Pictures with a better overview from the whole slide would be nice :/

@Flopper, trust me, there is no single word missing from any of the slides (apart from some ingame text on the screenshots)

Hilarious :-)

hmm...
I don't get it...

Hmm I kinda get slides 1,2,3 and 6, but what's so bad with that?

Slide1 simple expalins the slow fading in quest text, I turned that off as well, why should I have to wait if I can read faster, don't tell me this feature will rob me of some mood, or anything.

Slide2 as I understand it, just shows that you can run around, while the map is still open, which is helpful when you need to get from A to B so that a quick look at the map will not stop you all the time, which many games still do these days (and I hate it)

Slide3, ok, that means that people only read the summary, yah that's really bad, but definetly not the games fault. Some people just don't care for the story, so a short "go $there, get $that" is exactly what they need.

And whats wrong with Slide6, I don't get that either, as long as you don't get rid of every XP points, and every character development in general, you can always put a number to those things. Even APB will have a system where you need to do $tasks a $number of times to reach/acquire a $place,$level or $item, anything else would be just boring, because it would mean that you had access to all content from the beginning, which would kill all sense of improvement.

If someone could explain Slides 4 and 5, that would be great, I left WoW several years ago, but the above reasons weren't mine.
Slide 4 could be some crude batch job, but for what purpose? Auto-leveling? As far as I can tell, there are 3 spells to be cast, then you try to loot something (what if you need more then 3 spells to kill, what if the mob is not close enough to be looted, then you drink some water to replenish your mana and start again and repeat that 19 more times. Apart from looking like a kastrated version of basic, without timing, this won't work, and would still be inefective as hell. Not only does is only run the loop 20 times, there is no targeting for new mobs. So maybe someone can explain that.

And Slide 5, no Idea what Wowhead is, but I guess it's another one of these databases that explain quests to dummies who can't find NPCs on their own. Doesn't every game have these nowadays? Welcome to the Internets.

Different people see the same thing differently, and while I do not totally agree with Dave Jones in every single point, he has my sympathies for explaining "The Grind" in just six slides.

Let me add some explanation (which *is* influenced by my own personal opinion): Honestly, nobody reads those quest texts, at least nobody I know. Except for the beginning missions and some special missions, why should they? You can create most WoW quests with a simple randomizer: "Kill (number) of (opponent type)" or "Bring me (number) of (object type)" or "get (item) to (recipient) in (city)". What this means is that the "storys" behind those missions are not really important. Dave Jones said that he "pities the guys who write all those quest texts", to the loud laughter of the audience. And I don't think that the audience consisted of people hating WoW or MMOGs in general.

Travelling in 2D only simply means you don't even care what the surroundings looks like. Why not go back to a schematic 2D representation of the world, if that's enough for questing in many MMOGs? Shouldn't it matter where quests are located, and how I get there? Having said that, I personally enjoy using the "Instant travel" in let's say Oblivion... :-)

Wowhead is a database for items, quests and so on. Of course, these are common for many games, but again: If looking there for some coordinates makes you solve the quest so much faster, maybe the quest is not really interesting, but mainly about finding these coordinates?

The last two slides (in the right column) simply say how easy (and arguably how dull) it is to create "gameplay time" with the Grind. Hacking at always the same keys (for standard opponents) is no fun, in Jones' opinion, it's "more like programming". Then repeating that, and repeating that, you fill 10 minutes of game time without really getting much in terms of gameplay.

The last slide just does a (not very scientific) calculation how to get 76 hours of gameplay with the Grind in WoW: By killing one mob after the other.

By the way, the next slide (which I have not included) was about what Dave Jones thinks is the opposite of the Grind in MMOGs: Counterstrike! All the actors in CS are human, every match is different because of their actions, and you get 76 hours of gameplay easy -- but without PvE, meaningless quests and standard key presses.

That's what I understand is Jones' standpoint (which is my own, to a large extent). That's the reason, by the way, why I have played a wide variety of MMOGs in my gaming career, starting in earnest with EverQuest, but have never played a single game for longer than half a year, and mostly for much less: Once the Grind shows, the game mechanics become transparent and the suspension of disbelief falters, I lose interest.

Feel free to shoot back at me :-)

So for all the developers out there ;-)
next big thing to write: super-magic-random-story-and-quest-generator SMRSAQG