There indeed are people who would grind for a small reward but that was not my point. Just because WoW doesn’t have any grind that would offer a big reward, it doesn’t mean other games don’t or didn’t.

Interestingly, before Moria, and before Forochel, and before The Angmar Revamp, when you’d run out of quests in the Misty Mountains around level 48, your best option to get to the cap would be to grab some friends and travel to Goblin Town to slaughter goblins. I have a screenshot somewhere of my character in GT with “8 XP to level 50″. I loved every minute of it, the frantic killing on – and often enough beyond – the verge of getting lost.

Also, being reputation grinds are often things you can do solo it makes for the perfect type of game play for solo players or players that are waiting for their group time to come.

Rep grinding also seems to be an “at your own pace” sort of thing. I can go and grind 10K rep in one day whereas someone else does 500 or 600 each time they are on and slowly peck away at it. There is no advantage to be doing it quicker and no drawback to them doing it slower and even for those that never do it at all there is nothing they would miss. Grinds like that fit all styles of play.

There are definitely people in WoW for example who would grind 100 hours for a 1% bonus.

At least, that’s what I recollect when I look back towards the end of WoTLK and the start of Cataclysm which is when I stopped playing. I started an alt because even getting to the next “ding” by grinding mobs felt more rewarding than not doing anything substantial as a casual player.

To be honest, looking back it doesn’t really feel like there was much to do other than daily quests once you’d capped all the other relevant things (like dungeon reputation or whatever) and you didn’t have regular playtime to commit to raids. I’m sure there were, but I can’t remember them.

Grinds are easier to swallow if they’re optional, and you don’t feel you have to rush to get it done to make your character more powerful. That’s why I prefer reps to have things like mounts or companions or other vanity items, instead of endgame gear. Granted it’s a good way to get endgame gear without having to raid, but if you want to jump into raiding it’s annoying to have to grind out those reps for gear enhancements. Blizzard has hit AND missed on reputation grinds.

They’ve done well in the area of reducing the “grindy” feeling of the grinds. Winterspring and Timbermaw used to be really annoying, but are so much more manageable now. Adding tabards that give you rep while you run dungeons was a brilliant idea, and is something they should have added for every faction in the game, even the old ones. Having multiple ways of gaining rep I think is key. Mob kills, item turn-ins, daily quests…having several ways to increase your standing keeps the process from getting boring too quickly.

Blizzard has done terrible with reps in other aspects, however. One thing that comes to mind is the new Therazane rep. This rep is required to get the only shoulder enchants in the game for all classes and specs (unless you’re a scribe). And while each of the other Cataclysm reputations have a helm enchant, they are also Account-Bound. So if you have one main character that got all your reps maxed out, you can buy the enchant on that toon and mail it to your alts. There is no such luck with the shoulder enchants. You have to drag each one of your alts through almost all of the quests in Deepholm to access them. This is a huge mistake on Blizzard’s part. Quite frankly, I think anything that can be purchased from a reputation quartermaster should be Account-Bound. Having to do those grinds on one character is enough, but if you want your alts to benefit at all, it becomes even more of a grind.

Another of Blizzard’s failure with reputation grinds is the ones they put in the game that have only one way to gain rep (such as Ravenholdt) or have no rewards attached to them (several worthless reps that only offer a title, “The Insane”…they should have at least added some mounts to these reps).

I also think a bit of gating can be quite fun; it’s only when players feel forced to do something they really don’t want to do that it is a pain. For example, in LOTRO I noticed that I could get a fast travel to Forochel once I got a certain rep with the faction there. But it was doable through quests and drops, and I could see that it would be doable just from hanging out there. So I decided that it would be worth the effort and went ahead and did it. I think that’s a neat example of a meaningful decision and a reasonable piece of gating. But obv others may vary