Here's what I am referring to:

Case 1: The item you need costs 20,000 gold. Each encounter gives you 200 gold. In this case, every encounter gives you a bit of progress toward your goal.

Case 2: The item you need has a 1% drop rate. While you could get lucky on the first encounter, if you do not get lucky, than you have not made any progress toward that goal.

In this case, I definitely prefer case 1. (Also, I think I would prefer it if high-end equipment were sold somewhere at a high price instead of having to be obtained via random drop.)

It's also worth noting that the frustration of Case 2 is reduced as drop rates increase; as a result, this isn't nearly as much of an issue for common items as it is for rares. (With that said, if inventory space is finite, Case 2 can get annoying with all the wasted drops, whereas Case 1 makes it unnecessary to acquire them, allowing you to save your money for other things.)
Actually, thought of another interesting case where spears end up being very good at the high end.

I'm going to look at Final Fantasy 5's strongest weapons, by attack power (and ignoring the Chicken Knife, which internally actually has a low attack power, though it's actually really good):
* Brave Blade: 150 attack, but every time you run from a battle, even before you get it, both its displayed attack power and the number actually used in calculations decreases by 1 permanently.
* Ragnorak: 140 attack, but actually getting this requires defeating one of the game's superbosses, at which point you probably don't need it anymore,
* Dragon Spear: 119 attack, does double damage (and IIRC ignores defense) against dragons; also does double damage when used with Jump. This ends up being more practical than the above weapons (though it needs to be obtained as a rare steal from an enemy with a common steal), and it's even a spear. Also, while its special property is only good against dragons, there is a !Mix that will turn any enemy into a dragon for this purpose.

Its also worth noting that FF5 has a point where you can steal a spear that's noticeably stronger than other weapons available at that point in the game; unfortunately, this is also before you get the Job that can use them (so you'd have to be a freelancer and give up ABP gain in order to equip it at that point).

I agree. Progress of Type 1 is far better than Progress of Type 2. But it has nothing to do with how fun encounters themselves are.

Can be, yes. But if it works in this steady progress manner I also use it before points of no return or decisions I'm too wary of making. Or even to get back in a game I dropped for a while. Or when I'm not in the right state of mind to actually advance.
Recall all the time I spent gathering weak enemies around me and letting them pound away to train armor use in Morrowind for example, when I wanted to stop (again) otherwise. Got me to advance a bit more before doing so eventually.
And now I'm grinding in Lionheart, using the Toulouse teleport crystal, since that seems to be the only one that still can get me to ethereal places, all others became 100% reliable long ago. Was level 31 with little grinding just before getting to the Lance, but since that's a point of no return, went back and grinding since, 34 now, want to get to 35, then see if I can persuade myself to advance.

To each their own, that much is clear. I withdraw my cocaine statement and on a personal basis i withdrew too from games that use a clear defined grinding mechanic though... with control i found myself a bit in a draw there. you have this special instance set in control which costs tokens and is setup in such a manner that you need to forfill certain requirements to gain tokens. You can buy tokens either buy using your -credits used to upgrade weapons and personal modifications or win tokens by winning certain special timed events that turn up once in a while during your game progression. I really did want to have acces to a new outfit just to see if that would be a cool addition but in the end i forfaited since it relied to much on gamble mechanics.
another example might be grim dawn where i sometimes choose to delibirate walk through a piece of land just because it is cool to ruin stuff

I like to grind... can spend hours in one area, getting in a rhythm

Age of decadence and its combat spin-off Dungeon rats feature spears, with several unique attacks, maybe try that.

In tyranny you can even create the perfect spear user! If you take spears as your main weapon skill and javelin throw as you secondary main skill you create " LEONIDAS WRATH OF THE WORLD, DESTROYER OF THE UNIVERSE AND PERSIAN SCOURGE "

the upcoming waylanders will have spears too and i belief they even give acces to formational tactics in

I hate pseudoexpert conventionalism opinions about what is good for a RPG or an Point and Click game. Opinions like the supposedly negativity of grinding, pixel hunting or the use of brains and great difficulty in adventure games, the garbage defense of the "sweet and short" concept or the concept of the "evil" randomization combat in RPG.

All of these features, and more, where classic features in the most respected games of the genre, and when the lazy developers buried them, surrendered, happily believing that this would modernize games, would make better games and would boost sales. Accordingly they caused the famous decline of the RPG genre and the dying of the graphic adventure.

The superfans killed the graphic adventure and RPG.

The problem is that even nowadays those ideas remain in the elite sites of these genres.

Got it. Thanks! Maybe I'll take a look at it.

This is a great take. I think you could make a general rule out of this and say that anything gets worse once fans become superfans. You see this with how a lot of players spend more time watching critiques and super detailed dissections of computer games than actually playing them. These players cannot have fun with games anymore since every mechanic and feature has been dissected and declared 'bad'.

I think you can apply this to anything like I said. I think everything in life used to be more fun when you were more naive and took things at face value instead of doing a deep dive on everything and becoming obsessed.

Well, I can agree, I must understand that you are talking about "metagaming". And why not, that is a concept closely related with the idea I was pointing. And why not, as we are into business, I tend to hate it too. Because "if something related to gameplay is not under total control it was marked as something bad for a game in the rpg genre" :):)

Greetings

Formation tactics is something to look forward to.

Party based RPGs have no concept of the benefits of group tactics beyond "keep the squishy mage at the back".

Combat invariably devolves into individual contests and you may as well be fighting 5 separate battles.

It is only with formations that the strengths of spears can be fully exploited, outside of gimmick special attacks.

elitists in any genre are usually to be avoided in general but, since those are the guys that are doing their show
Yea though i'm still a bit conflicted on that subject. We all know Rome was able to win against the mighty Greek sarissa/hoplite formation because of higher agility and better manuevrability with their checkers legion setup. Still from a pure defensive standpoint with the addition of extra defensive terrain features a spear probably remains outmatched for any weapon. Also pure singular combat it is said that a stick user can outdo a sword user any day.

Watched a show once where with the help of those ancient martial arts practicers ( fema? no hema !) they've tried to unravel the truth behind the sword vs the spear. their end conclusion was that a sword would be almighty in most encounters unless the spear users would create the unbreakable shieldwall. this conclusion needs to be taken with a lot of grains of salt since hema users that are practiced in the use of the old weaponry do so in a controlled enviroment, are not trained soldiers and probably don't know anything about fighting for your life.

I did try once with warhammer 2 to bring a spear army to a battle ( empire vs empire ) against a mostly sword wielding opponent ( all 20 stacks all tier one units ) but it turned out to be a massacre .. In Rome II i did manage to grab the whole known world several times with greek based factions ( athens, sparta )

but yea, i remember well how exited i was when playing battle brothers for the first time

Horror action games (Dead Space, Doom 3, etc.) are the only kind of action game that offers an acceptable context for the genocidal tendencies of video game protagonists.

If a game has crafting, I automatically skip it. I feel that crafting has been added to games to just pad content and make the game longer than it needs to be. Unless the game is centered around construction, crafting them not be in those games.