Quest Fatigue

[Xanthippe]

Assuming we stay in the level treadmill model (which I don't think is evil) what can be changed or added to the existing methods of gaining xp to make it more fun? And to be honest, I don't think "world changing events" is the answer. You're still grinding quests, even if they have some impact on the world. People are always going to care about their personal advancement and it becomes more and more difficult to demonstrate a 1 to 1 relationship between my actions and the changes in the world the more people you have in the world performing those actions. It doesn't scale all that well. I'm not against the idea (although I think it is far more difficult to pull off and has a ton of problems associated with it, some of wich Lorekeep outlined above), I just don't think it solves the issue at hand.

I'd like to see more reputation interplay but not in the sense of how WoW does it (grindy), but in the sense of being able to join/fight for one faction versus another.  Make it somewhat fluid so that people can do deeds that earn them rep or lose rep so they can switch sides.  (EQ2 has some kind of mechanism, although I'm not familiar with it).

So my actions define/change _my_ world experience, but not everyone's.

[LK]

Point by point:

More exploration XP/quests. Maybe some sort of cartography profession that gave XP as you filled in your map?

If experience is directly tied to a character's ability to fight, then exploration couldn't be a primary method of earning experience.  You'd have to be raising some alternate skill where it would be primary.

More dynamic spawns- the same mobs in the same place walking the same paths unto eternity is dull.

This would make accurate directions extremely hard to give in quest text if a mob can appear in a large area.  If you have to refer to a mob as being in a particular zone, that's too big.  Sub-zone? Then the mob is either populated throughout the zone or already patrols a large radius (there's a gronn in Nagrand in WoW like this).

XP from PvP. Or better, a skill-based system where your skills you use during the fight go up whether you win or lose.

Like Honor? But instead of skills being raised, your equipment specifically designed for PvP improves, including abilities tied into the equipment that directly benefit PvP.

Crafting XP? Make it worthwhile to farm for hours to get the mats needed, especially the uber high level stuff.

There are two extremes. A Tale in the Desert is the crafting extreme, where you can make the best possible stuff but farming for hours on end.  Eventually the activity sucks, but if all the game has is crafting... well, now you know why ATITD is not a hugely popular game.

WoW and LOTRO is the other extreme, but it's one where crafting can't be better than the drops.  A good solution would be to make the drops from high level creatures ingredients for high level crafting, but that would be putting up an easily-seen through illusion.

Small XP bonuses for doing class-specific stuff like lockpicking, summoning, portaling, etc. Obviously each class would have to have something and balancing would be interesting.

Stuff like summoning and portaling sounds like it could be easily automated, leading to problems, and seems an unnecessary task to add experience to.

And finally...

Make the world appear different to the characters who have completed the quests- If I kill Foozle A, I don't see him in game (unless someone in my group hasn't killed him yet, in which case I can still help). If I have burned a hut down, make it show up in ruins in my view. Give me the illusion that I am having some sort of impact on the game world.

That's actually a sound idea, where the client renders things differently between client and server.  The problem? Collision between the two objects would need to be exactly the same.  Otherwise, Player A on top of Intact Hut will appear to be floating in space to Player B with Destroyed Hut.

[Nebu]

There are two extremes. A Tale in the Desert is the crafting extreme, where you can make the best possible stuff but farming for hours on end.  Eventually the activity sucks, but if all the game has is crafting... well, now you know why ATITD is not a hugely popular game.

I'd argue that ATitD's lack of popularity is based more on implementation of the system rather than the concept behind their system, but that's a thread unto itself. 

More on topic: The real thrust of the discussion here is in differentiating between a game and a simulation.  WoW's popularity suggests that people enjoy playing more game-like multiplayer games.  They seem to prefer having other people around more for competition than collaboration.  WoW is definately more game than sim and plays like a single player game shared with others.  The complaints/issues with the questing system seem to tend toward the development of a more sim-like environment or, at the very least, a more story-driven narrative.  My impression is that the gaming masses prefer an experience dressed less in cerebral "fun".  They don't want to be immersed in a richly crafted narrative laced with difficult challenges, rather just to log on and have fun.  WoW does an excellent job of providing just that.   

[AcidCat]

I think aside from the static nature of the quests, my main complaint is the player's role in relation to them. You are always doing the bidding of others. The only initiative and freedom involved is choosing what area to quest in. Whose servant am I going to be today? I know in WoW you can technically ignore the quests and just go grind .. two problems with that is that psychologically it is hard to ignore those yellow exclamation points, and of course pure grinding gets monotonous.

A question could be - how do you make grinding less boring? If I want to go off on my own and kill what I want without some NPC bossing me around, how can that be more rewarding? The combat system can become more action-oriented. A really fun combat system is its own reward in many action games - I know there are technical issues but those will become less of a factor over time. There could also be some kind of quest dynamic that is some how reactive to what you do in the world - maybe you feel like killing Lizardmen tonight. After killing some amount, once you're back in town an NPC approaches you - "Hey, my son saw you out in the woods slaughtering Lizardmen, those creatures are real bastards, we appreciate your efforts, here is *insert reward* for you" The actual mechanics might be the same - "Kill X Lizardmen" - but it is initiated by the player's chosen action. Maybe the quest scales depending on how many you killed.

[LK]

Sounds like a quest you haven't accepted yet that you complete when you return to town.  Once word gets out about it though, then it just becomes a quest someone can do that they have to find out about outside the confines of the game system, or, if it's random, work towards and maybe never see it at all.

In some instances quest-giving items are a rare drop on monsters that you are killing.  However, there has to be a point to killing those mobs to draw players towards that item, which means another quest is usually directing players to kill those mobs that is easier to accept.

I think you're mostly doing the bidding of others because if you were doing your own bidding, the game wouldn't recognize that.  For instance, I can quest myself to go out and kill lizards, but the reward from that is the drops I get from the lizards.  The game isn't going to award me any experience or cash for doing something that I told myself to do.  Other people have the items and cash and are handing out the rewards for the tasks you can complete, and are making you aware of that.  They need help.  Whether you choose to help them or not is the only choice you have in the matter, in most cases.   If you don't help them, you can take your chances killing mobs for random drops and a different experience progression.  But interacting with the world in these types of games typically means playing the part of the hero helping someone out.  "Save me!" "OK!" Sandbox or dynamic environments are typically those that you can affect a change based on your activities.

Also, it depends on the game's setup.  LotRO appears to have a narrator similar to the Game Master in DDO.  So, there's another participant directing you on what to do other than the NPCs of the game world.  WoW does do quest text from a narrator-type style, but this is only done when you are interacting with a non-speaking character or object.  But regardless of what you are doing in a game, something or someone is always guiding you on what to do.  If that isn't happening, then you're probably playing a game that has multiple paths but only the goals you set for yourself.  Ultima Online, the Sims and EVE are like that.

[Khaldun]

Assuming we stay in the level treadmill model (which I don't think is evil) what can be changed or added to the existing methods of gaining xp to make it more fun? And to be honest, I don't think "world changing events" is the answer. You're still grinding quests, even if they have some impact on the world. People are always going to care about their personal advancement and it becomes more and more difficult to demonstrate a 1 to 1 relationship between my actions and the changes in the world the more people you have in the world performing those actions. It doesn't scale all that well. I'm not against the idea (although I think it is far more difficult to pull off and has a ton of problems associated with it, some of wich Lorekeep outlined above), I just don't think it solves the issue at hand.

See, I think this is where the problem is with the paradigm. People think about personal advancement because persistence is vested IN THE CHARACTER. If persistence was centrally vested in the world, then the character becomes less important.

If I'm trying to win Civ IV, I don't care about levelling my civilizational leader. I care about my civilization. If I'm in a persistent synthetic world where I want to accomplish particular changes to the world in alliance with other players, I care about what happens in the WORLD.

Now far more to the point is the question of, what happens when I lose? A synthetic world where it's more about the world and less about the character has got to have another feature: a potential endpoint. Just like Shadowbane should have had: at a certain point, game over, one guild has won, restart the game. Maybe shuffle some conditions, randomize the map, change some features.

Maybe you can have a hybrid, I don't know--where quest-givers are agents with their own AIs who may ask for unpredictable things and react to player initiative. Maybe if I bring forty-five orc heads to Beorn, he could say, "Fine, fine, how about you go kick some worg ass now?" or even, "Great, that gives me enough time to go meet with my shape-shifting werebear homies, want to come along?". Maybe the orcs go somewhere else for a while. Keep it cyclical so it's unpredictable, or doesn't introduce serious issues to player advancement. But I'm thinking eventually this genre's going to have to go somewhere other than, "Want to ride on the roller-coaster? It's cool, there's a yeti who jumps up and roars in the ice cave EVERY FUCKING TIME you ride it."

[AcidCat]

Sounds like a quest you haven't accepted yet that you complete when you return to town.  Once word gets out about it though, then it just becomes a quest someone can do that they have to find out about outside the confines of the game system, or, if it's random, work towards and maybe never see it at all.

Yes, but the point would be that it wouldn't be a quest you "worked towards", it would come about as a result of self-directed gameplay. Of course knowledge of it would exist - people can always spoil things for themselves on websites - or ingame it would be a social discovery. A guildmate might tell you "Hey, citizens of Forest Town don't like those Lizardmen, they'll reward you if you kill them." So it could still become a quest you discover and work to complete, or it could be something you discovered on your own. With many such quests you'd get a mixture of both scenarios.

I guess I'm looking for more rewards and discoveries for self-directed gameplay. I know there is a place for game-directed activities - heck it dominates a game like WoW, but I think the two styles can be merged for a much broader spectrum of gameplay. Or maybe that's all fluff and if the combat system improves to be more visceral and exciting in and of itself, that would be enough to make "grinding" fun again - maybe that and less predictable, more dynamic mob behavior patterns. I don't know the answer, I'm just thowing out random ideas borne out of my current frustration with questing as it exists today.

[HRose]

As it often happens "innovation" can be looking backwards instead of forwards.

For example, revolutionary approach to questing: old style dialogues.

You go around a town, speak with NPCs, picking answers as in Ultima or Baldur's Gate. Questing would involve gathering infos that ultimately may bring you to kill something. But before you have to figure things out and roleplay a bit, explore, talk, interact.

You know, you don't need generated crappy stuff, NPCs with a bit more depth would be already great. More interaction and all that. But it also means that content production takes longer.

[Rithrin]

Hmm, I'll throw some stuff in here, too.

Let me bring you all back to EQ1. Believe it or not, I enjoyed the leveling there better than WoW. More grindy, of course I won't deny that. But, as people have hit on here, I was rewarded basically the same with whatever I felt like doing during my level. I remember, after talking to different NPCs in town (more on this aspect later) I discovered that the Freeport Guards were basically corrupt bastards. So I took it upon myself to start eradicating them, in the name of balance of course, first picking off the guards in the far reaches of the areas around the town and then as I grew more confident in my guard killing abilities I decided to infiltrate further into Freeport. Eventually the world changed, in a very small way, where suddenly the guards knew my deeds and would attack me on sight. But as a bonus the Paladins in their Freeport stronghold then absolutely loved me, again the world changes in a small way.

Now this let me be the hero, everyone loves that. The Paladins can't wage open war inside the city, but I felt that the matter of corrupt guards needed to be dealt with. Now this wasn't a quest, it was simply something I thought would be fun. They gave me a reward, though... the loot off the guards, multiple and far reaching faction changes, experience for killing the guards, a feeling of interacting with the game world, and I ran into a few likeminded fellows who I ended up /friend'ing. Most importantly is that the game rewarded me for doing what I wanted and rewarded me differently (but not less) than if I had decided to do anything else that week. I think that is key. In WoW, sure I could go invoke a holocaust on the cult members in the Blasted Lands, but I'm being rewarded much less than if I went and did the quests to kill hell boars... even though I do not want to kill hell boars. This is intrinsically a problem with a quest based leveling system. If you're in Area A which is populated by bandits, bears, and snakes, but there are only quests to kill bears then you are penalized if you find fighting bandits or snakes more interesting/fun. "Well then just add in quests to kill bandits and snakes!", one might say. That would certainly be a good temporary fix, but what if I want to befriend the bandits... then there are only quests to kill them rather than quests to gain faction with them. And the problem keeps going on like this. Back to EQ1 again for a moment. For the most part if there was a faction, there was a way to increase your standing with that faction regardless of who you were. It was mainly gaining faction by killing stuff or completion of mass repeatable quests, but at least it was an option. The closest thing to this in WoW so far that I've seen is the Bloodsail Buccaneers. Genocide the goblins and you eventually (took me months, literally) to get the pirates to like you. Of course this goes against what I said previously as it was both less rewarding in terms of character or world advancement compared to basically anything else I could have been doing instead and the reason I was doing this was not my decision but simply motivated by a quest. All the other factions in WoW are just content blocks that you grind out to max because some NPC told you to, and if you don't want to then you're penalized.

I think MMOs need to allow more personal decisions for the player. Instead of "You are a human, allied with NPC Guild 1, but at war with NPC Guild 2, forever." the player should be able to decide what he likes the best. Instead of "We want you fighting and questing in this zone, if you attempt to do so in another zone you'll advance slower." the player should be rewarded equally regardless of what he does in the game. Etc.

Originally I had planned on talking about how we need more interaction with NPCs and dialogue as HRose started to touch on, but I'm sleepy.

[Calandryll]

Assuming we stay in the level treadmill model (which I don't think is evil) what can be changed or added to the existing methods of gaining xp to make it more fun? And to be honest, I don't think "world changing events" is the answer. You're still grinding quests, even if they have some impact on the world. People are always going to care about their personal advancement and it becomes more and more difficult to demonstrate a 1 to 1 relationship between my actions and the changes in the world the more people you have in the world performing those actions. It doesn't scale all that well. I'm not against the idea (although I think it is far more difficult to pull off and has a ton of problems associated with it, some of wich Lorekeep outlined above), I just don't think it solves the issue at hand.

See, I think this is where the problem is with the paradigm. People think about personal advancement because persistence is vested IN THE CHARACTER. If persistence was centrally vested in the world, then the character becomes less important.

If I'm trying to win Civ IV, I don't care about levelling my civilizational leader. I care about my civilization. If I'm in a persistent synthetic world where I want to accomplish particular changes to the world in alliance with other players, I care about what happens in the WORLD.

Now far more to the point is the question of, what happens when I lose? A synthetic world where it's more about the world and less about the character has got to have another feature: a potential endpoint. Just like Shadowbane should have had: at a certain point, game over, one guild has won, restart the game. Maybe shuffle some conditions, randomize the map, change some features.

Maybe you can have a hybrid, I don't know--where quest-givers are agents with their own AIs who may ask for unpredictable things and react to player initiative. Maybe if I bring forty-five orc heads to Beorn, he could say, "Fine, fine, how about you go kick some worg ass now?" or even, "Great, that gives me enough time to go meet with my shape-shifting werebear homies, want to come along?". Maybe the orcs go somewhere else for a while. Keep it cyclical so it's unpredictable, or doesn't introduce serious issues to player advancement. But I'm thinking eventually this genre's going to have to go somewhere other than, "Want to ride on the roller-coaster? It's cool, there's a yeti who jumps up and roars in the ice cave EVERY FUCKING TIME you ride it."

And I think trying to get people to stop caring about personal advancement and only care about the world as a whole is setting yourself up for a world of hurt. In your Civ example, that civilization is YOU. It's yours and only yours. No other players contribute to it’s success, so in effect in that game, the civilization is your character more so than the leader is. Kinda like how in a racing game that lets you customize your car, the car is your character more than the dude who drives it.

The problem with designing a game that focuses away from personal advancement and focuses more on the world is the issue of common good. The more people in the world, the less direct impact my actions can have. The less impact my actions have, the less I feel connected and responsible. For example, in the real world when I buy a new TV I am helping to stimulate the US economy. But I don't experience that sensation because 300 million other people are also doing the same thing. My contribution is so small that it borders on meaningless. The combination of everyone's contributions adds up and certainly becomes meaningful, but when it comes to my personal actions, you're talking about drops of water over a long period of time. Contrast that to when I get a raise or promotion at work...that I feel immediately. I get a huge rush of achievement and satisfaction when that happens.

I like the idea of a hybrid model and I have nothing against creating world changing events based on player actions. But I don't think making them the focus of a massively multiplayer game's advancement will work because it doesn't scale.

I do think you could focus on smaller group based advancement. Some games have put in "guild levels" and I'd like to see that concept taken further. The problem with the current designs though is you perform the same tasks that you do to gain your own levels (questing and killing) so it doesn't feel different. But when you deal with smaller groups you have less of a problem related to common good because my actions can have a greater affect on the group's advancement. So I'd focus more on that and less on big huge world changing events.

I think there are two issues here. One is the tasks you perform (such as questing) and the other is the advancement (ie: the reward) related to those tasks. For me, I'd like to see more focus on creating new and different types of "tasks" to break up monotony rather than focusing on different rewards.

At the end of the day, if I can advance my character, my guild, and the world through questing and only questing, I'm still going to get burnt out on questing if that is the only meaningful advancement system for all of the different rewards. It's certainly better than ONLY having character advancement, but I think it misses an important opportunity - one that hasn't been explored to any meaningful conclusion in modern mmogs imo. I see it as a huge opportunity for differentiation.

[trias_e]

I think if you combine the concepts in HRose's and Rithrin's post, you have the 3rd stage of Diku on your hands. 

Many of us are fucking sick of the 2nd stage.  TBC is so bland and boring I can't play it for longer than 30 minutes at a time.  This half-assed quest driven gameplay is dying quickly to me.  It's worse than the grind from stage 1 as far as both boredom and freedom go.  The only thing it has going for it is it doesn't last nearly as long, so I can go play in the arena and new battlegrounds hopefully fairly soon (only reason I'm playing right now).  I was hoping Vanguard would drop the quest-centric gameplay and go back to the freeform experience of EQ1, but it failed (I wanted EQ1 done better, not WoW with more grind). 

I don't mind Diku. I think it has potential for growth.  Advancing your character and exploring the world and all that can be good stuff.  But it needs to be more personally engaging than it is now.  There's too much hand-holding going on.  Everyone in WoW (and all the 2nd stage games like EQ2, LOTRO, to some extent even Vanguard, although there it's split up more by location) does the exact same fucking thing, is led through the exact same gates, gets the exact same rewards and the world's incredibly static.

How about a world where I actually have choices to make, and I to some extent can create my own gameplay, with a world that reacts to what I do?  It doesn't have to be of Spore-like complexity, just the little things like faction changes, dialogue options, non-linear quests, and a world that can react to these things in baldur's gate-esque basic ways.  You slap a decent polished diku on top of that, and that would be a diku i'd be interested in playing.

[Sion Verdox]

I find this thread depressing because it clearly demonstrates why MMOG games have evolved into their current state. I am an old UO fan and personally had the most fun involved in wars, player feuds, setting up trades online and offline via UO trade websites, decorating my house etc none of these things were driven by anyone other than other players. The tools were provided by the game but the actual things I enjoyed were player driven.

WoW is a fantastic game, but it is just a game and like any other game it has limited playability. I ‘completed’ WoW and will never play again. What kept me paying monthly fees and buying regular updates for over two years was a virtual world where players provided my entertainment.

The problem with designing a game that focuses away from personal advancement and focuses more on the world is the issue of common good. The more people in the world, the less direct impact my actions can have. The less impact my actions have, the less I feel connected and responsible. For example, in the real world when I buy a new TV I am helping to stimulate the US economy. But I don't experience that sensation because 300 million other people are also doing the same thing. My contribution is so small that it borders on meaningless. The combination of everyone's contributions adds up and certainly becomes meaningful, but when it comes to my personal actions, you're talking about drops of water over a long period of time. Contrast that to when I get a raise or promotion at work...that I feel immediately. I get a huge rush of achievement and satisfaction when that happens.

In my opinion you are very wrong. You of all people should understand that each UO server was different, from player housing and player cities to statues placed by GMS for unique server events. Each server had famous guilds, famous players all who achieved 'fame' on their server by doing player driven things such as owning a popular shop, leading a successful PvP guild or in some cases for simply being an ass! A new player from day one could over time have a direct impact on their server and actually change the dynamics of it.  In some cases there was no immediate gratification but that only made the achievement better. That’s the decision you have to make – are you making a slot machine or are you trying to advance the boundaries of online gaming. Richard Garrot chose his side of the fence and he has gone down in gaming history for doing so. The asshats that fucked things up after have not - I could not name any of them =)

[Slayerik]

Don't worry guys, I'm retired. No fagging up of this thread from me :)

I agree with two posts above though, too much handholding.

[LK]

I'd argue the hand-holding is actually what makes these games popular for the vast majority of players (who are probably casual, but I've nothing to back that up), as evidenced by WoW's *overwhelming* success.  So, you can't please everyone, but if you can please the majority, you're already on your way to a successful product.

Granted, I would like new MMOs to not be WoW clones and offer some alternative style of gameplay.  It's why I sometimes resub to Planetside, A Tale in the Desert, EVE (Currently subbed), and other non-EQ based games when I feel the itch to play something different.  If you try to do WoW, it needs to be as good as or better than WoW.  LotRO didn't quite hit that marker, but they did do some interesting things that I'm sure other game development studios will use.

[Lantyssa]

<good stuff>

I did this with the Nightsisters in SWG.  I loved Dathomir and I went around the galaxy befriending different factions, even diametrically opposed ones by fighting things that were both of their enemies.  I could roam most worlds (and I did a lot of roaming) and have NPC friends everywhere.  They looked after me if I happened to be fighting near them and that was cool.

I'd argue the hand-holding is actually what makes these games popular for the vast majority of players (who are probably casual, but I've nothing to back that up), as evidenced by WoW's *overwhelming* success.  So, you can't please everyone, but if you can please the majority, you're already on your way to a successful product.

Granted, I would like new MMOs to not be WoW clones and offer some alternative style of gameplay.  It's why I sometimes resub to Planetside, A Tale in the Desert, EVE (Currently subbed), and other non-EQ based games when I feel the itch to play something different.  If you try to do WoW, it needs to be as good as or better than WoW.  LotRO didn't quite hit that marker, but they did do some interesting things that I'm sure other game development studios will use.

What would be nice is a mixture of both.

Have the static quests for those that want them, or want a change of pace, to do.  More types, more varied rewards, and maybe even some randomization in those rewards would be fine.

But also have more free-form gameplay where quests come to you because you did something out in the wild.  "I've heard you slew many of the Blackfang Orcs.  A group of them kidnapped my sister, could you please find her!?"  Give us choices in the quests, where it can affect the outcome.  It doesn't have to be a huge chain causing exponential work for the devs, just a couple of different options every now in then.

Have world affecting events.  They can be minor, but even small changes can make the world feel more alive.

[LK]

I'd argue the hand-holding is actually what makes these games popular for the vast majority of players (who are probably casual, but I've nothing to back that up), as evidenced by WoW's *overwhelming* success.  So, you can't please everyone, but if you can please the majority, you're already on your way to a successful product.

Granted, I would like new MMOs to not be WoW clones and offer some alternative style of gameplay.  It's why I sometimes resub to Planetside, A Tale in the Desert, EVE (Currently subbed), and other non-EQ based games when I feel the itch to play something different.  If you try to do WoW, it needs to be as good as or better than WoW.  LotRO didn't quite hit that marker, but they did do some interesting things that I'm sure other game development studios will use.

What would be nice is a mixture of both.

Have the static quests for those that want them, or want a change of pace, to do.  More types, more varied rewards, and maybe even some randomization in those rewards would be fine.

But also have more free-form gameplay where quests come to you because you did something out in the wild.  "I've heard you slew many of the Blackfang Orcs.  A group of them kidnapped my sister, could you please find her!?"  Give us choices in the quests, where it can affect the outcome.  It doesn't have to be a huge chain causing exponential work for the devs, just a couple of different options every now in then.

Have world affecting events.  They can be minor, but even small changes can make the world feel more alive.

A mixture would be great, but I think it's already there in some places, just more transparent rather than hidden away.  WoW's reputation unlocks content as you reach new levels of rep.  I think allowing people access to content with minimal barriers is the focus of most designer's content creation philosophies (and, if barriers exist, attempting to make you aware of what those barriers are so you can work towards them), so that there are fewer options for what you describe then the up front "Here's what you can do in this zone."  There's always room for improvement though.  If the game was designed from the ground up to allow for these things, then it wouldn't seem out of the ordinary.

I'm all for dynamic worlds, but I think it should be kept separate from the static portion.  That way you can eliminate many design problems that come from mixing the two world types.

Edit: Fixed quotes.

[Calandryll]

In my opinion you are very wrong. You of all people should understand that each UO server was different, from player housing and player cities to statues placed by GMS for unique server events. Each server had famous guilds, famous players all who achieved 'fame' on their server by doing player driven things such as owning a popular shop, leading a successful PvP guild or in some cases for simply being an ass! A new player from day one could over time have a direct impact on their server and actually change the dynamics of it.  In some cases there was no immediate gratification but that only made the achievement better. That’s the decision you have to make – are you making a slot machine or are you trying to advance the boundaries of online gaming. Richard Garrot chose his side of the fence and he has gone down in gaming history for doing so. The asshats that fucked things up after have not - I could not name any of them =)

Yes, but all of those things are still individual achievements (opening a store or being an ass) or smaller group achievements (a guild). They were recognized by the community as a whole and I'm not against the idea of recognizing achievements in the larger scale at all. But what I am talking about is the idea of a system that tracks everyone's actions/quests and changes the world accordingly. Aside from being difficult to design, the problem is the disconnect between my actions and the changes in the world become greater the more people you involve. And the danger is that disconnect becomes so great as to be almost impossible to demonstrate in a meaningful way.

So my caution is simply, be careful trying to solve the notion of quest fatigue by making questing affect the world and lessening the importance of personal achievement because firstly, people care about personal achievement and secondly, common good rewards don't scale. I also think a solution that could be far more impactful is creating multiple gameplay options for advancement, rather than creating mutiple rewards for the same gameplay. And in fact, I do believe if this was done well, even in a diku-style game, that it would be very much expanding the boundaries of online gaming.

With that said, keep in mind I'm not saying all mmogs should be level based dikus. Obviously I like sandbox games. In fact, the "game" I am working on now is very much a sandbox and about as far away from level based gameplay as you can get.

I'm keeping my discussion to diku based mmogs though because a) they're the more likely short term future, like it or not and b) to me, in the context of quest fatigue, it's more interesting to have a discussion about how to take an existing system and make it better than to say "let's change the whole thing from the ground up!" because it allows for a more focused discussion.

[tazelbain]

I would happy to see the world change even if couldn't see always see what hand I had in it.  It's enough that I could actually go back to a place I have been before and it not being 100% identical to when I left it a year ago.

[WindupAtheist]

I'll never play another Diku ever again.  It's going to be a long time before anyone does it better than Blizzard, and the things that killed WoW for me aren't going to be rectified by jiggering the quest system around.  Levels, and the world design they force upon developers, just suck in general.

"Here's our amazingly vast and open world!  It has a thousand places to visit!  Just remember that in 499 of them, the grey mobs will all die in one hit without giving you any challenge or benefit, while in 498 of them every bird and bug and boar will run over and murder you in one hit because they're boars with more levels.  Here's a list of the three places you can go.  Enjoy our expansive WOOOORLD!"

No thank you.

[Calandryll]

I would happy to see the world change even if couldn't see always see what hand I had in it.  It's enough that I could actually go back to a place I have been before and it not being 100% identical to when I left it a year ago.

Agreed. All I am saying is changing the world in that way doesn't help with the issue of quest fatigue and isn't a good replacement for personal achievement systems.

[Lantyssa]

A mixture would be great, but I think it's already there in some places, just more transparent rather than hidden away.  WoW's reputation unlocks content as you reach new levels of rep.  I think allowing people access to content with minimal barriers is the focus of most designer's content creation philosophies (and, if barriers exist, attempting to make you aware of what those barriers are so you can work towards them), so that there are fewer options for what you describe then the up front "Here's what you can do in this zone."  There's always room for improvement though.  If the game was designed from the ground up to allow for these things, then it wouldn't seem out of the ordinary.

I'm all for dynamic worlds, but I think it should be kept separate from the static portion.  That way you can eliminate many design problems that come from mixing the two world types.

Except WoW doesn't really do that.  Sure it has factions, but you grind, grind, grind to unlock content.  You go into it know you need X amount of faction or your left twiddling your thumbs.  Finally get the faction and you can do a few more quests.

How many people happen to be doing their own thing and have that content come to them?  I was having fun on Dathomir, made some Nightsister friends, and what's this?  In exploring their home I find they have quests.  Cool!

There is a big difference in how the player perceives those two situations even though they both involve unlocking content through faction.

"Here's our amazingly vast and open world!  It has a thousand places to visit!  Just remember that in 499 of them, the grey mobs will all die in one hit without giving you any challenge or benefit, while in 498 of them every bird and bug and boar will run over and murder you in one hit because they're boars with more levels.  Here's a list of the three places you can go.  Enjoy our expansive WOOOORLD!"

I am sure I will play more out of curiosity/boredom, but I have to agree with the sentiment.  It really bugs me as an explorer type.

[Venkman]

I get quest fatigue from WoW because half the quests are the same. Every zone has a series that starts with farming tier 1, then tier 2 creatures, and culminates with some [Elite] fight I invariably don't even want the reward from anyway. It doesn't matter when you are in the midst of achievement. But it's one of the first things to bubble to the surface of notice when boredom with the sameness begins to set in.

My next game is PotBS, beta or not (AoC later this year). But WoW won't see me through to June because of the above. LoTRO is a good diku surrogate for now, mostly because of the interesting way they handle some things. But it's another WoW in a sea of them.

How many people happen to be doing their own thing and have that content come to them?

Exactly. For all its content, WoW, like EQ1 before it, does not actually have enough content to engage someone in an unfolding storyline until they hit the cap of faction. At best, engaging story, or just quests at all, will get you 25% of the way there. After that it's farming all the way. And I don't care what the faction is, it all sucks. The only one I found palpable was the Alterac Valley one, but that mostly because the bonus for winning was very good, and I was Alliance so we won 9 out of 10 times for awhile.

All I am saying is changing the world in that way doesn't help with the issue of quest fatigue and isn't a good replacement for personal achievement systems.

I agree. Changing the world needs of method of being converted to personal achievement. Even with the UO example cited, most people were happy being part of something when they had achieved a uniquely personal place within it. This is the best combination, something SWG tried to do as well, and for awhile I thought pulled off ok. You let players achieve personal things while enhancing their place in the server society by providing them the tools for both.

WoW is just a CRPG you occasionally need others to help during. UO was a world you were a part of. Developers like the former because it's easier to justify and I imagine easier to manage. And apparently most gamers like it too or it wouldn't be so easy to justify.

Which doesn't say what *I* like, but that doesn't matter for two reasons: 1) I'm a target of one; and, 2) one year it's worlds, the other it's diku :) Linear and contrived or not, the dikus get the polish.

[LK]

I wonder.  Could you pull off an MMO where instead of thousands of players per game space (server), you only had a couple hundred, and those couple hundred could determine the fate of their game space? And they could move on to different game spaces, or start a fresh.

You'd still be able to interact with everyone else in the game, but there's only a small group of players you are playing with / against.

It's a thought.

[pxib]

I wonder.  Could you pull off an MMO where instead of thousands of players per game space (server), you only had a couple hundred [...]

No.



I oversimplify. Not without some way of grouping players by play times so that when you log on you don't feel like you're living in a wasteland because only twenty of the other 299 players are on at this particular moment because most folks only play a couple hours a week...  so unless the game takes place in a space smaller than a city block, you're not going to meet anybody tonight. Maybe city-block games have a future, Castle Marrach seemed at least modestly successful.

Even if you do have that, who's to say players won't get jealous of a particularly successful and interesting sequence of events in somebody else's "game space" and go tromping over there en masse. Suddenly you've got a lot of servers with thirty people on them and one or two with 3000 in a space designed for 300. Whole guilds move at once... heck, if these are close-knit little servers maybe whole SERVERS move at once.

That first M in MMO is a killer.

[Margalis]

Another thing I would point out is personally I hate being told what to do. So quests annoy me in that way as well. I don't enjoy the feeling of being lead by the nose.

[Sion Verdox]

I'm keeping my discussion to diku based mmogs though because a) they're the more likely short term future, like it or not and b) to me, in the context of quest fatigue, it's more interesting to have a discussion about how to take an existing system and make it better than to say "let's change the whole thing from the ground up!" because it allows for a more focused discussion.

I take it you think that because of the success of WoW? What WoW has achieved has very little to do with the actual mechanics of the game. WoW has been a massive success due to some lucky brand awareness. The more people that played the more popular it became. It also hit at around the time that the internet was at its peak of accessibility, there are a number of factors that have contributed to why it is such an enormous commercial success but I am willing to bet that had UO or even AC or EQ hit at that exact same time in its place it would have had exactly the same impact.

Cloning Wow will never work out – ask any of the thousands of developers that have tried to clone EBay (another commercial success that has nothing to do with the mechanics of the software and everything to do with brand awareness).

I do agree with you that it is very easy to sit here and discuss how we can mash up existing systems – but no one said innovation was going to be easy. I realise I am derailing the discussion, so I will stop now =)

[Slayerik]

I'm keeping my discussion to diku based mmogs though because a) they're the more likely short term future, like it or not and b) to me, in the context of quest fatigue, it's more interesting to have a discussion about how to take an existing system and make it better than to say "let's change the whole thing from the ground up!" because it allows for a more focused discussion.

WoW has been a massive success due to some lucky brand awareness.

So, are you saying even if WoW was some festering turd MMO, due to the fact that it was Blizzard and Warcraft it would have the numbers it does? I call bullshit. There was plenty of Brand Awareness with SWG , no?

The fact is, they made a fun game. The made it engaging enough, playable enough (on lower end PCs), polished enough, so that an MMO vet like me could pull 10 of his friends into it and have them get hooked. Yes, brand awareness helped. What really helped was the time and money they put into development. I love how Blizz never seems to rush.

[LK]

Moreover, they are released in lots of areas, including China, which is a *huge* market to tap into.

[Calandryll]

I'm keeping my discussion to diku based mmogs though because a) they're the more likely short term future, like it or not and b) to me, in the context of quest fatigue, it's more interesting to have a discussion about how to take an existing system and make it better than to say "let's change the whole thing from the ground up!" because it allows for a more focused discussion.

I take it you think that because of the success of WoW? What WoW has achieved has very little to do with the actual mechanics of the game. WoW has been a massive success due to some lucky brand awareness. The more people that played the more popular it became. It also hit at around the time that the internet was at its peak of accessibility, there are a number of factors that have contributed to why it is such an enormous commercial success but I am willing to bet that had UO or even AC or EQ hit at that exact same time in its place it would have had exactly the same impact.

Cloning Wow will never work out – ask any of the thousands of developers that have tried to clone EBay (another commercial success that has nothing to do with the mechanics of the software and everything to do with brand awareness).

I do agree with you that it is very easy to sit here and discuss how we can mash up existing systems – but no one said innovation was going to be easy. I realise I am derailing the discussion, so I will stop now =)

Couple quick points.

No, I didn't say that because of WoW, although WoW's success has a lot more to do with being a good game than it does the name. Brand awareness helps, but if the mmog isn't good, it won't be a success. The market has proven that over the past 4-5 years as more than a few big name licensed mmogs have struggled greatly.

As to cloning WoW, nowhere did I say mmogs should clone WoW. Making a diku-advancement based mmog doesn't mean you have to do everything EQ/WoW did exactly as they did it. In fact, that's kind of my entire point. That there are opportunities to innovate character advancement beyong killing and questing and if someone pulls it off (and it's fun) then they'll have created something unique and innovative, even within a level based system.

[Azazel]

In the past, quests in RPG's served a purpose beyond turning the xp odometer.  Quests taught players skills, taught them the geography, and taught them the background lore.  Players are now so intent on getting to the end that they now plow through all of this to get to the end as quickly as possible.  Once there, they either find that they missed out on the fun of the journey or they just run through the grind again.  I really hate what WoW has done to the genre.  First, there's no reason to interact with NPC's as you can just run to the ones with a big "?" over their head. Second, the story is weak at best because developers know that most players won't even bother so why invest the resources. 

I read things like this and wonder if the writers crying about WoW ever played, say, EQ1 for any length of time. Then I shake my head. 

[LK]

I read things like this and wonder if the writers crying about WoW ever played, say, EQ1 for any length of time. Then I shake my head. 

LotRO has some excellent writing in its quest text that seems to follow the style of Tolkein, but I couldn't help feeling I was spending a lot of time reading when I wanted to peg the NPC to get to the point.

[Nebu]

I read things like this and wonder if the writers crying about WoW ever played, say, EQ1 for any length of time. Then I shake my head. 

I guess I'm not understanding what you're getting at. I played EQ far longer than I played WoW and have always felt that WoW was a fast food version of EQ.  Given the resources that were poured into WoW, I've always felt that it was a disappointment in terms of rich and interesting gameplay.  I've similarly had mixed feelings about its success as it has made me doubt that any MMO in the next 10 years will be anything more than another EQ/WoW clone.  WoW is very polished, stylized, and "fun" in the console sense. 

I'm tired of having my hand held.  I'm tired of linear gameplay.  I'm tired of games where the focus is on the end rather than the journey.  I'm tired of games dominated by loot tables and min/maxxing.   Sadly, this puts me in a minorty category that you all seem to love to ridicule.  I want my games to challenge me in terms of mental stimulation rather than in terms of time dedication.  I want there to be opportunities for me to fail.  I want rare items to be rare.  I want risk/reward.  If I'm going to be stuck in an MMO, I want it to feel like a world rather than a shared single player game.  If I'm hunting a mob, I want there to be a reason beyond that it turns my xp odometer.  I want too much apparently. 

[Dren]

I'm surprised you mentioned FFXI as one of the games that did questing poorly.  I actually though they made the quests that they did do very high quality and they all seemed epic with a nice cut-scene inbetween main segments.

The problem with them is that there were far too few and they didn't award enough exp and items.  You HAD to do them though, or you wouldn't be able to progress through the game.  Of course, as you mentioned, the rest of the game was based on a huge grind....huge.

I'd like to see more of the elements that FFXI had for quests (missions) and put more of the WoW aspects into it from a full gameplay perspective.  They need to be more than just tollgates through the game.

GW had a lot of this going right in that some of the quests were just normal ole WoW quests, but some actually moved the Lore along for your character.  They had cut-scenes that fleshed this out nicely too.  The problem is that the game isn't deep enough to care much about that.  It is all about the PvP arenas, so it is hard to invest much into the plot.

[Azazel]

I read things like this and wonder if the writers crying about WoW ever played, say, EQ1 for any length of time. Then I shake my head. 

I guess I'm not understanding what you're getting at. I played EQ far longer than I played WoW and have always felt that WoW was a fast food version of EQ. 

WoW is a fast-food version of EQ in the sense that it's open to the masses. Though at the same time, the levels of polish, quality and things-working-ness compared to EQ makes WoW seem like the most refined dining you've ever seen next to EQ's ..well, food analogies just don't work.

What I'm getting at specifically is that you said this:

In the past, quests in RPG's served a purpose beyond turning the xp odometer.  Quests taught players skills, taught them the geography, and taught them the background lore. 

EQ's quests did pretty much none of this. And I find people's reasoning that faction-grinding one faction into max-KOS and another into Ally is an example of a true open-ended "quest" to be weak sauce. We did that kind of shit as something to fill in the large spaces of empty time when we were waiting to get a group together or only had a short amount of time to play, or so on and so forth. Not because EQ1 was an open-eneded sandbox of a winter wonderland, but because doing fucking anything meaningful by yourself was next to impossible after a time, so you'd go farm faction, or farm a loop of named in Permafrost/Sol A/etc.

...

Having something meaningful as a directed task to go do (as in WoW), and even something as weak as collecting 20 terrorturkey testicles gives you more options than just going and grinding mobs for faction/rep. But you can do that in WoW if you want to. (Though not for every faction in the game) Though, it even has more reward than it does in EQ.

I've been grinding Ogres in Nagrand to get the blue powder for my PVP mount. They also drop warbeads, which I can hand in for Ethereal rep, and killing/grinding the ogres gives me rep with the Kurenai. They love me now. Not that it changes anything (just like those North Freeport Paladins). When I max out the Kurenai, though, they'll let me buy their mounts, and a tabard, and a few tradeskill recipies. Which is more than those Paladins will ever give you or let you do. This isn't needed, it's totally optional, and I don't think that many people will bother to do it. Just like my brother's EQ1 troll warrior who worked his way to from deep KOS to friendly in North Freeport so he could use the bank there.

[Rithrin]

Having something meaningful as a directed task to go do (as in WoW), and even something as weak as collecting 20 terrorturkey testicles gives you more options than just going and grinding mobs for faction/rep. But you can do that in WoW if you want to. (Though not for every faction in the game) Though, it even has more reward than it does in EQ.

The problem I see with this is that the very definition of being "directed" conflicts with "options" you get to choose - You're being told what to do, and usually how to do it.  And yes of course you can grind faction if you want to, but as I said before you are being penalized for doing something on your own instead of for a quest/drop. You certainly could concievably grind one of the centaur factions in Desolace to Revered if you wanted to, but you're not going to get any shiney, money, or bonus XP that a quest to do something else would have. I admit, all the other factions in the game give you some kind of bonus for grinding them but that is largely due to the fact that Blizzard implemented factions for key groups simply to justify a larger grind. Whereas my example from EQ1 was showing, in a small way, of how there were hundreds of factions that the game kept track of even if they were in there purely for fluff. Seeing faction gains/drops at the end of 90% of the kills you made in that game made me, in a very very basic way, constantly feel like I was having an impact. After grinding MC for the hundredth time to get my faction I still didn't feel like I had "accomplished" anything because I was specifically grinding for it rather than having it given out as bonus while I was hunting random things. Thinking "Whoa, I wonder why this brigand is linked to factions with the guards. Something's not right in Highpass" to myself was an accomplishment in and of itself. Granted that's generally where the story stopped with EQ1, but they were on the right track.

I've been grinding Ogres in Nagrand to get the blue powder for my PVP mount. They also drop warbeads, which I can hand in for Ethereal rep, and killing/grinding the ogres gives me rep with the Kurenai. They love me now. Not that it changes anything (just like those North Freeport Paladins). When I max out the Kurenai, though, they'll let me buy their mounts, and a tabard, and a few tradeskill recipies. Which is more than those Paladins will ever give you or let you do. This isn't needed, it's totally optional, and I don't think that many people will bother to do it. Just like my brother's EQ1 troll warrior who worked his way to from deep KOS to friendly in North Freeport so he could use the bank there.

Again, it seems the only reason they decided to add Kurenai as a gainable faction is for their mounts and recipes rather than for background or story reasons. And you say that my gaining faction with the NFP Paladins didn't change anything, that's simply not true. If I went to them to sell loot they gave me better prices, if someone PvP'd me (Yes I was on a Zek) near the bank the Paladins would help generally since not many people bothered working the faction up as high as I did, and like your brother I could then use the bank in the area. Its true that these rewards are generally the same for WoW's factions, but they miss the fluff part of the rewards. When I got my reputation to Revered with the Bloodsail Buccanneers other than one quest for a hat there was absolutely nothing whatsoever. At least the NFP Paladins let me buy/sell stuff with them. The Bloodsails don't even have one single faction vendor, hell they don't have a single NPC that I can just talk to. Just a little "Yarr!!" from the named Bloodsails would've done it for me. Sorry, off on a tangent there. My point is that the bonuses derived from high faction are relatively the same in both EQ1 and WoW, but the former was able to make tons of optional factions seem meaningful by focusing on interaction while the latter simply took a handful of factions and degraded them to a grind by focusing on Item/XP churning.

Don't get me wrong, though... I play WoW. As much as I'll praise the factions/map from EQ1, it didn't win in the end. I'm just amazed that freeform factions dropped off the face of MMO's after EQ1 as its a lot of amazing potential being thrown out. I'm glad WoW is starting to add in more optional factions. That's an example of good faction, whereas the mini-exalted grind in the new races' newbie areas is an example of bad faction.