 1935. And hold on, you look at the rank and it says Rank I. When you access the tech tree, that is where the horror sets in and you realize that if you want your favorites, you'd have to grind up to Rank VIII, and for those WWII enthusiasts, the favorites would be like higher end Rank III-IV. Those who are smart enough would nope the fuck out but for those who says "fuck it, I'll grind", prepare yourself for the most soul-crushingly agonizing grind in the history of video games.

When you progress from Rank I to Rank II, it may seem easy at first, until you realize that the game has multiple nations, and each tank/plane/ship/infantry (assuming the infantry mode ends up being a permanent mode) has a set of modules/upgrades to put your Research Points into. RP is the lifeblood of the grind. What battles you play on that specific nation and specific mode (Air/Naval/Ground and Arcade/Realistic/Simulation) will award you RP on that specific tech tree. Except, RP rewards are ass by design. In your first few battles, you may realize that there is a "Premium Account" setting and it immediately lands you in the shop. And this is where the hook has you set in.

Those who have played the game know that F2P'ing the game will only get you so far. You can only tolerate the grind up to Rank II-III, and anything beyond that WILL require a Premium Account to even progress. With such a shit grind, you also realize that the game's content (i.e maps, mechanics, teamwork, etc.) is even more shallow. Maps have been redesigned into shitboxes with 3-corridor layouts akin to Call of Duty, spawn-camping becomes an issue because of shit maps, specific type of vehicles gets the boot in balance (i.e bombers), mechanics are added for """realism""" only to worsen the experience (volumetric shells as an example) and worst of all, its the same capture the flag mode for 15 fucking years, with very little new events apart from April Fools events. The community has become a cesspit of retards whose smart minds have been degraded by the grind, turning them into "monkey sees enemy killed, neuron activation" shitters.

I know you retards will start mentioning "but WoT is worse!" except it isn't from a grind perspective. The only reason/s people will start the same old argument is because a.) it's arcade and b.) the premium tank balance. b.) is justified, a.) is subjective, but when it comes to the grind, its a massive night and day difference. The latter will actually award you credits, premium days, free XP and sometimes Gold when you do dailies/weeklies, not to mention, you can actually progress as a F2P. War Thunder doesn't even reward you free Premium at all, so all you get is paultry RP and Silver Lions (their regular currency) whenever you complete a mission. Its actual insanity. Compared to the two, I've constantly facepalmed multiple times in WT because I look at the grind thinking "my god how long will this fucking end".

tl;dr War Thunder has the worst fucking grind in all of gaming and no one can beat it (unless you're some gook or chink)

Thread tax: Gacha, the dailies seem innocuous but add up significantly to dozens of hours per year of busy work.

I would have said Nikke but any FagHoyo game has THAT weapon-gacha mechanic that has seeped into every goddamn gacha game to make the grind as horrendous as possible. That fancy weapon exclusive to that character to make them giga-powerful? You have to roll for a CHANCE to get it.

Actual tedious, scummy shit.

 

[Croaking Spider]

poe truly is a game for severely masochistic giga autists. it's extremely good at what it does, but you have to be a very special kind of person to handle it. i used to be that, but by now the autism levels of the game have increased so far that even i have been left behind and can't keep up anymore.

I feel like the general sentiment among a lot of PoE players is "I have 1k hours in this game and only marginally understand what I'm doing". I never got into true end-game content until several years of playing on and off, and I barely understood crafting until I forced myself into SSF. I have a friend who constantly bitches about the state of Diablo, yet every time I try to get him on PoE1 or 2, he bounces off of it and complains about the complexity despite it being the very thing he bitches about in Diablo. There's not really an intuitive way to "learn" PoE without external resources and the occasional piece of useful information you see fly by in global. PoE is probably my top ARPG coming in at a close tie with Diablo 2 and Titan Quest, but it's hard to recommend to people. Some days I wonder why I keep playing, until I see shitstainsteve break through another Delve milestone.

 

[Korpon]

Black Desert Online is probably the worst grind I've ever heard of, I have a friend who's played it and explained it to me, fuck that shit

OSRS (my beloved) I've almost maxed my main before I got burnt out, that in itself takes around 2-3 thousand hours assuming you're playing at peak efficiency and doing the best methods, but obviously you still have to make money to do many of the grinds, do questing, etc. And that's just for the stats alone, someone else already mentioned it but things like the collection log exist, along with achievement diaries and other shit.

Payday 2's Robbedacop safehouse trophy requires killing 658,893 cops to get. I put about 1k hours into Payday 2 back then but I don't think I even had 100k kills when the safehouse got released and I saw that trophy. I also haven't checked the game in forever but I heard they made the infamy system level cap way higher, along with a bunch of other inane grinds to the game for achievements. I 100%'d the game outside Robbedacop way back then and I have zero intention on ever going back to get all the new shit.

Yakuza series in general for their 100%'s are insanely long and require playing a lot of very hard minigames, including learning mahjong. (there's also a fuck ton of games in the series) Yakuza 5's coliseum in particular requires you to beat all the battles in it with all 4 playable characters, and only one or two characters fighting styles are actually good in it, and many of the fights are insanely badly balanced.

 

[Super Malario]

As a former TF2 player the biggest time waste is getting involved in the trading part of the game, all of it sucks ass and is worthless, specially now that the game is a rotting corpse filled with furries and trannies

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I would have said Nikke but any FagHoyo game has THAT weapon-gacha mechanic that has seeped into every goddamn gacha game to make the grind as horrendous as possible. That fancy weapon exclusive to that character to make them giga-powerful? You have to roll for a CHANCE to get it.

Actual tedious, scummy shit.

Weapon banner is just another way to force players to double dip on the gacha, akin to locking a character full abilities by requiring at least one duplicate to unlock an ability that completely changes how it plays.

No, the worse thing that FagHoyo popularized is artifact grinding. Each character has 6 artifacts to equip that can massively boost their damage, to get one you need to do some bullshit fight using your daily stamina points. So after spending a few minutes you get artifacts, and that's where the fun part begins.

Every weapon has one major stat and multiple sub stats. Don't let the names fool you, the sub stats can be just as important as the major stat.

First of all if the major stat is not a fit for the character archetype then the item is garbage. The Devs don't care that an item effect improves fire damage by 60%, it can have the major stat boost being water damage boost because fuck you.

Then the sub stats are usually partially visible, so you have to waste resources leveling the artifact to even reveal them. Almost certainly at least one of them will be complete dogshit like defence/HP up and in general only 20% if the possible options are optimal.

And it's not over yet! Now as you upgrade the artifact, only one random sub stat will increase. Usually to non optimal spread, if not outright choosing the garbage one each time.

And that's the endgame, grinding resources and then grinding artifacts hoping to get lucky and get out of this hell.

 

[Lost at sea]

My pick would be trying to find god charms in Monster Hunter 4 and Generations Ultimate. To put it into perspective for those who don't know MH and how they work, these are basically pieces of equipment that have random skill points and up to 3 slots for putting even more skill points into them. A god charm is basically a charm that has not only 3 slots, but also a good skill (or two) with high points. It's extremely RNG heavy and, as far as I know, there are no RNG manipulation methods for getting one in a timely manner. So, you may get one in an hour, or you could never even see a half-good one. These are not necessary for playing the game unless you are autistic (like me) or a speedrunner and want to make an optimized set.

Another one is, trying to get the achievements for bringing Sora and Riku to lvl 99 in Chain of Memories, with Riku being especially tedious, since with Sora you can at least Mega Flare the enemies to ashes.

 

[TokiBun]

Coming back so I can bitch about Gen 2 Pokemon for a second. I find Gen 2 fans wayyyy more annoying than genwunners. Johto fans are delusional claiming these games are the best in the franchise when there is no excuse for that level leap from the last gym to the Johto elite 4. I'd forgive it but the grind in the area before challenging them needs higher level pokemon. Genuinely just play a mod that fixes the level jump issue in current year. I'm blaming this problem on misguided game design and Johto fans need to own up to that. The fact that the remakes didn't fix this problem either is also baffling.

 

[Judge Dredd]

This is a gross lie, you get dumped into a resettled world, but you can essentially run right to the next reset immediately after the first go.

Its absolutely shitty but you don't have to redo the game 9 times.

I didn't know. It was, what, 2012 when that game came out?

I remember it being a piss take and not bothering.

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

I didn't know. It was, what, 2012 when that game came out?

I remember it being a piss take and not bothering.

well there is a fucking point to it, if you beat the game

the main villain is a world eating bug thing, and you are tunneling through dimensions, and there were parties of "yous" before your crew as well, the only difference is Tiz, who was not apart of any previous loop, the giant hole that appears where Tiz's hometown was, is the tunnel between all these worlds, and at the end, this entity will feast, but then you beat it up.

Tiz himself died when his hometown died, but a cosmic widowed being inhabits his body and animates him, and this sort of cosmic touch is the special difference that helps things change.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

This is a gross lie, you get dumped into a resettled world, but you can essentially run right to the next reset immediately after the first go.

But if you don't do all the side quests you are going to send up so pitifully underpowered that the first boss of the "Real" ending will rape you because it outright cheats and overrides your equipment.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

MMORPGs are fucking stupid.
Every single one.

Loved them in my teens and 20s. Absolutely loathe them today. And loathe any multiplayer game newer than 2009.