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The original was posted on /r/gaming by /u/DarkIcedWolf on 2023-08-07 14:50:49+00:00.
So I just have to say this and see if any of you agree. TEDIUM IS NOT HARDER. You people who think so need to stop and think about other ways developers can do certain aspects of the game and improve it. I guarantee you there are more than 2 ways to deal with everything bad they create.
I’ve learned to call it Glorping as of late, a term from MMO’s and learned from Harry Barry and Ben Edgar of the Yogscast.
Glorping is in a sense an unnecessary tedious, repetitive task to get something you want. For example, crafting in games, busy work. Like to craft this item, you need to craft this item to craft this item, which also needs 3 more items that are crafted out of 13 of these items. Overly complicated recipes that just make you want to punch the creator of a game/mod.
Tedious is the same thing, a boring mundane task that is there to be there.
Recently Minecraft has made two massive changes to how the game is played and the only thing it has done is rendered time consumption on one task. The two I am talking about is Netherite and Villagers. Im sure you dudes know this but if you are not familiar or just haven’t played since beta, I will teach you.
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In the game, you have an ore that can only be mined in another dimension and using an explosive like TNT. You’d then grab gold with 4 of these hard to find things into a recipe to get the ingot. This process was already an issue for some, however, Mojang chose to implement exploring into this mess in order to apply it to your tools. This would be fine if it wasn’t for how world generation is done, once you explored a part, it’ll forever be there with nothing new- making you have to go out even further and explore WAY more land. This basically doubled the time as it’s a hard to find structure already. If you use an outside source it makes it easier but pulling up a damn website for a structure should be illegal. This was a massive divide with a decent majority saying it’s unnecessary or poorly implemented.
As of the last few months, Mojang has been tossing the idea again but with villagers, an NPC who trades with you for items. There are two ways of going about getting max gear and villagers was one of them, however it is tedious and overbearing. To start youd have to find a village, easy enough, you’ll find one within minutes of opening a new world. Then you would bring them home or trap them to then make farms and wait HOURS to get enough materials to trade with them. However you would have to wait again, because they only allow you to buy certain items a certain amount of times every day. So you’d glorp; wait, buy, wait, buy, wait and then you can get into the nitty gritty. TIME TO LOOK FOR WHAT YOU WANT! It could take hours to do this, you have to break a block, place it down and click on the NPC to trade. This is glorpy as all hell but was worth it as you would get what you want eventually. This was the BEST way to get armor because the other method is complete RNG with levels and with how you get XP, even more glorpy. So how did they fix this?
By making it even more tedious! You can now only get certain items from certain villagers in a biome! And 2 biomes don’t even naturally spawn with them. So you know that place down the road with no way of transport as villagers don’t follow you? You gotta go there! Grab your boat, portal or minecart, grab your villager and put them in there to move them glorping your way to victory. Then you can repeat the process above for no other reason then to get a certain book that’s only guaranteed after SPENDING ALL OF YOUR HARD CASH on a fucking gamble to get what you want. Then you’d have to go back your house, use levels that weren’t entirely necessary before and combine them with things to get the better thing you need! It’s less RNG technically but the way you have to move, build a village and make sure you have enough cash and villagers to trade with is ridiculous.
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You might be asking now why I’m posting this and why I started this off with a story about a game everyone has played. These two changes are the shining example of Glorp. The only reason why Mojang made these changes were to make the mid game (which is a breeze along with everything else) last longer and make the player take even more steps to get something that was already glorpy in the first place.
This has been done countless times in gaming, whether by accident or by purpose. A great example of how hard games can be is FromSoftware games. These games were meant for the fans and nothing more, the games intentions are to make a hard game not to stretch out the contents of one section like crafting or low durability for trouble like in Breath of the Wild. The game was made with an intention of difficultly but not so difficult or glorpy where you feel like every time you die it’s because of lack of in game accessibility. If you die you move on and go for it again, you continue not feeling bad of the death but counting it as an experience. Whenever I lose in a game of skill, it’s more about what tools I could have used better or what skill can I improve upon, not setting myself back to glorp to beat a final boss.
Another example is fighting games. Street Fighter is a great game of skill and is only hard because the game was intended to be that way. They’ve since changed their ways and added Modern controls but they made it balanced while not taking ANYTHING from the original people who supported the franchise and the original Classic combo strings and flow charts. They might have reworked a few things but it’s nothing as drastic to ruin the experience or put more people off of the game. This is most prevalent with Street Fighter 6 and it’s done incredibly well. It’s hard and overwhelming but do-able because it’s not meant to be tedious or time consuming. When you get a combo you don’t think of it as tedious just to be tedious, your hard work paid off.
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The 3 examples I’ve given are three different examples of hard and one of them is just tedious. In the example of Minecraft, the notion of it being as intended, not talked about until it releases and not changed until 5 updates later is tiring. It’s not doing anything but making it longer because the devs don’t know how to fix what was established. Tedious does not mean hard, tedious is a term to mean boring, mundane or just annoying. To make a game tedious, doesn’t automatically mean it’s harder, just longer.
I’m not saying tedious shit is unnecessary either. It’s part of games, in some games you have to glorp and get better gear to be better. However, that is when you either have an alternative and a skill gap to clear or to have an equal reward for what you work for. The reason I suggest alternatives is not to be made P2W, just something that takes more skill and less time or have an equal reward for the effort.