The Lost Art of Killing Ten Thousand Rats

I spent six hours killing Wraiths and Zombies in Ragnarok Online once. Willingly. Happily, even. My priest was maybe level 74, the exp bar was crawling, and I remember thinking about how the heal-bomb timing felt tight and clean. Loot dropped. Levels ticked. My fingers knew the rhythm. I logged off at 2 AM feeling like I’d done something. I spent a lot of time in Glast Heim Churchyard. A solid spot to grind.

Nobody designs for that anymore. Or if they do, they’re embarrassed about it.

The conventional wisdom now, the status quo that every GDC talk and Reddit thread reinforces, is that grinding is bad. Players don’t want to kill mobs for hours. They want curated experiences, dynamic events, story beats, rotating dailies. Give them variety. Respect their time. The worst thing you can do, supposedly, is let someone sit in one spot pressing buttons on monsters.

Guild Wars 2 built its entire identity around this. Hearts instead of kill quests. Dynamic events that scale. No dedicated healer, no trinity, everything flowing and casual and frictionless. And yeah, it works as a pleasant thing to do for ninety minutes after dinner. But ask yourself when the last time was that you lost an evening in GW2 just… grinding. Just being in the zone. You don’t, because there’s nothing to be in the zone about. The combat flows past you like screensaver. Pretty. Painless. Forgettable.

Old School RuneScape, meanwhile, is still running. Still growing. Players park themselves at Ammonite Crabs or Nightmare Zone for hours and hours, and they come back tomorrow and do it again. The progression is glacial. The combat is, honestly, barely interactive by modern standards. But the drops matter, the levels are visible and rare enough to mean something, and every tick of the exp bar is a small dopamine receipt that the game respects your investment. There’s a reason “nice” in the chat when someone hits 99 still feels real.

The difference isn’t complexity. Ragnarok had simple combat too. So did early MapleStory, so did EverQuest at its core loop. What those games understood, almost by accident, was that grinding works when every layer of the experience reinforces the same feeling: the hit sounds, the loot table, the exp curve, the power jump at the next milestone, the spot you picked being slightly dangerous, the economy making your drops worth something to someone. All of those tiny signals stacking into a flow state that modern designers have just. Abandoned.

They abandoned it because it’s hard to monetize flow. You can monetize skipping the grind (boosts, tokens, battle passes). You can monetize variety (skins, mounts, seasonal content). But you can’t put a price tag on “this felt good to do for four hours,” so it stopped being a design priority. The incentive structure bent toward content churn and cash shop rotation, and the thing that actually kept people logged in got left behind.

Sure, some of it is nostalgia. Some of it is being 17 with nowhere to be. But I’ve gone back to private servers in my 30s and the loop still works when the design supports it. When the exp curve has real teeth, when the economy isn’t flooded, when dying costs something, when the next level actually changes what you can do or where you can go. The grind holds up. The grind was always the point.

Forget the lame “kill 10 rats” quests. Bring back the “kill 10,000 rats” style design.