[2023] Archaic Bones, Trickster Keys, Maw farming… These are all examples of poor game design and overly complicated, boring grind that many F2P games suffer from.

I like Wayfinder. The art style, gameplay loop, and overall feel of the game is good.

What I do not care for is the tedious nature of some of the essential loot piece grind. Archaic Bones might be the worst offender. They only drop from one random event that rarely ever spawns in Blood Works. Your best option, which is not great, is to load in to the dungeon, see if the event is in the first room, if it is not then abandon the mission and rinse repeat. You essentially spend all of your time on loading screens, not actually playing to have a shot at an event that almost never shows up.

Over the past week I have spent close to 10 hours total grinding for archaic bones. In that time I have found 3. Mind you, the vast majority of that time wasn’t actually playing. It was sitting on load screens hoping I do not get kicked from the game which happens frequently.

Trickster keys feel the same way, but with even more random BS since the event doesn’t guarantee a coin if you are lucky enough to find it.

Bear in mind, these are also best done solo, since only one person can collect the items. Which means, that the game designed to be played with others is best played by yourself.

Fighting the Maw for Niss’s Steel is a different kind of awful. Since it involves wasting hours looking for RNG chests you have to dig up that may, or may not spawn all over a massive map. A low level map that becomes increasingly pointless to venture to the higher level you become. I eventually got the items, but not without a lot of unnecessary, pointless searching.

The game is still in early access, and these things still have a chance to be changed, or improved upon. I have hope that the devs will recognize how bad some of this grind is, and make adjustments, but it’s going to go one of two ways. Either they see the issue and improve it, or they intentionally leave it awful to try and goad people into spending more money by making the grind impossible to stomach. I personally hope they are not that evil and greedy.