Grinding is a term within video game culture that describes time spent in the game in which a player repeats a general task in order to gain rewards like in-game currency, in-game experience, player stats or other reward types.
A player is commonly motivated to grind due to a desire to earn rewards, gather resources, or increase their level.
For some games, grinding is an integral part of the gameplay and is required if the player wants to make significant progress.
Examples of games with grinding include: RuneScape requires the player to partake in repetitive tasks to level up skills.
An example would be the "Slayer" skill, which requires players to defeat a certain number of a specific type of creature.
Players gain experience while fighting the monsters, which increases both their Slayer level and their combat skills.
Borderlands 2 requires players to repeatedly kill specific enemies to acquire Legendary items.
With this combination, most common blocks can be mined immediately, massively decreasing the time it takes to find rare materials.
Completing more objectives in "non-endless" missions will allow the player to have a chance at the rarest items included in the last drop table.
Play past the level cap usually provides rewards in the form of tokens and specific in-game currencies that contribute to rarer and often visually superior cosmetic items for player avatars compared to the most easily acquired sets.
The focus in these late-game areas is therefore usually aimed at effective teamwork and how the players approach a problem as opposed to the degree of statistics acquired by playtime.
The game also allows the players to create other AFK (away from keyboard) farms to aid in fishing, growing sugarcane and other crops, or even generating moss blocks.
Black Desert Online contains the literal definition of grinding in the most simplistic sense, as the methods of making money are through any of the several "life skills" such as cooking, or combat through killing monsters.
Grand Theft Auto Online features passive businesses that produce various types of cargo automatically that can be later sold for profit.
By spending a large amount of time battling easily defeated characters (a practice known as bottom feeding), players can gain levels to have little difficulty vanquishing more difficult enemies.
[11] Players of subscription-based online games often criticize grinds as a heavy-handed attempt to gain profit.
Grinding is seen as a reason to increase the amount of time it takes to reach these levels, forcing the player to pay more subscription fees along the way.