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

[The Last Stand]

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.

You're talking about Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway. There were three time consecutive achievements. One for playing seven days straight, one for playing each week for three months, and finally, another for logging in for one hundred calendar days. Mind you, you couldn't just cheese it through changing the console's calendar. Those tracked days would only count when connected to Xbox Live. Even worse, the exact time zone within Hell's Highway is unknown, so your specific time zone may differ from its internal tracking.

Since we're talking about WWII shooters, two Call of Duty titles remind me of having horrible time sinks for multiplayer achievements.

Call of Duty 3. I've discussed this before in detail, but I will give a quick rundown here too.

Publicar en el tema 'Call of Duty Thread'

29 de Ene, 2025

Whoever created those leaderboard achievements for Call of Duty 3, I hope they're not working in the game industry again.

Five achievements ask you to obtain 200/2000/8000/20000/40000 accumulative points logged into the leaderboards. It's not like CoD now where you'd get 100XP per kill, per capture. Each action (kill, capture, revive, ammo supply) I believe is worth ONE point. So, reaching 40K points, assuming you'd play during its lifespan, means you'd have to consistently play Call of Duty 3 online for many weeks/months at a decent level.

The quickest way to boost is to obtain at least...

• The Last Stand

Reacciones: x 1

There are five multiplayer achievements related to your overall leaderboard score. 200, 2000, 8000, 20000 and finally 40000. Kills and captures are only worth one point so you'd either need to play religiously during its heyday or boost for hours on end. It took weeks of coordination and boosting to barely reach 40K points since the game is dead.

Lastly, Call of Duty: World at War with two achievements related to rank. One for obtaining first prestige, another for reaching the max XP cap at tenth prestige. It's easier than CoD3 in theory since you gain 10x XP for kills, objectives and even challenges and more people play it regularly in comparison. However, compared to recent CoDs afterwards, XP obtainment takes longer since kills are only 10-30 XP and level progression gets exponentially larger. The kicker being that unlike CoD3, those two achievements are worth zero gamerscore but they count towards completion. So, assuming I play regularly and avoid cheaters, I should expect to reach 10th prestige within a few months to a year.

 

[Dysnomia]

I remember an insane amount of grinding in Beyond the Beyond. A simple low level bunny rabbit could kick your ass. Luckily (or unluckily) the encounter rate was so high that you could grind easily enough without wandering around too much.

 

[That Chris Guy]

Rust has a mechanic called "wipes" which correspond to updates of the game, meaning that absolutely nothing is persistence and everything you do is usually for that wipe only and every server resets on a specific interval (sometimes a week, sometimes a few weeks).

That's exactly why I never tried it. I saw no point in playing something that resets every 30 days.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

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.

To be fair, going on season 3 in BF6, the passes are well easy. I got 5 weeks of basically just "play assault" or "revive a bunch". Early seasons were nuts, true, with a ton of battle royale bait. Though, now that it's easier, the rewards aren't all that enticing. There's very little going out of your way to it.

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

Hats off to any adults who had a job while WoW was at its peak. I cant even bring myself to spend time on it now that I got literally nothing else to do.

 

[Agares]

To be fair, going on season 3 in BF6, the passes are well easy. I got 5 weeks of basically just "play assault" or "revive a bunch". Early seasons were nuts, true, with a ton of battle royale bait. Though, now that it's easier, the rewards aren't all that enticing. There's very little going out of your way to it.

Sounds like there's some improvement there but not enough to get me to drop $70 on the game. Hopefully it gets the BF4 treatment and becomes a solid BF game but until then, I'll just stick to 1 and 4.

Happy they're bringing back Golmud Railway though.

 

[Thiletonomics]

WWE 2K26's The Island mode added three (and a fourth one is introduced in the Story) Orders that have rewards like weapon skins and Create-A-Wrestler parts that require to rep grind for. The very last reward you get from each order requires 561600 rep, with these boots being one example:



The main way of gaining rep is by doing Towers. Each match win gets 100 rep, each loss gives 50 rep, and you get a little extra bonus rep (I think it was 500) for completing a Tower. So you'll need to get 5000 or so Match wins to max out one Order's rep.

There is also another grind on the Island called the Hall of Fame, where you have to get points by doing certain milestones, i.e. winning matches or hitting move types like light attacks, Signatures, or Finishers. And those require a large number of said milestones, i.e. the top Win Matches milestone requires 25000 match wins. The end reward for that grind is a jacket:



Also, since The Island is always online, and WWE 2K game servers shut down after only 2 years, if you don't do these grinds before the shut down, those items will no longer be obtainable.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

Sounds like there's some improvement there but not enough to get me to drop $70 on the game. Hopefully it gets the BF4 treatment and becomes a solid BF game but until then, I'll just stick to 1 and 4.

Eh, it merged the BF1 and BF2042 crowds into one game that isn't -too- modern. I enjoy it now and then until I realize "wait, I've spent the last 10 mins running around, dying and respawning. This ain't fun at all" and uninstall it. So in that sense, sunk-cost, the pass is aight. I don't mind dying if I got a bit closer to finishing a challenge. But again, if the core game isn't fun, why bother? It's still nuts to me how BFII got so close to triggering a feeling I haven't had since TF2: The ability to support your team in other ways than killing, dying relatively quickly but also being able to team wipe singlehandedly. I love playing support in games but there's just no reason to in Battlefield. Killing is all you're aiming for.

 

[Strangolapreti]

Personal experience:

• Minish cap's figurine collection, not worth a final piece of heart.
• Can think of 2 Shitass grinds in Enter the Gungeon:
  • Obtaining 5000 Hegemony credits to buy a golden skin for Tonic the Sledgehog.
  • Also unlocking "High dragunfire", abysmal low chance to find it in 2nd floor and just for a shit weapon with no synergies.
• Boss rushes where you put limitations of yourself and there's some kind of visual reward for clearing with all at once.
  • Hollow knight's pantheons, you get the funny glowing markings, first 2 are feasable, if not doable. 3rd is HARD, 4th is cancer, 5th is distilled pain.
  • Bō: path of the teal lotus does the same, but bosses are much harder and leagues more miserable to fight.

After asking my friends for their experience and opinion:

• Exalting in Realm of the Mad God: A single class requires 75 exaltation points per stat, which are gained by completing various (difficult and dangerous) dungeons in a game with a permadeath mechanic.
  According to him the minimum amount of dungeon runs needed is 305 for JUST ONE CLASS (there are currently 19) and on average (some dungeons have a chance to give an extra exaltation point) these 305 runs are split into:
  • 29 "Advanced Kogbold steamworks" (harder version of "Kogbold steamworks")
  • 37 "Plagued nest" + 1 "The nest"
  • 38 "Fungal caverns" + 37 "Crystal caverns" (the latter is accessed from finishing the former)
  • 75 "Ice Citadel"
  • 37 times "The Shatters" (hardest and longest dungeon in the game)
  • 38 "Lost halls" + 37 times "The Void" (former is a very long dungeon, the latter accessible only from the former)
  • 26 times "Oryx sanctuary" (2nd hardest dungeon in the game, Oryx is the titular Mad God)
  • 25 times the hard mode of "Spectral penitentiary"
• The entirety of Digimon world is a painful grindatron and micromanagement, you can find the biggest offenders in getting all the medals themsevles though, with one in particular tasking to raise every single digimon at least once, another tasking you to take part of and win all tournaments, fishing 100 fish, collect all trading cards and filling up File city, Also have fun in PAL version, where the game cannot be completed lmao.
• That piece of troonslop abandonware "webfishing", apparently fishes comes in different tiers and rarirties, and the rarest of them also are particularly nasty to find at max tier level.

 

[donksmanSupreme42]

Monster Hunter

it isnt even the worst monster hunter game in terms of grind


that title goes to either dos or frontier

 

[Lost at sea]

it isnt even the worst monster hunter game in terms of grind


that title goes to either dos or frontier

Yep, I could have mentioned Frontier, but I felt doing an MMO would be cheating. But since we are on that topic, stuff like maxing out a Ravi weapon in that game (at least when it was live) would take 1,300 hours of doing nothing but Ravi raids. There were other ridiculous grinds like hiden armor (which by the time it was near the end of service was also severely powercrept).

 

[Roast Chicken]

I'm playing a game called Blacksad: Under the Skin and the last achievements are to fill in the sticker book. There are 100 stickers and 160 locations. But y'see, they're not in set places - they spawn in random locations through each playthrough, and sometimes you can't even pick the fucking things up without angling your camera very specifically. I have to play through this game, that has no dialogue or cutscene skip, again and maybe even again there's glitched stickers, to complete the album.

I might give up or take a break

 

[donksmanSupreme42]

Rust

oh yeah, i solved that by having an account i shared with relatives and friends in sifferent time zones, we'd have a schedule, where each one of us plays the account in different hours of the day, so its never left unattended for more than an hour, we had a whatsapp group fpr coordinating account switches with out actual lives


never got raided until we got bored ot it and the team gradually disbanded

 

[The Last Stand]

That's exactly why I never tried it. I saw no point in playing something that resets every 30 days.

Speaking of which, remember when titles from 06-09 would incorporate achievements for placing on their leaderboards. Saints Row, Killzone 2, Kane & Lynch: Dead Man. The worst, infamous example of that would have to be Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.

There's two achievements associated with leaderboard placement, both of which require the player to achieve #1 placement. It's practically impossible to achieve it now. It's worse than a time sink, it's a money sink as well.

According to TrueAchievements, you'd need multiple copies, multiple accounts, multiple consoles, multiple subscriptions (remember, Xbox Live requires a fee to play online), multiple TVs and expert coordination to even THINK about scaling those leaderboards.

Add insult to injury, leaderboards do not reset and can be modified through external software to achieve mathematically impossible scores. I don't know what Ubisoft was thinking.

 

[The Feline Solution 2]

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.

GGG's design philosophy is one of the core reasons i ultimatively left. Oh, you got a fun and effective and also somewhat affordable build last league? Yeah, we can't have that, eat shit/nerfs. It was like this literally every season, most often players who didn't even play the meta builds but used gems or gear from those builds on their characters were affected. I really hate that NO FUN ALLOWED approach and from what i've seen GGG seamlessly carried it over to PoE 2.

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.

I never knew that, what the fuck? That is probably the most retarded approach to drop table generation in existence. Still, loved playing that game back in the olden Dreamcast days.

 

[Two Dollars]

Any RPG or metroidvania where 100% means “find every piece of common treasure in every bumfuck corner of every bumfuck map”.

Aside from that, as much as I love Mario Party 1, unlocking every minigame is way too much of a slog. You have to buy them from a shop (as opposed to every game after 2 where simply playing a minigame for the first time unlocks it), and they cost way too many coins. How do you get coins? By playing boards over and over and over, and you only get the coins obtained by human players (stars go toward unlocking the final board, which is also a massive chore, and become worthless once you’ve unlocked said board). If you’re playing normally with one or two people and have already gotten the cheaper ones, you’d be lucky to even get enough coins for a single minigame from a hour-long board. It takes forever even by cheesing it with the “turn on minigame stadium, let the CPUs play for half an hour, then use two controllers to set everyone to humans on the last turn” strategy, but if you’re doing it legitimately and don’t have a group of four diehard MP1 fans, just give up.

MP2 also has this problem, but it’s at least a lot better. You get coins from all four players regardless of whether they’re human, each star gives a 50 coin bonus, and if you really want a different grinding method, Mini Game Coaster now gives coins.

 

[The Last Stand]

Any RPG or metroidvania where 100% means “find every piece of common treasure in every bumfuck corner of every bumfuck map”.

You reminded me of GTA IV. There's two time sinks that I dread from its single player and multiplayer.

To 100% the single player, you'd need to hunt down cars parked in specific locations, complete every stunt jump, and the worst of all, kill 200 pigeons scattered around Liberty City. Unlike hidden packages from the 3D GTA games, these pigeons are quite small and tucked between crevices within the city (buildings, alleys, roadways.)

Its multiplayer is even worse. There's an achievement, Auf Wiedershen Petrovic, that requires you to win every game mode, complete each co-op mode and every race variation offered.

Publicar en el tema 'Grand Theft Auto Grieving Thread'

11 de Ene, 2026

GTA IV's online achievements and its 100% achievement requires a lot of dedication from the player to unlock.

Issue 2: Devs include multiplayer achievements and don't separate them from the standard achievements. I played GTA IV in 2016 with the intent of getting every achievement, but I quickly realized I was genuinely locked out from 100% because one of the achievments was to win a huge number of online races. I couldn't find a single race, let alone enough to complete that asinine requirement.

You're talking about two particular achievements. Top of the Midnight Club...

• The Last Stand

The races would make up the chunk of time since there are 108 of them involving bikes, boats, unstructured, even helicopters. And you have to keep track of what you've completed. You could boost the races and game modes yourself with at least two copies, two accounts, two consoles and two TVs, so it's not AS bad as GRAW. Still, it would take time and the servers aren't always stable.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Any RPG or metroidvania where 100% means “find every piece of common treasure in every bumfuck corner of every bumfuck map”.

If the game has some upgrade to see where everything left, or at least gives hints to hidden walls that's at least something. The worst for me (that I quickly gave up on) is the upgrades in the first Infamous.

 

[The Last Stand]

The "Seriously..." achievements from the Gears of War series. Gears 1 started this trend with achieving 10K kills in its ranked multiplayer modes. There are three (four after an update) 4v4 game modes: Warzone, one life elimination mode; Execution, Warzone but executions or headshots count for kills; Assassination, kill the leader to win. (Annex; capture a moving point around the map, respawns allowed.)

Think about accumulating 10,000 recorded kills where you only have one life per round. Even worse, the kills tracked on the leaderboards are bugged, so it make take more than 10,000 kills to eventually unlock. I highlighted Annex in parentheses because kills from that game mode do not count towards Seriously... or the weapon kill achievements.

Gears 2 had its own Seriously 2.0 where it asks you for 100,000 kills. Luckily, this is accumulative towards any mode (campaign, multiplayer, horde) but it's still a massive time sink to farm kills. I consider this the "easiest" of the Seriously achievements.

Gears 3 takes inspiration from prior Gears titles. Now, you must reach level 100 and collect every onyx medal from the base game. Onyx medals are achieved through, but not limited to, completing the campaign on its highest difficulty, Insane; earning X number of ribbons through specific tasks, play/win X amount of matches. achieve 6000 kills per weapon, etc. So, be prepared to spend hours into days experiencing everything Gears 3 offers for the player.

Almost forgot, there's an Onyx medal that's currently unachievable since it relies on Epic Games updating their event playlists in its matchmaking.

 

[TheTitKoker]

Honestly grinding ANY non-ranked/non-PvP game gear, especially if there is RNG is unadulterated lobotomy.

Used to cringe every single time I'd read someone pouring days into Borderlands for some shitty legendary gun they could've just hexxed in and kept things moving.

And thus why I never really bothered with Destiny - making top tier shit be RNG only to sunset it and pump out some new fucking thing a few months later was one of the greatest disservices to FPS games in history. Fuck Bungie post Halo era.

 

[The Last Stand]

Used to cringe every single time I'd read someone pouring days into Borderlands for some shitty legendary gun they could've just hexxed in and kept things moving.

Aren’t all of them practically the same types of variants?

The skill tree in Assassin’s Creed’s: Valhalla. I saw one look at that web and noped the fuck out.