f13.net

Towards the end of my stay in WoW, running around the Outland, it started to become clear that I was really sick of quests. Of course, there was a ton of them all over the place - and certainly the first batch of them had substantial rewards, but I was just really tiring of the whole process. Logging in and looking at my quest log became like showing up for work and checking an assignment list. What do I have to do today? For the most part, they weren't even "Quests" really - they were tasks. Jobs.

Checking out the LOTR beta, it appears quests are a big part of the leveling process with this game as well. So-and-so wants me to go somewhere and do something. Yeah, this feels real familiar. So it got me thinking about quests in general and what's good and bad about them.

The Good:

An alternative to grinding. Having played games like Lineage II or FFXI, quests do add variety to gameplay and provide various reasons to kill mobs that go beyond "because they are there" Quests can provide different gameplay scenarios.

Adds to the Lore of the gameworld. Assuming you read the quest text as you go, questing in WoW actually gives you a lot of information about the story of the world you're in, and background on characters, races, etc. is woven into the day to day gameplay.

A steady source of gear. You don't have to depend on luck or money making - at least with quests you are guaranteed a sort of baseline gear upgrade path.

Showing you new places. Quests can provide a flow to the game by requiring you to go to new areas at appropriate times, sort of a subtle tour guide to the world.


The Bad:

This is a Hero's work? Too often "Quests" are simply mundane tasks such as delivering a letter, recovering some random item, or are just a flimsy excuse to "go kill those mobs over there"

Static and Predictable. A side effect of quests is they actually highlight the static nature of the gameworld. That lost bag you found for NPC Citizen 23 is lost again for the next person that comes moments after you turn it in to her, not to mention it's lost again if you do this quest on another character. NPC Citizen 23 is always going to be in that spot with that task.

Homogenization of game experience. Whether you're a Warlock or a Knight or a Rogue, you rescue Stuck Kitten from Tree as the quest instructs you. Everyone pretty much goes through the same quests and does them the same way. The exceptions, such as specific class quests, are usually just a few compared to the hundreds of quests everyone will do with each character they make.

Too Much Structure. When quests are a major source of experience and gear for your character, you are cheating yourself by not doing them. This ties in with the previous point - you're doing the same thing everyone else is doing. You go from quest hub to quest hub, doing specific tasks as instructed by the NPCs. In a way, you are a slave to them. In WoW it is at least viable to grind and just kill mobs as you see fit - but a game like LOTR makes grinding much less efficient than doing the quests. So you either quest, or severely gimp your progress. This was the fatigue that set in during my last weeks in WoW - everywhere you turn, there is some NPC telling you what to do and where to do it. I didn't feel like a free person of this world, I felt like a worker bee.


So is the only alternative to quest-based gameplay the straight grind? I think quests can improve but only with the game world they are bound to. Things must actually change. Maybe NPC Citizen 23 lost her hat next time, in a different spot from the bag. Maybe she's in a different spot. Maybe you kill Stuck Kitten in Tree and get run out of town instead of rescuing it. Anything that makes you feel like you have meaningful choices, that you're not going through the same exact motions as everyone else, that you have some freedom, that things can be unpredictable.

Much of this has already been said before, I'm sure. And since WoW is so huge, I'm sure LOTR won't be the last game to make quests an integral part of the game. When I first played WoW I thought the quests were great ... but at this point I'm sick of 'em and wonder when they will ever evolve.

No, but it's "Hero's Journey". In the sense that every story needs "escalation", and this is something that WoW does very well. Or at least better than other games I played.

To be able to appreciate high peaks there must be valleys. There must be some world building and stories, preparatory work. If you start high and keep the level just high then things would feel just cheap and valueless.

The problem with quests instead isn't a problem of questing itself, but a problem of scope and breadth. WoW's expansion is well executed, but it doesn't really add much on what the game was already. It's horizontal development in the sense they add a lot more content and good content, but a type of it that we already know.

It's mostly a problem of a game who isn't try or doesn't know how to renew itself or grow.

It's a hard problem to rectify.  Ideally you'd have a fun combat system and a world populated by interesting NPC's that either want you dead or don't, where interaction with each is potentially a story of it's own.  Something like Fallout.

So, a dynamic changing world whereby content / events are created on the fly, players are rewarded for particpating in said content / events, and done in such a way that a player that has been in the game since launch experiences something new and the player that starts today doesn't feel like they missed out on two years worth of content / events. 

Cool.

Well as long as they have adequate content ahead of them, does it matter what they "missed"? Anyway it would be a small price to pay for a gameworld that could change and be unpredictable, at least in some fashion.

Yeah, HRose I would agree you don't start out doing "Heroic" things. But also, even at the higher levels in WoW for example, you're often doing generic by-the-numbers quests.

To me quests and grinding are basically the same.

Sitting at a camp killing 20 lizards isn't really any different from running around and trying to collect 10 lizard tails - by killing lizards. I do like that quests have rewards but that doesn't really differ from fairly rare drops you can get while camping.

Would it help to have options in what direction you take your character (see KOTOR) ? Problem here is the same problem it always is....content creation. No matter what devs do people will basically chew up and spit out content. With options in your content the amount needed raises exponentially.

So my answer? Fuck if I know....thats why I love player created context....like owning noobs :)

I'd rather see the players empowered with the tools necessary to succeed.

"Bring me the book on the third floor of the guard house!"

The fighter kicks the door in and kills his way to the top.

The thief climbs the wall and sneaks in at midnight and steals it.

The mage summons an imp that fly's in the window and takes it.

Etc...

It's a problem of tools.  Developers are afraid to give players decent tools because doing so makes other (the combat portions) trivial or too hard to execute well.  I say the answer to that is that combat should be trivial, I want to walk in and wtfpwn anything dumb enough to get in my way.

The problem with a changing world is that a person new to the experience will be unable to experience that which was made that is "the game."  The static nature of the 1-60 leveling experience for WoW, pre expansion, was something that each customer got to experience at least one time, and as far as I can tell, after that first time, nobody was asking for a change.  It's only when the content is replayed that there are screams of "gimme something new to do!".  But that content won't change, because it has to be there for someone else to experience.  Everyone must be capable of having the same experience.  Otherwise, you're creating content that not everyone can enjoy.

Look what the expansion did: a lot of areas at the previous leveling cap are no obsolete and no longer used.  The world changed, creating 10 new levels and a large land mass to explore.  At the same time, the previous 58-60 experience no longer exists.  It's much easier and more rewarding to go to Hellfire Peninsula than to rough it out in Eastern Plaguelands, Silithus, etc.

Also, WoW has at least several branches you can follow when leveling a character.  There are at least 2 for every range of levels your character is in.  Each race has its own starting area.  If you're just concerned about making an uber character, then you're not really caring how you get there.

Granted, I can see a system where you have a static nature in the beginning, at least until a player finds themselves in the world.  EVE doesn't have static progression, and that can wildly affect how much fun a user can have in the game.  A Tale in the Desert has a static skill progression in a dynamic world, which is a nice combination (if the game weren't so horribly grindy).

I wouldn't mind seeing a game where you start out neutral, and through your choices at the beginning, you determine your faction, storyline, etc. that branches out from there.  Like everyone is a civilian helping out the relief efforts of a war, then you as a player decide to take your neophyte abilities for revenge against X Faction (gaining favor with Y and placing you on their storyline) to help sway the dynamic war effort that is the end game.

I think levelling through quests is the substantial innovation WoW brought. It let the world suck the player in, give them a nice clear micro-goal and set them off a well balanced path of challenges. After that I can't imagine going back to sitting in a field reaping the repopping mobs.

The problem I think is scale. Levelling through quests means an order of magnitude more developer effort than sprinkling a plain with mobs. And truly innovative quests, with multiple solutions and scripted, variable, elements even more so. Multiple paths, whether class based, factional or geographic multiply that again. Thus the designers compromise with template quests using existing objects. In other words, kill this, get that.

I don't think it's a problem as such, it's just a question of budget.

Yup. We had branching in UXO's quests and doing so added about 33% to the time needed to build a quest. The other issue was grouping. What if half the group wanted to choose option A and the other half wanted option B? We had a solution for it, but at the time I wasn't 100% happy with it. We never explored it further for obvious reasons.

To me the key to breaking up the monotony is to give more ways to gain XP. Right now most MMOGs have two. Killing and questing ... and questing usually involves lots of killing. The more recent mmogs have really lessened the value of the former too - which isn't necessary a good thing. Sometimes it's relaxing to just grind for a while, and if nothing else, it breaks up having to constantly talk to NPCs and complete specific tasks. But if the individual monster XP is too low, then ALL you have is questing. Then you're back to only one real method to level and questing becomes the grind.

Some mmogs have other ways, such as exploration (basically finding POI) but it's usually a very minor part of the equation and rarely a method unto itself. But if there were 3 or more additional ways to gain XP beyond questing and killing and each was legitimately different in terms of gameplay, then questing becomes something you choose to do rather than something you HAVE to do. The problem with that of course is first coming up with the additional methods and then finding the time to actually impliment them...not to mention making sure they're fun and balanced with the other methods.

Yeah, I'd like to see WoW's exploration XP taken a step further. Nice post.



I thinks the world/quests can change and still offer fundamentally the same experience. It wouldn't have to be world-shaking changes, just fairly small stuff. Say you have the NPC who wants you to find a lost bag. Maybe the next person comes along, and it's something else in a different location. After a set amount of time the NPC moves to another town along the road with a pack mule. The NPC can give random quests along the way. Random rewards of similar value. Maybe a "rare quest" is given on occasion. Once you complete a quest from this NPC, you can't do another so one player can't monopolize. Then the NPC is in a new town and gives some different "I've lost X" quests. Even if after a month the NPC goes back to the original town and starts over, you've just added a huge amount of random content. It's no longer predictable.

I guess the issue becomes programming time. But how much of it can be randomly generated according to set parameters? I don't know the nuts and bolts issues ... but surely it's not impossible.

I agree to the extent that for those who've chosen to specialize in combat, combat should be easy most of the time.  Say, a quasi-skill-based system, with rating from 1-100.  Most NPC fighters are 40-60.  So you can be good, at 70 or so, able to beat the vast majority of combatants with some work.  Whereas at 85, the majority are light work, and even the tougher enemies don't make you do more than sweat from a good workout.    By the time you're at the 95-100 rating, you're a true master.

The trick is to allow for that, while making for good reasons to stay at 60.  Why did we always hear about the 7xGM in UO, vs. the 12x58 generalist, or the guy with 2xGM and 10 skills at 50?

I say one reason is skill balance(the lack thereof), the other is alts.  Developers like to make the advancement a curve rather than linear improvement, so the 10 points from 91-100 are worth way more there than in some other skill where they are points 51-60, which are worth more than being pts 1-10 in a third skill.  It's 10 points either way, but not the same value.  On top of that, why drop your swords skill to 75 from 100 so you can put 25 pts in herbalism, when you can make another character who can be a GM herbalist?  This alt will be way better at it than you would be with a mere 25 skill, and doesn't cost you anything but time, and maybe a wee bit of convenience.

So you fix your skills to improve linearly, and make enough of them that are interesting (crafting skills, NPC social skills, PC social skills, combat skills, convenience skills), with many skills in each, so you can invest in knowing a fair bit in a few things, or say knowing everything about combat, but social situations completely PWN you.  This is something games like SWG(pre-CU) actually did pretty well on, though there was room for improvement.

Then, you borrow another thing from SWG... the dreaded SCS.  There will be those who say, "But, but... I just HAVE to have alts!"  So I'd set up a skill you can take, that lets you have an alt.  Call it the 'Family' skill, or some such.  The alt character will be obviously related in-game (a la the shared family name system we've tossed around here for ages for accountability), and be more limited in what he can do.  Say a 2nd character gets only 600 skill points, and has a skill cap of 75, instead of 100.  Enough that he can invest and be effective at combat, or be a better-than-average blacksmith... but not a grand master.  Additional skill points spent by the main character can allow for additional alts, but each alt has fewer total skillpoints than the last, and the same lowered skillcap.  This lets those who simply must try(not master) every skill in the game get there without dropping skills on the main character(aside from the points spent on Family). 

The idea for this came from the fact that most heroes are either mysteriously adopted, foundlings, orphans, etc, or their family/siblings are not as cool as they are.  It protects the main-character crafter from the situation where everyone who needs their high-end goods just grinds up their own crafter, since they can get to pretty good with an alt, but not great.  It allows the alt-aholics to 'go get their main' when offended, etc, but maintaining a connection between alts, reasons for shared messaging/housing, plenty of role-play options for those who want to play more than one character.  You can even set up things like the vendor system SWG had this way... Spend points on family, and now you can have cousin Jeb mind the store(he having spent points on business skills to be good at that) while you're out searching for sources of high quality minerals.  Or perhaps your 'main' is a GM blacksmith and is hired to make suits of armor for a guild which would take an extended period to make in real-time... Instead he can be set up to do so(materials stockpiled, etc), and then set as 'NPC' so you can log on as his lesser-known brother Fredrick, who fancies himself a fencer.  Or his cousin Jimmy, who's an explorer trained in finding/mining minerals, who supplies his cousin with the raw materials for his work.

The automation could even, say, let you have an alt who is willing to join your group and fight with you, a la GuildWars.  He's weaker than another player(lower skillcap, fewer points, + points spent on automation), and semi-automated rather than intelligent, but better than being solo, to the extent that the points spent in Family and Leadership would be worth it.  And you can customize his skillset for synergies, unlike the stock 'a fighter' or 'a priest' you might get otherwise.

The important thing is to allow for this in your game design, so that having a small army of family members is balanced.  If the automation stuff is costly(and IMO, it should be), you get the effect of a WoW Druid... you can be everything, just not all at once, and not quite as good.  The more things you can do at once, you trade off some in depth, and even more in breadth on those additional characters.  Jeb the store-minder could be fairly low on the family totem pole, so he only has enough points for the skills neccesary to run the shop in an automated fashion.  He has the skillpoints to hang out as an NPC, some social defenses to avoid being 'taken' by characters with good social skills(which get them better deals with NPCs), and the rest of his skillpoints are invested in business acumen which affects the size of store he can run, and the efficiency with which he maintains it (Upkeep... Jeb doesn't mind the store for free!)  He might only have 400 total skillpoints, almost half a full character, but just enough to do what he has to do.

Advancement issues are a whole other ball of wax... IMO, flatter is better.  WoW has 70 levels, but relatively, there are only a few.  There's 'near you' in the +-2 range, the 'just above you' in the +3-7 range, the 'You're just dead' in the +8+range, the 'easy' in the -3 to -7 range, and the 'worthless' in the -8+ range.  So despite 70 levels, there are only really 5 levels from a player points of view.  So, Why have them?

--
Alkiera

This is why I hate levels and prefer a skill-based system.  Then there is no choice between grinding quests or griding mobs as a means of advancement.

(Simplistically speaking, of course, since there is always wealth or other things.)

I disagree that adding more ways to gain xp is the solution.  A good bandaid, but not the solution to the problem (I'll concede that a good bandaid may be all we can hope for in the near future).

I think the main problem with questing is that it means nothing to the gameworld (ok, so I'm just saying "dynamic quests" alittle differently).  MoM/MOO were fun because each game turned out differently.  The activities you pursued in each game where very similar, but those same activities actually had impact on whether your goals (to conquer all) where achieved or not.  Even though you were doing pretty much the same things, they didn't feel repetitious because doing those things mattered.

Players aren't dumb.  After a relatively short period of time, even as a nub, you figure out that it doesn't matter whether the quest is completed or not.  If you don't want an activity to feel like grinding, then make an activity have some importance apart from giving the character experience.

What I think would be a cool game is where NPCs play out the roles of evil emperors waging wars against eachother, and the players play out the roles of "hero" class game pieces at the NPCs disposal.  The NPCs would give "quests/task/objectives" for the players to accomplish, and successful completion of the task would result in not only benefit for the player (xp, loot, etc), but benefit for the NPC.

The thing that bothers me more than questing is the progressive nature of zones. Level 1-10 is zone A, 11-20 zone B, 21-30 zone C and so on. Except for population hubs, there's little reason for veterans to chum it up with newbies. And developers are still very shy about doing the DAoC/CoX buddy/sidekick thing of temporarily flattening level differences so they don't want/need veterans and newbies in the same place anyway.

To me though that just sends development down the inevitable money sink.

• For one, newbie content will by and large be ignored except by the steadily decreasing amount of alts being made over time. That makes it harder to find groups when needed, and makes the world feel empty in general.
• For another, it's just expensive to continually have to wrap all quests with new NPCs, new mobs and new zones.

I'd prefer to see fewer zones with greater cross-polination of player levels through various quests. I actually liked the early zones of EQ1 for this. Greater Faydark typically had everyone from level 1 to 25 or so due to all of the various bits of content there, whether players went from 1-25 there or did parts of it and parts of questing/grinding elsewhere.

Constantly sending players spiraling outward from their starting area wastes content that otherwise could be creatively used to get the player more "invested" in an area. For example, I never again need to return to Northshire Abbey in WoW or (afaik) Archet in LoTRO. And yet those are fairly robust areas that'll go to seed because NOBODY does. I don't care what happens at the Abbey anymore, but quests could make me.

Quests suck.

I hate them 99% of the time.

I like questing. I like getting a task from an NPC, doing it, and then returning for my XP boost, money, and maybe an item. I actually think WoW needs more quests and more handholding because there's situations you can get into where there are no more quests for a level and you have to grind it out. I also don't like changin quests because I don't want to have to go looking everywhere for the tree the cat is stuck in, if I reach the end of my tolerance for finding the stupid cat I like to know that the solution is a quick internet search away. To me, a game IS the quests. I play the baldur's gates, fallouts, final fantasy's, etc for their quests (the main story being a quest also). So to me...  questing it not something people should be avoiding. My ideal would be where you have quests and that's it, mobs don't drop anything, don't give any xp, they are just obstacles in the way of questing and questing gives you everything you need. I also don't pay the idea of dynamic quests or quests changing the world. I don't feel the need to change the world at all because I killed 20 gnolls down in some valley. I'm quite happy to go back there with an alt and kill those same 20 gnolls and have the NPC tell me their problem is solved again even though it never was and never will be.

Again we come back to the world vs game. If the MMOG builds itself as a game the world does not need to be anything more than a place to put tasks for the players to complete IMO.

Without quests, what would guide the player's experience?

Doesn't this game format *require* some direction for a player to progress? Otherwise you are relying on a source that isn't the developer, and that's not optimal.

Think of any game you play.  Every level, every situation is like a mini-quest.  The thing is, there's much more variation because it's programmed into the system and usually involves just one player.  But most games are "Get from point A to B and eliminate the opposition in the way."

I suppose then the question is, how do you have fun in a game? Completing objectives a games set out for you tends to be enjoyable for people, and if the gameplay is designed right, fun to do.  Course it's best the first time too; every time you repeat a task you have already done, the potential fun and satisfaction is lowered.

This covers exactly what bugs me about LoTRo. The exp from mobs is so pitifully low there's nothing to do but quest which gets old after a while.

While I also sometimes relaxed in MMORPG's by just chatting and grinding away, I don't really agree LoTRO or WoW diminshed that playstyle per se. They simply made questing more valuable as an activity. But I agree 100% on the fatigue, by the time in unsubbed from WoW (lvl 70 rogue) I just couldn't do anymore quests or attunements. I just got tired of tracking where everything was, what should be done next, etc. Particularly when the actual play activity was no different from arbitrarily grinding mobs.

LoTRO has the same issue, but it's really a symptom of the level based DIKU model (and that's what we're all burning out on IMO.) Without a significant other outlet for advancement the usual mechanics get dull after a while. At first we were all sick of grinding and grouping, then WoW came along and we all went - "Hey, some of these quests are neat and I can solo." 2 years later the questing is not so neat (although there are some stellar individual quests in WoW - the bombardment one, the mini yeti one, the noob undead ones). PvP is equally too task/rank driven.

The times in LoTRO I enjoyed the most were the instanced storyline quests. Those felt like I was an up and coming hero, making a difference. The kill 10 rats ones - not so much.

I found the problem to be too much choice. If I have 20 quests that I could complete at any time it turns their mini-stories into common chores and it diminishes my character's narrative. There is no external pressure to choose one over the other. However, if there were only 5, some of which I should save for later, there would be a reason for my character to do them when he/she.

Now, I'm not saying a quest log should only have space for 5 quests, only that there shouldn't be 20 or 25 quests in two neighbouring zones that are all mashed into a giant narrative ball of spaghetti.

In the wonderful world of The Future, when wer are all wearing silvery jumpsuits and eating meals from a pill in our jetcars, there will be an answer to this.  By which I mean inside a decade.

With sufficient, cheap processing power, that MMO will be able to support crowds of NPCs: proper cities instead of today's ghost towns.  Enough that each player will have a cast of NPCs tailored to their ongoing story.  Your villain and someone else's might be the same for a story reason ("raid", so to speak) or might not.  Perhaps they are attackable by all, perhaps not.  With tens or hundreds of thousands of NPCs running around (and proper, in-game risks to killing them without plot reason, sort of like in Eve with ganking in Empire), the odds against your next targetted villain being popped (if they are even attackable) is low.

You can still get help with taking down some capo in your quest, but he's your target.  And he stays dead, rather than spawning for the next guy, standing on the same corner, mocking you.  And you know that he died in everyone's version of the world, rather than just being hidden, non-world-affecting, instance mook #7824 in CoH.

Yes, the processing power needed would be at least an order of magnitude higher.  Yes, state menagement would be complex.  But Moore's Law is a wonderful thing.  And in many ways it would be simply an iterative improvement on stuff done in UO.

Yes, there is far more complexity to it than that.  But hey: I'm not posting a game design document, and I know it's all been said before.  Though HRose will probably be the first to claim it was said by him.

This is an excellent point actually. There's so many quests that none are important and the authorial voice gets lost. Games like WoW would do well to have a priority score on the quests that is irrelevant to xp/loot rewards but is indicative of the quests impact on a storyline - if there is one that is. sigh.

I'm not sure that I agree with this - most quests imply their relevance quite well with just the story text itself:
Bloke wants you to bring him ten gazelle haunches/rat livers/giant meatbeast ribs so he can cook some dinner - pretty low priority
Bloke wants you to infiltrate the Dark Overlord's tower, wreak havoc on his generals, destroy the Dark Shadowed MacGuffin of Facemelting, and slay the Dark Overlord - pretty high priority.

Obviously these are extremes, but the principle still stands.

Simple solutions have already been discussed.

1) A MMOG which constrains players *entirely* to a quest mechanic for progression (as LOTRO basically does by making grinding almost valueless) becomes tedious simply because there is no way to get off the rails. If I can go off and kill stuff for no particular reason for an hour or two and still feel like I did something meaningful in advancing my character, that makes a difference. If I can explore and be rewarded for it, even better, especially if it's a truly huge gameworld like Asheron's Call. Monotony is bad. The narrative details of a quest, no matter how interesting or well-designed, rarely do more than serve as a fig-leaf for the game mechanic. I can think of no more than ten WoW quests out of hundreds where I thought the narrative design was sufficiently compelling to entertain me in its own right.

2) Another important factor is to allow for multiple pathways to solving the quest. Players are fantastically efficient at algorithimic optimization, so yes, if one way of doing the quest is easier than another, and that style is consistently quicker and easier in multiple-pathway quests, that will start to have an impact on how players choose classes or skills. But if you do something like "there's a long route to the item that you can stealth to, or if you're a strong warrior, there is a door you can kick in and have a quick intense fight", then you're getting it about right. One reason I habitually play stealth classes in MMOGs is that stealth classes *can* solve quests in a different way, unless developers are being total pricks about it. I had fun spending a couple of hours seeing if I could solo the second two parts of the Karazhan key in WoW (yes on the 2nd, no on the 3rd) but I was irritated that the devs spent time trying to keep me from doing that.

These are the easy fixes, and past a certain point, they won't get MMOGs out of the design cul-de-sac they're in. I really think they're heading for a bit of a cliff here, and LOTRO may demonstrate that. The big new customer base is not going to just want more of the same for all time forward. Someone's going to have to man up and try a new design architecture.

3) So that being said, the real long-term solution is shifting persistence out of the character and into the world. Until things start to happen to the world so that tomorrow the gameworld itself is a different place because of something you've done or something someone else has done, you'll never really get over this problem. Yes, this means that someone who joins the game tomorrow has a different experience than someone who joined today, but there are ways to deal with that. For one, if you make progression about changes to the world rather than endless accumulations of power and wealth in the character, you won't be at so much of a disadvantage. For another, if you have some way for new players to review "last week's episode" the same way I might want to watch Season 1 of Battlestar Galactica before watching Season 2, they won't feel so excluded. In any event, I think we're coming to the limits of how successful the MMOG form can be if it doesn't start to move towards some kind of dynamism in questing, NPC interaction, and world-state.

The quest grinding caught up with me at around level 68.5 in WoW, and I lost the desire to even boot up the game. The biggest things that burned me out were that my xp bar would barely move, I would have to chain quest to get a decent advancement rate, the gear rewards were not comparable with the raid stuff, and my average gaming session is 2-3 hours per night. No matter what I did I simply could not keep up with my friends, nor devote the kind of time to the raid content that they did.

I think if I did between 5-10 quests per level I wouldn't feel like I was quest grinding, but when you've got to do 25-30 quests per level, run back and forth to tell an NPC something, and kill "x" mob to get "x" drop it all comes crashing in on you eventually.

So in the grand scheme of things quest fatigue drove me from the game because it wasn't advancing my character at a fast enough rate to keep up with my friends, and the rewards didn't help me much in the end game because the end game just lead you to RAID content.

That wasn't quest specific though really, if you had to spend just a much time killing the same mob for the entirety of the level you'd be in the same position.

You wouldn't feel like you were quest grinding, but you would feel like you were grinding, nonetheless.  The developers wouldn't want you to go through the level any faster, so your 10 quests would take as long to complete as the previous 30.  Collect 30 pelts instead of just 10.

It would be less work for them to develop, though.

In my opinion, WoW quests are just about right.  A zone will typically have a common theme going on through all its quests, if you read the text you can see it.  The quests are quick enough that you get the carrot often enough to keep going.  You can opt out of doing them, and they've peppered enough instances throughout the levels to provide alternate means of levelling and getting items (Deadmines, do it 4 times cause you're called to help by different people, and you gain several levels of xp, enough to bypass the quests of the next zone entirely).  And although the WoW quests are mostly about PvE killing, the WoW game is mostly about PvE killing, so you get what you expected and what's printed on the box.

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. 

There is so little adventure in mmog's.  The focus has shifted to instant shiny gratification and the ding-gratz mentality.  I think this has never been more evident than in the discussions about the WoW Armory.  If the focus were shifted away from having the perfect gear and the ideal spec toward learning the lore, the dungeons, and the landscape perhaps the whole gaming experience would become more than a race to 70 (or 50 or whatever the last level is).  I see people plowing through content in WoW, EQ2, and CoX only to ask myself "why"?  There is so little reason to get to the endgame that people miss much of the fun of the journey. 

The only time I feel like I am having an adventure is when I explore a well designed zone.  Crawling through Gfay in EQ2 now is great, but it wears off so quickly.

Get rid of exp/levelling. Use quests for faction building only. As the faction scales shift, then NPC populations and behavior shift. Have three or four towns/regions with different faction dynamics.

All these quotes are related, and Nebu beat me to the point of one primary benefit of having quests in the game.  When someone enters your game world for the first time and is a new player, there should be something more than a tutorial instructing them on how to proceed and interact with the game world.  You WANT to have your MMO have as much developer-implemented guidance as possible so that, at least in the very beginning, they won't have to rely on outside resources or even players in the game should none be around to get them acclimated to your game environment.  This is why the beginning experience in WoW was so critical to get right, and one I'm sure they spent a lot of time on. 

Lord of the Rings Online does have their newbie zones hold the players hand, though they don't *quite* get it like WoW did.  For instance, all of their trainers are grouped together in a very tight area.  Considering the default option for floaty names is set to on, this makes it look like a confusing mess when you reach the area where all the merchants and trainers hang out (in Archet).  Little things like that can nudge the experience into the positive or the negative.

Beyond the introduction, you can have a variety of options of how you want to proceed, usually determined by what the developer has implemented.  In WoW's case, you could grind mobs, do quests, do instances, or grind mobs to do quests that build faction and earn rewards.  There's also World PvP and Battlegrounds PvP.  So options on how to spend your time exist.  If these options are no longer satisfactory, then maybe the game is getting dull for you.


Reiterating what was said, I didn't proceed past the Humans story in Lord of the Rings Online, but both LotRO and WoW did two things, with WoW being less transparent than the other: every area that you adventured in had a theme going for it, some problem or some main storyline, and most quests in the area dealt with some side effect or was caused by this main problem.  Do you notice how in some RPGs, there might be some problem gripping an area, and NPCs you talk to mention some aspect of it, or you do something that appears to be caused by it? Same deal.  How LotRO makes this more transparent is that you are literally doing a main Story Quest in its own category that is linear.  Most quests I saw tied into that (Brigands on the rise in Bree), including the Crafting quests (Archet destroyed, needs wood supplies).  The "problem" in these zones is usually not immediate, and multiple quests dealing with the problem (and not the side effects) usually only come into play if you are at the stage of quest progression that is directly dealing with it, which is usually either it's own area of interest or instance.  So, when you enter a zone, there is a discovery process at work that will not work the next time you come back with a new character.  A concrete example is the Naga in Zangarmarsh in WoW.  Everything you do quest-wise is dealing with a problem caused by what they are doing in the region, with the quests dealing with the problem directly contained to the Coilfang Reservoir instance.


LotRO DOES have grinding and exploration rewards.  The Deeds system rewards experience for performing actions in the game.  Exploration was one of those actions, and killing mobs (albeit specific mobs and in large quantities, usually different levels of killing too) did reward an experience bonus once a deed was complete, plus something cool, like a trait or title, to go along with it.  I'm not sure how they stack up against quest experience.  When I completed the final deed for doing quests in Bree, I received 860 experience at Lv. 13 (does level change the amount earned?), which was a huge chunk, about 2.5 quests worth.

I believe that you can grind mobs in the game, but there is a finite amount of grinding that is worth it.  So maybe "pointless", long-term grinding was designed out of the system with low experience values from killing mobs.  I don't know how it is after Lv. 15, but it seemed like monsters were giving a good amount of experience, considering that the experience to each level was extremely small.  But I'm sure that changes later on.


I think a flawed aspect of a dynamic world that no one seems to be outright saying is the situation where a change to the game environment has a NEGATIVE impact on a player's experience.  Take a game like Chromehounds, where persistance is in the world and not in the character (aside from equipment and cash).  You are given the option of joining 3 factions.  If a player logs in to find that a faction is already on the breaking point of losing, or controls very little territory, there isn't much incentive to join that faction (there isn't any cool benefits for losing factions programmed into the game).  The only upside to this is that the game world eventually resets, but if a population and power balance still exists, then it's like a Civil War reenactment: you're going to be playing the same parts and history isn't going to change unless the players willing rebalance themselves.  It did happen in that game (hardcore players would switch factions, though probably to obtain the superior equipment when that faction is losing, and not because they wanted to create a fair team).

If a dynamic world is going to exist, then it has to occur after the player has left the guidance offered by the developer.  If a player can affect the world and make it so that an experience is negative for another player in an area that they should really be having a fun time in, then that is something that should be avoided.  This doesn't mean PvP ... that's a separate deal and one that's already taken care of by most MMO developers ... but a player's experience, up to a certain point, shouldn't be impacted by something another player did unless that change is positive.  Best example I see coming down the line? Spore, believe it or not.  Players can make new races and they get inserted into their game.  Massively Single Player Game.  Can't wait to see how that functions!


The first is probably a symptom of the second.  The quest marks over NPC heads are there to let you know that there's an activity to do.  Otherwise, you'd have to waste time and get frustrated checking NPCs that are there for flavor or don't do anything.  Some people could give a crap about story, even if the game is designed that way, especially if you have to raise a character through PvE to get to PvP.

I *hated* Everquest cities back in the day.  You never knew what NPCs were capable of helping you with a quest and had to constantly check outside resources (something you want to avoid when designing a game), you had a hard time finding quests, and they were pretty big with not a lot to do.

This would be my longest reply to date. ><

Just to be clear. In no way was I saying we should get rid of quests. Quests are good. But I think we need more. Originally we had monster killing to gain XP. Then mmogs added quests. Later mmogs made it so you could gain all of your XP through quests.

So my question is...what's next?  And beyond that, I think it's a bad thing to take away an option (in this case, monster bashing) from players and leave them with only one again.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Point by point:


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.


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).


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.


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.


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...


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.

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.   

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


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 =)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (http://www.skotos.net/games/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.

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.

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 =)

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.

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

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.

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.  :roll:

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.

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. 

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.

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:


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.

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.


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.

You'll note that I used RPG and not MMORPG in that statement.  I wasn't referring to any MMO with my statement about quests having purpose.  I was more stating that in MMO precursors (i.e. RPGs) that quests had a purpose in involving players into the world and storyline.  Quests in MMO's are nothing more than an alternative grind and that's why they feel that way. 

I also never claimed that EQ was a better game than WoW in terms of polish. I was more stating that I enjoyed EQ (at least early EQ) more for its lack of handholding and that it allowed more open-ended play. I think WoW is nothing but a polished turd.  It's still a lousy game by my standards and all the streamlining, loot, and polish in the world won't be enough to keep me playing it for longer than a few days.   

I'm guessing you don't play Horde.

Take a look at the Mag'har and do their stuff to completion, then tell me the same thing about them.  However, I will agree that a faction for the Alliance was added to create an opposite to the Mag'har, and it was the Kurenai for background/story reasons.

See, this is where we differ in our logic. How are you being "penalised" for having decided to grind re/faction instead of doing a bunch of quests any more than if you're being penalised for not doing your epic quest in EQ1? I never finished my 1.5 or 2 before I left EQ1, was that the game "penalising me" for doing other stuff? You do something and get the carrot, or you do something else and don't. The same can be said of any MMOG quest, as well as any CRPG quest that's considered a "side quest" as in not requred to advance the storyline. Grinding specifically for rep as opposed to getting it for killing random things? Grinding for it, indoors or outdoors was as much a part of EQ as WoW. From Giants in EW to raiding Kael, it's more or less the same shit. If you want to meaningfully advance any faction in either game you gots to grind it, one way or another.

The hundreds of factions that EQ1 kept track of actually touches on my main intellectual problem with it. It's bothered me since the EQ1 days actually, and that's the "Psychic Faction". I know it's a game mechanic, but if I'm in the wilderness of Northern Nagrand and wipe out the ogre camp with noone else around to see it (and no survivors who'd chat with the Kurenai anyway) why the fuck do they now like me better? Why does every Dwarf in Thurgadin know what I look like and love me when I got my last 200 giant kills skulking around the Kael arena with no Dwarfs in sight? I know it's a game mechanic, but it did always bother me. And you're not having an impact on the game world at all. You're just having an impact on your own gameplay, the same as if you'd done those 4 quests, or even, not.



See, with something like the Kurenai, at least there's a point to the faction. Something like the Bloodsails, or, honestly, most of the ones in EQ1, there's simply no point at all. Whatsoever.

I mean, remember the Deathfist Orcs (http://eqbeastiary.allakhazam.com/db/faction.html?faction=35)? Or even, what was the point ofOrc (http://eqbeastiary.allakhazam.com/db/faction.html?faction=169)?

Or the Stonehive Bixies (http://eqbeastiary.allakhazam.com/db/faction.html?faction=169)? You could gain faction with them by killing Mooto a million times (at one point), but what was the point? You never even got a hat from them! Yes, the Freeport Paladins had some practical use to them, but they were by far the exception as far as those went in EQ1.

My point there was simply to point out that EQ1 was just as full of useless factions as WoW is, and honestly I see no reason to even have these usless groups have their own factions. With some you're leaving it open in case you might possibly want to implement some quests attatched to them one day, but then, who's going to add quests to the Deathfists? Or "Orc"?



@Nebu - yes I wasn't responding directly to you with the EQ1 comments. There are, though fundamental differences between SP CRPGs and MMOGs. The closest I can see to crossing the "world-effecting" divide is with something like LOTRO's instanced versions of the Archet newbie zone.

I'd like to see some mechanic for player-created quests in a game like WoW. Essentially where a player can set up an NPC and some directions to go do whatever, add some items/cash to taste and perhaps a level limit for the quester, and away you go. Allow this to only be set up in a certain number of hubs (single-instance them off of the main world if you need to, like the officer's quarters, so the world doesn't become a ghetto of Player-Quest NPCs). Maybe add one of these hubs to each Inn. And maybe tack one onto the non-Inn zones at the major quest hubs like in Arathi Highlands, Searing Gorge/Burning Steppe.

With something like that, you still can't alter the world, and you couldn't add xp for a completed quest (get that from foozle-whacking) but you can certainly alter individuals' playing/questing experience of the game. It could even work as a form of second-tier player economy and minor moneysink, in that you could set up an NPC to buy stacks of Runecloth for 2g a pop, pour 100g (plus maintenence charges) into the NPC and he can then pellet-out 50 Runecloth turnins (auto-mailing you the cloth).

Such quests would also be dynamic by nature, since unlike the lady always standing there with her cat in that tree, that player-quest NPCs would change regularly and could never be counted on to be there anymore than that Enchanter chick who's often in PoK selling C3 buffs. As such they'd be "seek-out" quests that players would have to find.

I'm sure there are flaws in that system, and it still doesn't change the problem that was the reason for the initial post in this thread (you're still collecting 25 nutsacks for someone else, and you're still not changing the world), but it is at least a bit more dynamic and less predicatable.

This is something I've never understood about requests for player-gen quests. Why do people keep asking for them when they already get them. How many here have made something for someone else, in exchange for an item, money or a service? How often have you helped a guildmate/random-person with a quest? How many times have carted something from point A to point B for a player?

We are quests by virtue of interacting with other people in ways meaningful to the game. The only thing we don't do is dispense XP in these interactions, but by the time you've read this sentence, 17 ways that's a Bad Thing(tm) have already occured to you.

This has always bothered me too. Sure people can write this off as "word travels". How many East Commonlands Orcs deaths have been witnessed by players running to Freeport or West Commonlands? But, in general I'd prefer some required proof. Like, orc teeth on a necklace. That would grab their attention. Without that, they'd have no reason to attack save you hurling fireballs at them. I will say though that the bi-directional factions in EQ1 did make some sense. They were pure grinds, but at least the rewards were a bit more tangible than WoW's system, which is merely an XP grind.

The other thing that aggravates me is  "social aggro" code. Three Orcs standing next to each other. Me fireball-ing one should always bring the other two. The only way to make that work without screwing balance is to either change that balance to something like CoX (3-to-1), make it group-content or spread the mobs out.

When I say "penalized", I'm talking specifically about character advancement. In terms of money, XP, items, faction, or otherwise. Ultimately, I'm playing any given MMO to advance my character in some way. In a quest-based system like WoW or LotRO you are advancing slower than normal if you choose to do anything not related to a quest, thus the "penalty". If you have a quest to kill bandits that rewards both XP and coin, but you'd prefer to kill the lizardmen or something, you'll end up with less advancement in the same time frame than if you had done the quest. I wouldn't really care except for the fact that I don't have much time to spare so when I do put the time in, I'd like to be rewarded an equal amount regardless of what I did with that time. These rewards don't have to be the same, but should be equal.

Your example about side quests in CRPGs doesn't fit here because I'm talking about rate of advancement. Whether you're working on a side quest or the main quest you're still advancing at the same rate (Unless its been badly designed). If you don't do the sidequest you'll end up less advanced overall at the end of the game but that's a different issue.


True, I have issue with the way faction is recorded like that as well. Slaying some random hermit in the middle of nowhere shouldn't alert anyone. For an example of a good way to do faction I'd point you to Gothic 3. You only pissed people off when they saw you kill their friend, or help their enemy. Even if you overthrew a city, only the prominent members of the other cities recognied you while the average Joe gate guard couldn't discern you from any other random traveler.

Impact on the game world, I suppose this depends on definition. Yes, gaining or losing faction may only really have an impact on my gameplay, but it can change the experience of other players as well. That's what I consider having an impact on the game world. I didn't construct or demolish any buildings, permanently remove or add any NPCs. I did, however, change where people could chase me to, change where my group can sell excess loot, things like that. There should be more, of course, I'm just trying to clarify what I meant with the terms I was using here.


There are lots of factions in WoW, like the Syndicate, Dalaran, Scarlet Crusade, various others, that would have lots of background and story to them. It is, though, my personal preference that I would rather them allow me to play with factions even if there is no benefit to doing so instead of giving me no option. It makes the world feel less static. That's what I'm getting at I suppose when it comes to the hundreds of EQ1 factions. It made Neriak, for instance, feel more complex. It wasn't just "Dark Elves", it was The Dark Bargainers, The Dread Guard, The Indigo Brotherhood, various guilds, The King, and The Queen (whatever their names were). Finding out that the King's faction was opposed to the Queen's faction and that different guards were linked to one or the other and not both got you closer and closer to the realization that the King and Queen were in open disagreement and the whole city including guards and guilds were ultimately divided by their loyalty to one or the other. It also gave me the feeling that I could make myself part of the story by working those factions up or down. And as I said, that was usually the end of line in EQ, the stories didn't really progress beyond that. But that's heading in the direction of what I think factions should be all about.

I don't think EQ1 did them "right" at all, I just think they were the closest in an MMO and were on the right track.

I've never been particularly excited by the idea myself. Not that I have anything against it, but I don't much care either. My ideas in the last post were essentially made up as I typed them, and it was in response to all of the posts I've read recently bemoaning the lack of interactivity with a static world. What I wrote up would make "quests" a little less static, although they essentially boil down to either an NPC "buyer merchant" for higher level players who are offline or doing something else, or "charity" from higher-level people for random magic items or spare cash towards lowbies. Not particularly exciting for me, but you know, I keep seeing that people want to set up player-driven quests. I guess the mechanics could be kind of useful to heavy-RP guilds as well.

Players dispensing xp wasn't a point even worth considering.




This has always bothered me too. Sure people can write this off as "word travels". How many East Commonlands Orcs deaths have been witnessed by players running to Freeport or West Commonlands? But, in general I'd prefer some required proof. Like, orc teeth on a necklace. That would grab their attention. Without that, they'd have no reason to attack save you hurling fireballs at them. I will say though that the bi-directional factions in EQ1 did make some sense. They were pure grinds, but at least the rewards were a bit more tangible than WoW's system, which is merely an XP grind.

The other thing that aggravates me is  "social aggro" code. Three Orcs standing next to each other. Me fireball-ing one should always bring the other two. The only way to make that work without screwing balance is to either change that balance to something like CoX (3-to-1), make it group-content or spread the mobs out.
[/quote]

My point is that only some of the millions of EQ1's had any meaning whatsoever. A huge chunk of NPC factions were utterly pointless, such as the Orc or Bixie ones I mentioned earlier. As far as bi-directional goes, unless you were a Paladin doing Soulfire (I think) then the Freeport Guards vs Paladins thing was meaningless, since you could just grind Deathfist Orcs and Belts till both groups would pretty much not KOS you if you started off KOS to one or the other.

Social aggro is a somewhat broken mechanic in all these games. Aside from the three orcs standing next to one another. What about the second group of three orcs standing and daydreaming only 20 feet away from the first group of orcs that just got fireballed and slaughtered. And the other group of three standing around 20 feet from the second group, picking their noses as they watch the players slaughter six of their buddies, three at a time... It's the whole mechanic of aggro ranges, level differences, linked mobs, social aggro, LOS aggro. Gameplay versus realism.

EQ2's "group-linked" mobs were something I found utterly shit as a former Shadowknight, used to using all my skills in FD pulling in it's various methods. That would annoy me as a WoW rogue as well, with no way to bushwack groups larger than myself and cut them down to size.

Well, honestly, I think it's a case of tough luck. The game isn't a total sandbox, but it's very open-ended. You seem to be demanding that the game lets you do anything you want but still demand the game to min-max to whatever you feel like doing at any given moment. You want to kill Lizardmen despite the fact that they don't drop coin but expect to be rewarded equally as though you're killing bandits? You expect that they should drop rare lizardmen bladders worth the same amount of coin? TS. Not all things are equal.

If you want to min-max your gametime, then ride one of the many rails. If you want to meander and smell the flowers and kill random hobnobs, that's a legitimate choice but not everything can be maxed and "equal."

In all honestly, and without malice I have to say that I disagree with what you seem to be after. I hate to use the term, but it sounds a little entitlement whoreish. To take it to the next step, why not demand equal rewards for choosing to spend your time chilling out in guildchat while sitting in Shattrath? I'm sure you'd agree that would be silly. But then again, if there's a quest to bring the guard captain 10 bandit bandannas I still can't see any requirement for a clone-quest to also bring him or the NPCs standing near him 10 widjets from every kind of local foozle. (And FWIW, WoW comes pretty close to this when you consider it)..



Never played Gothic 3, but I agree again with your erm,. agreement with me. I think Fable was a little like this as well, except I think you eventually sprout horns and a demonic aura if you commit too many serial killings in the local bush. Which, for a fantasy MMO is possibly a better way to handle it in some cases. It doesn't quite deal with the fact that you may start off neutral to two feuding factions, and become a hero to one while hated by the other. (Scyer/Aldor, Kael/Skyshrine, Monagues/Capulets, Sunii/Shi'a, etc). "Yes, that guy is amongst our greatest champions/freedom fighers/dog washers and hero of our town/cause/group. Never mind the horns, glowing eyes and black aura around him."

I'd suggest that WoW is closer to EQ1 in terms of affectable factions for banking and selling than you think. Outside of a few starting cities I can't think or any other place where you could actually effect towns or NPCs to a useful extent, with the exception of Coldain/Kael/Skyshrine. I understand what you mean though, as, thinking about it, my SK worked her Cab faction all the way up to completing the Greenmist quest. It meant I could relax and chill with my Iksar homies, and had an extra bank in Kunark, but (perhaps because I wasn't on a PVP/Zek server) it didn't make a difference to other players in any kind of meaningful sense. It certainly didn't have what I'd consider an effect on the gameworld, though I think we're dealing with an issue of differing definitions here.




I think I'm understanding what you're getting at here, faction messages as a means to understanding the great back story to the game. The problem with EQ's system was that it was horribly implemented, and despite the sometimes very interesting backstory and lore behind the world, it was incredibly hidden and obtuse. Since the game lacked any real meaninfgul manner of interacting with NPCs besides killing them and playing guess the "what trigger?" "what is the trigger word?" "trigger word" "start the quest you fucking trigger fucker turd" "trigger phrase".

WoW I think does a much better job, in that it's full of books with lore in them, a lot of NPCs will have a meaningless-in-terms-of-progression chat with you that will reveal background and lore to the area/NPC/etc.

It seems that you'd like a little more sand in your sandbox by being able to work your Scarlet Crusade/etc rep up and do some quests for them? I'm not terribly opposed to that sort of thing, but I'd rather see it in more of a Velious kind of situation. I think the Scarlet Crusade is always-KOS except for the few in LHC because their upper-tier corruption is such an integral part to the stories of WPL/EPL/Strat/SM. Playing against them is part of the narrative of that region of the world and I guess fits into narrative vs sandbox (as opposed to game vs world).

There are some big flaws in WoW's setup though. It's far from perfect! My gnome met and hung out with an Orc Blademaster and brought about peace between his ogre tribe and the Kurenai. Well, except that his Ogres are still KOS to me, and I still get Kurenai rep from killing them, even when I slaughter them right next to the Blademaster who stands there picking his nose while he impassively watches me slaughter his ogre followers about 3 feet away from him.

I think adding more meaning to some of these factions in the game would be a good thing - Dalaran, Syndicate, Ravenholdt, but by the same token, some (especially "monster factions") should just be "the enemy" and that's that. Murloks, Fel Orcs, etc, even the Defias - though I'd have liked to see more of their backstory/struggle in Stormwind and the corrupt nobles extended, because "Onyxia is in charge", while a cool revelation the first time, isn't enough after awhile. The next patch is supposed to be adding a new rep for us all to grind. Some friendly Ogres. Becaue not all Ogres are arseholes. 

Yes, I suppose I do sound a bit overzealous on the min/maxing time thing. I would never suggest that anything someone does be completely equal. In games like EQ and DAoC where quests were few and far between, I didn't have a huge problem with it because even if I did all the quests I could concievably do in one timeframe, I wouldn't be that far ahead of where I'd be if I didn't do any of them. It allowed me to pick and choose. Deciding not to get the Pristince Carapace for the Dwarf wasn't that bad, it just meant I got to kill a couple extra mobs to make up the difference. Then you get to a game like WoW where doing a simple 5 minute FedEx quest amounts to 45 minutes worth of killing mobs and the imbalance is so great that NOT doing it, even though its the most boring thing in the world to you, is very bad decision. And to make it worse, every quest has that kind of imbalance and there's hundreds of quests! I just feel like that's very bad game design, but I suppose its not a flaw with quests in and of themselves.

Also I'll admit that I'm probably a bit soured by my experience with the Bloodsails. While grinding on the opposing goblins, they dropped absolutely nothing in coins, cloth, or otherwise and did not grant me experience. It was almost literally wasted time, all because I was doing something unrelated to a quest. Now if Blizzard had put in a quest to kill these goblins, you could be sure they'd load them up with loot and make sure the quest gave even more coin and items.

Yeah, I'd bet that being on a Zek made the "which NPCs can you seek shelter with?" reward a lot more tangible and carry more meaning, like the whole NFP Paladins deal. But there were actually quite a few "monster" merchants out there linked to faction. Various bartenders, bankers, and general merchants inside Runnyeye with the goblins, brownie merchants that sold spells and things in Faydark, the Aviak merchant in the Karanas, but yes they were few and far between.

You're getting it. I would actually be much happier if an MMO found a way other than faction messages to show me that the world is full of different political powers. WoW has a great deal of stuff like this in the background. The Syndicate is a huge power in Azeroth that actually threatens the Alliance a great deal. The problem is that you (Or at least, I) don't get that feeling when I encounter them. I just think "Meh, more rogues" when I show up at their keep as opposed to "Uh oh, its the Syndicate!" or what have you. The faction messages in EQ1 from killing some random dark elf hidden away in High Keep helped you connect that it wasn't just "some random dark elf" but actually a member of an organization, giving further proof that this organization has far-reaching influences and a real place in the world. Essentially a crutch picking up where the NPC interaction left off.

Luckily for me I have a pretty damn good imagination that'll carry me over until some MMO figures out how to implement Baldur's Gate style NPC interaction.

See, there's a big and fundamental difference between WoW and EQ's handling of quests besides the reward aspect. The biggest part, certainly early on in EQ was that quests were more or less hidden from the playerbase, you had to go and seek out the quests by either hailing every NPC in sight and hoping to find a trigger phrase or hearing about them from another player or eventually just looking up the "quests by zone" list in Allakhazam. WoW shows you the quests, and encourages you to do them, and even gears you up from them to the extent that you're not forced to go camp named mobs in a dungeon, etc. I mean, if you were ever on the PGT list in Highpass all the way down to the FBSS or Fabled Mithril Breastplate, you know exactly how ridiculous the EQ mechanic could be as well. I think I catassed for something like 12 or 13 hours in Lower Guk for my Fabled FBSS - since I wasn't a higher-end raider at that stage, it was my only way to get an item that good.

The fact that I enjoyed a lot of it was basically because I was with some cool people for much of the time who's guild I eventually joined. That and the fact that we WTFPWNED LGuk.
But at the same time, let me complete a chain quest to kill 10 ogres warriors, then 12 ogre warlocks, then the Ogre Big Cheese to get an item upgrade. EQ1's long ass camps are a been there, done that mechanic for me now.

BUT. If you're not concerned with min-maxing your time, and are more interested in the sandbox freeform journey, you can do that to an extent instead with usually quite a good few zones that yeild xp-and-cash-giving mobs, and always a decent chance of a green upgrade, or even a blue (and very occasinally, a purple). There's piles of mobs scattered throughout the game though that don't have quests attatched to them yet still drop loot. With the Bloodsails and specifically the Goblins, I guess I'd say that it's because you're not supposed to kill the booty bay goblins rather than there not being a quest linked to them. The fact that the game lets you, however, is an example of that sandbox in action.





Quite a few of those NPCs were on the beta neutral faction actually. The Aviak was, as well as the Runnyeye Banker. Basically if you could slaughter your way to him, you'd be able to bank with him. The Aviak merchant was also not based on faction at all, as we sat up in the penthouse slaughtering the aviaks, then selling the various bits and bobs that his dear departed brothers dropped to him. Then watching some new guy attack him, mistakeningly thinking that he was a named, only to be slaughtered.




See, here I both agree and disagree with you. I agree that more could/should be done with many of these factions in WoW, and the problem seems to be that with having decided on the "endgame baddies" pre-BC to be the Scourge and the Silithilid, most all of the other world intrigue, and especially "single-side" stuff (ie Alliance-only or Horde-only) becomes relegated to "Levelling up backstory", though to be fair a lot of it loosely tied in with other higher-end stuff. Like the undead in duskwood are scourge. And the various trolls tie into ZG/ZF/Eriankus/World Boss Dragons, but yes, it mostly feels unconnected.

Where I disagree with you is that the faction messages in EQ were/are overused for every bloody thing in the game, and after a time meant nothing at all compared to if they were used much more sparingly. Killing a random DE in the forest somewhere and finding that somehow the "your faction with the Indigo Girls has gotten worse." really means nothing to you when you also see that "your faction with Orc has gotten worse." and your faction with Dervish Cutthroats has gotten worse." constantly. This only got worse with later expansions - killing one stupid-looking mob could net you something like:

your faction with Yaxxta Maxta has gotten better.
your faction with Matta Muram has gotten worse.
your faction with Gatta Muram has gotten worse.
your faction with Yaxxta Baxta has gotten worse.

I mean, what the fuck is that supposed to be?

That doesn't mean anything at all when three of the factions that just got worse are nothing but KOS-mob factions that have no point to them and you can never even find out anything about them besides perhaps a google search turning up some of the worst fan-fic level dross passing for story that you'll ever seen written by a 9th-grader. Except a dev essentially wrote it.

I can't even pretend to care about a faction message like that.

Shenanigans!

I actually played LotRO to see how they did quest experience, and I would agree that you get gobs and gobs and gobs of experience from quests, such that you would be a silly newt for trying to not do the quests to level up.  However, I only made it to Level 13, and the amount of experience between the levels seemed low, but the amount of experience you got for a quest was still pretty high.  There wasn't much balance on the quest experience, even at that level.  They did have other activities to pursue (Deeds, mainly), but quests were your primary impetus to move forward.  I think the idea behind that is, since quests were so tied into the linear story progression, that they'd have more control over what your level is in most cases (sans grinding) as you moved through the game's story.

But, for WoW, I think your assessment is highly exaggerated.  FedEx quests in the game typically do not award a substantial amount of experience, and if they did, it'd probably be a bug.  In fact, you'd probably get more from killing two mobs your level, and let's not talk about rest experience.  Now, I will agree that you're better off doing quests in WoW if you're after experience, but looking at how the zones are designed, you're killing and moving through the zone's content at a very, very balanced pace, typically reaching the "end" zones if you started at Lv. 58, and sooner if you start at 60 and clean up all the quests you encounter.  You get a sense of adventure if you're doing quests, rather than just killing mobs over and over.  Plus, quests tend to have some memorable experiences.  Did you have a good time killing that 100th mob for experience? Or did you have a good time bombing the hell out of Legion troops, or controlling a pet robot to fight a bigger robot with your group? Maybe getting shot out of a gnomish cannon to traverse a zone?

WoW's quest experience reward distribution is very balanced based on the difficulty of the activity that is being conducted, especially if you take into consideration if you've got a huge chunk of rest experience to work off.  You're also not thinking of a team of players working together, using AoE tactics to gain experience from mobs to level up.  LotRO, I don't know if it is, nor if the AoE cheese is as prevalent.  And that's the only two primary examples you have to work with as far as a WoW-style game goes, unless there's some foreign entry I'm not familiar with (I'm pretty sure I'm not aware of all MMOs of this type).  It's not very bad design at all, and you must not be seeing the bigger picture or what most people appreciate if you think that.

If leveling up was easy from monsters alone in WoW, there'd be a lot more max level characters.  Someone would find a way to exploit it.

I think there needs to be more of a distinction in these games between tasks and quests. I think tasks should be something like WoW's system where you seek out npcs who send you on trivial errands for exp/gold/faction.

Now quests on the other hand should be meaningful. I think back to the EQ 1 days and the monk headband/sash quest, or the soulfire quest. Those were actually quests that took place over a characters lifetime and they did a good job drawing the player into the story, and the world. Quests should be very hard to come across and players who explore and talk to npcs, or search out lore should be the ones to find quests and this is where I think there is room for EQ's guess the trigger system. Simple tasks can be found by looking for the ! over an npc's head, but actual quests need to be hinted at and then it is up to the players to explore and figure them out. Think of how cool it would be to walk into a tavern and overhear a couple of npcs talking about a mythical flaming sword. This would give the player the hint that there is a flaming sword and then the players have to discover how to do the quest for it.

One of my fondest memories in EQ was when all of the epic quests were implemented and people were scouring the world trying to figure the quests out, trying to piece together all the riddles, and the lore. Once they were spoiled all the fun was gone, but still to take part during that time was fun. Also another thing that EQ did right that most people never took advantage of was identifying items. You could find out all kinds of cool stuff about items with the lore tag by identifying them. This is how some quests were figured out/discovered.

As for some of the useless factions in EQ it is impossible to say, but at one time maybe it was the intention of the developers to offer quests dealing with those factions. I remember hearing somewhere about there being over a thousand (I can't remember the specific amount) quests in EQ that were never discovered (or more likely they were never implemented fully). It is pure speculation on my part, but it could be that the bixxies offered a quest just noone figured out the keyword (and in this case this is a waste of dev time, and content), or more likely there was intended to be a quest from the bixxies but it was never implemented, but the faction was already in place. Now one downside to this as you can see is there were hundreds if not thousands of undiscovered quests, but in a system that separates quests from tasks this could be avoided because in EQ like WoW there was no distinction between tasks (trivial shit) and quests (epic lifelong character journeys). Tasks are something that every player should be able to partake in if they choose, and quests should be something that only a few experience (those willing to put in the time/effort etc.)

There is one other thing I think EQ did very well that WoW didnt do very well and that is player freedom. The players in EQ constantly found ways to play that made the game more fun and challenging. Ever do something unconventional in EQ like an AE group, using charm to kill named mobs, kite groups, shakerpaging, fear kiting, swarm kiting, quad kiting etc. These were all ways to play the game that the devs never intended, but they were fun as hell. For some reason devs nowadays want to limit the players imagination and put us on a linear rail and it sucks. If there were more creative ways to play WoW it might have more long term appeal. I don't want to just quest for exp, sometimes I want to grind, and when I have the right combination of competent people playing certain classes I want to try unconventional ways of gaining exp.
 
In the end though count me in as one of the people who want less handholding, and more adventure, exploration and epic feeling as opposed to being some npc's errand bitch.

Yeah, for like the first week.  Of beta.  After that it's on a spoiler site and such common knowledge that your average player couldn't avoid hearing about it if he wanted to.  C'mon, did you just fall off the turnip truck?  What's the point?  You may as well put exclamation points everywhere and save people the time it takes to tab out and open their browser.

Maybe if they were randomly generated to some degree. At least the "tasks." Daggerfall games do this no?

SirDrizzt:  sup?
PwniusMax:  sittin in teh tavern, waiting for quests
SirDrizzt:  NEthing good?
PwniusMax:  keeps talking bout flaming swords
SirDrizzt:  lol, flaming swords are like 20s on the AH
PwniusMax:  yeah I know lol
SirDrizzt:  just sit til he sez where a hammer of acknot is at
PwniusMax:  wut 4?
SirDrizzt:  dude HoA is like ownage
PwniusMax:  ya?
SirDrizzt:  ya, but the quest only liek spawns once every 8 times
PwniusMax:  wtf, this sux, why do i gotta sit here?
SirDrizzt:  just sit there til a HoA tavern quest pops, its awesome
PwniusMax:  ok, guy says to find HoA being held in ogre cave
SirDrizzt:  man, ogres are hard, the boss in there is like level 54
PwniusMax:  ya so?
SirDrizzt:  so just wait for the HoA quest to pop for the orc camp, its easier
PwniusMax:  wtf no, i dun wanna wait anymore

pure win.  :-D

QFT.  Between this and the fact that games with high experience value mobs and the capability for damaging AoE attacks (a necessity for raiding / instances when you have a large quantity of mobs facing a five-man), I think you get pretty close to why things are the way they are in MMOs like WoW.

Hm.. just quickly browsing this thread has shown how interestingly the tables can turn in just 3 years.

When WoW was first being discussed it was;

 "Awesome! No more straight-grind bullshit! Something to do rather than sit on your ass killing the same 5 mobs for 3 days straight!"
  "Quests that give ACTUAL, USEABLE rewards on a regular basis, and decent coin? Count me in!"
 "Holy crap, you mean I can not only kill something OF my level, but 2-3 levels above me? Fucking hell, that's how it should be!"
 " You mean I don't have to go out to a spoiler site just to know that Mob_102 will give me the quest for the Sword_of_Pwnage(noob version)?  That's a hell of a good idea."

Now, we have people bitching about the same things. 

Face is, folks.  Some of you simply don't like DIKU, and shouldn't even bother with them once it becomes public that's the method they're going for.  Even WUA has one over on y'all in realizing this.  Bitch about how it's the direction devs are chasing, sure, I completely understand that.  Bitching because a DIKU acts like a DIKU is silly.

There's plenty of different paths a Diku could take.  Obviously EQ1 is much different than WoW.  I don't see all that much bitching about the overarching diku model itself  here.  Alot of bitching about the method of progress, however.  Besides, I don't see why diku couldn't evolve in different ways as well.

Right it's the players fault for not liking the game.  How silly of us.

Maybe, after 3 years of experience, some people have come to the conclusion that even easy DIKU is still PITA grind and BS cockblock mechanics?

I think it is more that a cool world can hide the DIKU longer than a bland one. That and the fact that WoW introduced about a million US gamers to DIKU even if they don't know what the term means. Your first DIKU is always the sweetest DIKU.

I played  EQ up to level 56 or so, and did exactly one quest in that time. This was fairly early on (I quit soon afterthe first expansion) and maybe they put more in later, or made them more important or easy to figure out or something. In many ways you have a lot more freedom without quests. You're still limited to places of a suitable level, and by your desire often to go kill something you heard will drop good loot, but it felt like you had a lot more freedom without a list of tasks to complete in your quest book.

LotR is the exact opposite. You need to do the quests, as killing monsters alone gives so little experience and, as far as I can tell, they never drop loot which is anything like as good as quest rewards.

Isn't that the truth!  You cannot go back though.  I tried and I lasted less than a day.

Kind of sad when I think about how much work I put into that MUD.

Yes, it is.  I can't stand CS, Half-Life or lots of RTS games.  Doesn't mean the games suck, it means they simply aren't for me.

Again, bitch all you want about the direction of development, or the lack of resources spent on things OTHER than DIKU. That's a very, very valid complaint, imo.  Doesn't mean "OMG THE GAME IS SUXXORZ" any more than "GODDAMNED HIGH FPS LOW-PING MOTHERFUCKERS SPAWNCAMPING" is a valid criticism of FPSes. 


But are they DIKU then? Probably not.  DIKUs have been loot-based & "auto attack with specials" since they were text in 1990, yet that's the most pervasive criticism about them out there.  As soon as mechanics are added-in that expand on that, they're just added to the list of bitches, as we're seeing here with the 'omg quest grind' crap.

Different directions requires a different mindset, different mechanics and different focus than level-based restrictions.  Soon as you're off of that you're off of the comfortable and familiar, however, and you require that much more work to design & implement, much less get people to try you out.   Thus, the prevelance of that direction.  Lots of MUDs tried to split-off of the DIKU model, with various levels of  success and failure.  At their core, however, they were still levels, loot & autoattack with specials.   After a while, even the most innovative of the games would still be  getting bitched about as derivative here, because of that core commonality. 

Perhaps if someone implemented a good, bug-free LPmud or some other variant we'd see change.  I'm not going to hold my breath, however.

http://www.secondlife.com (http://www.secondlife.com)

It's getting enough attention that it might warrant more of the industry looking into that kinda of possibility.  Heck, my university apparently owns some land there, and they're almost continually getting into publications.  The latest issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal(a sort of programmer trade journal thing) has not 1, but 2 articles on it.  One being a basic intro to the programming language/model, and how to build objects that forward all local chat to an email or IM account.  The other was kind of a general 2L info article.

--
Alkiera

Me to Schild a while back:

I'm still there. Except I think the "soft" cap blizzard put on orange+ mobs is still too bullshit for my tastes.

I'll say it since people are still thinking people who like WoW are in denial (not directed at you Merusk). I've been playing games for years, MMOGs since early UO, and WoW isn't the first Diku I've played. I'm not some MMO newbie pulled in by the popularity of WoW and will tire of it once I "get it". I LIKE the EziDiku+Quest formula, and I'll continue to like it for as long as forseeable. Though I would of course still like to see some more games that follow a different formula for some variety.

I like all of those things, but at the same time, WoW isn't the perfect game. The overuse of rep grind as a content extender mechanic isn't to my taste, but meh.

I played EQ up to level 4 and tried to do one quest in that time. I quit because common loot I started getting was better than the quest rewards were (and the game was ass).

The reason I started with EQ? I had read that of the MMOs of the time, EQ had the best quests.

That and the random loot generator on instance for 5 man, 10 man, and more. I just hate admitting that I ran the said instance 20-30 times just for the sake of rep grind or shiny, but that's all is there to it. On the developer's perspective if every single run guarantees a reward to every class, then they'll have problems trying to churn out content. I just ran Mechanar twice today, the healer didn't get his mace nor boots, the tank didn't get his sword, and I didnt' get my cloak. 2 hours in total killing the same thing, running the same place, fighting the same boss. The warlock said, 'oh well it wasn't a total loss, we got rep' and the mage quit in disgust after muttering 'i'm fukin exalted'

On the topic of mobs not chaining agro and useless factions  I give one of the better contributions the WoW forums have made to the forums:

Skinning a bear should aggro every bears (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=94165050&sid=1&pageNo=1)

 in a 40 yard radius. It makes sense, you are actually skinning their best friend.

Skinning a bear should aggro every bears.
EVERY. SINGLE. BEARS.
Not one bears, nor two.. every last bears.

And when a bear kills a human, it should aggro Stephen Colbert.

You are right people would spoil it. But if the quests were hard to locate, and actually took some brainpower to figure out then that is what I am looking to participate in. Eventually yes all quests would be spoiled, but until then it would be fun to discover them, and figure them out. I don't know if you were in EQ when major quests were being discovered or not, but it is one of the fondest memories I have of the game. The key here is like I said to differentiate between tasks, and quests. Tasks should be done through hand holding and give out trivial rewards. Quests should not be trivial to find, or solve and should give significant rewards. In fact one of the rewards would be figuring out the quest. It took a long time for the epic quests in EQ to be spoiled because it took a long time for people to figure them out. For the people actually putting in the work to figure them out it was a great experience completing those quests and like I said being the first to finish was a reward in itself.

Quests are only spoiled by fansites if you choose to frequent those sites for answers.  If you want a deeper, more challenging gaming experience, just avoid the shortcuts. 

One problem is that many quests aren't really "challenging" anyway - it's just a question of how long you have to run around randomly before you manage to find the quest-item/quest-NPC. I look up every single one of those quests on spoiler sites.

Based on what we see from EQ and UO, a successful MMORPG can expect to operate for upwards of a decade.  Designing major game systems around those first few months of discovery while waving the next ten years off with "Well everything gets spoiled eventually!" is beyond short-sighted.


There is a place in the MMORPG world for fond memories of obfuscatory EQ gameplay design.  Unfortunately, that place is in the bottom of a landfill, buried under a mountain of unsold Vanguard boxes.


They're all going to consist of killing monsters and/or delivering items, because that's just what gets done in these games.  The only questions are how long it will take, and how obscure it will be.  Arguing that there should be really long quests (or quest chains) that give really good rewards is one thing, but arguing that making the quest itself difficult to locate is a good thing because it gives a few EQ veterans explorer-woodies is lunacy.


Being the first to finish was a reward for a negligible 1% of the playerbase.

That's why I liked EQ1's system of AA points. Some here hate them, because they feel theyd need to grind exp to keep up with their uberguilds, but I always liked always having some way I could improve my toon at max level. It gave you a reason to play your character besides grinding faction or raiding.

But then maxing out your AA points becomes the next max level, even though its not a level per se. Kind of like DAoC's "master levels"... it wasn't lvl 51, 52, etc, but it might as well have been. Instead of "LFM 60 only!" it becomes "LFM 60 500 AA points only!". Except you'd be in a guild at that point and not be lfg, but you see my point I'd hope.

I liked the AA points, though, because it gave variation between me and the next lvl 60 of the same class.

That's after 3 years (or 8 in my case, or 100 in others) of paying a monthly fee. That's a crapload of money to the devs and publishers. People can bitch about something eventually, but if they gladly continued paying while they were achieving this self-actualization, then DIKU is a good business model.

Here's what I think a lot of people bitching about DIKU (not here, but in general) really want: For it to come:

• From someone as competent (which means as much resources) as Blizzard, so the game has a chance of "teaching those guys some manners", or the same such bullshit from SOE-dominant days.
• With an IP they give a shit about.
• With as much press coverage to validate their time investment ("hey, everyone is doing it!")

Basically, more of the same but from someone else. If people truly wanted something else, they'd be off exploring the rafts of alternatives out there instead of bitching about yellow exclamations vs blue. It's not bad to want more DIKU. It's just silly to not realize it.

Both are real problems, perpetuated by the static nature of the games and the quantity of quests. Most quests are XP grinds wrapped in text, because it's very hard to design thousands of equally compelling quests. Some are worth the storyline. Most are forgettable new-zone-new-KillXCollectY. And all of this is based on the descension of new MMOs to basic CRPGs with occasional group requirements. Raiding is still niche comparatively, perfect for veteran Achievers and those who didn't realize they were but just as alienating and cockblocking as it was back in the day. I don't care how easy it has become compared to EQ1. It's still the same ass content over and over and over and over for the one shred of chance of continuing to "grow" a character when the levels stop. That is not universally appealing.

I never said what you said I said.

Fixed. I only ever read the first letter of names ;)

If in a persistent world I am a citizen of a player city that can be damaged by the successful co-ordinated efforts of other players, and such damage irreversibly hurts my side and helps theirs, and player cities lead to wondrous opportunities, and I can conspire to defend my city and attack theirs, and defence and attack benefit from long-term preparation, there is no quest fatigue, only care factor. If it's personal, I think care factor is easier to maintain than if it's all lore and levels.

The question is how irreversibly it hurts your side. The care factor all too easily turns into frustration if there is no escape from the situation. And if there is a reset at some time, the persistent aspect of the world is lost. Is a difficult balancing act.

Irreversibly doesn't have to mean "cannot be rebuilt". But it does have to mean "losing something permanently". Generally that's a currency, whether in the form of cash or points earned with a faction. And for it to hurt, things have to be preposterously expensive and remain so.

Sorry. This is me missing SWG.

Most of that game's player cities were crap. There were also player cities entirely owned and run by a person with multiple accounts. Ultimately they were irrelevant and if they put up defences, they were soft targets for the amusement of major cities. The action was around the successful player cities that created a community of players who lived, crafted, defended and based themselves in the city.

Expensive imperial or rebel bases were earned with community faction points and placed in grid formations. Day-to-day gameplay, hanging out and even roleplaying happened around them. The inhabitants defended their creations to preserve the layout of their cities. There was a lot of community effort lost when a base was destroyed, which is what I mean by irreversible. The penalty was not enough IMHO and the bases were dysfunctional like most of SWG, but it still hurt. The community could replace it, but it did not change the fact that the community took a hit.

So you want EVE, then? :)

I haven't read everything, but I know I'm sick of DIKUs. The perfect mmo for me, if the designers had the talent and money to match their promises, would have been Seed.  I haven't tried many other games because they don't sound all that interesting. I have yet to see a crafting system I like and I don't want to spend my game time avoiding floating penises. :P

Shadowbane.

I wish SWG had anywhere near that level of immersion for PvP (it made up for having immersion in lots of other areas of course). At the same time, I've also argued most normal gamers would hate building up to something so big only to watch it get destroyed. I've long felt that SB even done well was not going to be anything more than niche. Niche can be good (see: Eve) unless you were SOE and wanting one of biggest licenses going (see: NGE).

Guess that's why being able to save your game anywhere is such a popular thing in non-MMOs.  Imagine if you had to start over at the very beginning everytime you died? Works best for fast arcade games, extremely insane for any normal console game being developed, and bat-shit insane if you tried to apply that to an MMO where you can spend thousands of hours in the game.

There was alot of bragging rights involved in early SWG bases defense/attack.  There was a base in an Imperial city that stood for over 6 months of relentless onslaughts, and a base in a Rebel city that withstood over one year of continual attacks.  The results of said attacks/defenses spilled out in cantinas, starports, and quite a bit on the forums.  The Rebel base that stood for over a year finally fell due to a combination of a years worth of defense 'stress' and some creative distractions.  We had 200+ player battles over those bases.  The infamous "Battle of Senia" initially had over 300 people involved.  It lasted for nearly 4 hrs and eventually crashed the server it got so big (500+). 

The sight of seeing 200 players (plus pets - whether creatures or ATST's) marching towards the city is something I'll likely never see again.

Good, good times.

Nice thread, guys.

Reading between the lines it sounds to me like what WoW did wrong in TBC was they made the quests too attractive in terms of rewards. Once players realized that quests provided equipment wildly superior to world drops (and even many instance drops) they felt like if they weren't doing quests they were wasting time. So instead of popping online and thinking "what should I do tonight?" they popped on line and looked at quest lists in order to get the most bang for their proverbial buck.

That's what made fun into work. Choosing to do quests because you feel like questing is going to be fun... so is choosing to grind or to go to the battlegrounds or just to sit around talking to the guild. Choosing to do something specifically because it's giving you economic rewards? That's a job.

What's Raph's bit about player's seeing through the fiction? Unless there are similar rewards (and other character progression) possible from every available player choice, players will pick whichever activity gives them the biggest payoff... whether they enjoy it or not. If they don't enjoy it (even if... heck, ESPECIALLY if there are other activities they would enjoy) they'll say the game sucks. Don't make your players do things they don't want to do.

I describe myself as a compulsive quester, I need to know that I have discovered all the 'secrets' and lore of an area and before I can move on to the next.  I think I learnt that from playing lots of single player RPG's where travelling through the storyline and completing the quests was the purpose of the game rather than reaching max level and having epic gear.

I still found myself at lvl 69 in WoW deciding to find a nice grinding spot to get my last level rather than go through any more quests for a while.

I don't think TBC introduced this. I existed entirely on quest rewards until my 50s, and then only started getting instance drops along the way to solving quests or helping others do theirs. I never understood why people would farm Scarlet Monastary or other places. Why spent time trying to get uber crap you'd outgrow quicker if you just went off and quested to level.

It's still "work" whether you farm mobs or farm quests. But the quests in WoW and anywhere else with good tracking makes for a good directed-play experience. It allows for much more efficient play for the time compressed. People log in and have a task list waiting, in addition to other goodies like NPCs which direct players to new settlements, quest-NPC notification icons (everyone does this now), and so on.

Now, if the games would let people play with such things turned off, that would stroke the Explorer-types. But I suspect there just aren't that many who'd bother using that option. We only didn't use it in EQ1 and UO because it didn't exist :P

Doesnt EQ2 allow you to turn off combat experience?

Quests ceartainly help to point out the majority of the content available, part of the reason I generally find myself doing them because I hate the idea that I am missing stuff.  I cant put my finger exactly on the reason why I got so sick of them by the time I was in my late 60's in WoW other than there was just a point where they seemed to be adding tedium rather than hiding it.

Well, not really. I haven't yet done much in terms of instances, but I've found that many of the quest rewards I'm getting in Netherstorm are inferior to stuff I've picked up in instances, and often inferior to AH/dropped greens "of the Bandit". At the same time, since I'm 70 and wanting to get 5k together for my fast flying mount, all quests are worthwhile in that they tend to give 10-15 gold plus an item I can't/won't use that sells for an additional 3-9 gold.

The initial quest rewards were great. The Hellfire and some of Zangarmarsh were great upgrading all the pre-BC stuff, then as you level and travel there were a series of small incremental improvements, with some sidegrades, and now it's almost entirely sidegrades. And honestly, none of the socketed stuff I've seen seems worthwhile.

I think the problem for me at least in BC is that once I hit that point of "work hard for a microscopic upgrade or sidegrade" hits, that'll be it. I can't justify that kind of time (to myself) wasted on essentially nothing. It's like.. farming MC or Naxx or whatever for endless weeks on end. Only probably less interesting.

Very few FFXI quests have any XP rewards (though those that do tend to be repeatable weekly).  A number of the higher end spells (the WHM teleport spells, Sleep II, etc) come from quests and they are pretty nice rewards.

The Chains of Promathia expansion missions were largely hated by people as being difficult and having "no rewards", which was total cracksmoking.  Yes, they were difficult (which certainly made it feel like an accomplishment to finish them), but the rewards were great -- access to whole new contintents, new higher end content at the end, etc.  The mission storyline was nicely epic and tied into the world stroyline all the way back to the original opening movie for the original game.  Really great storytelling.

Leveling in FFXI is grindy (though they've done a lot over the last year plus to take the edge off of the grind), but for me, at least for the second half (50-75ish) it was serving the goal of being powerful enough to pull my weight in this crazy hard mission quest sequence which I did with a group of friends -- typically saturday mornings.  I had a great time and really felt like I was accomplishing something.

That said, I would love to see this stuff somehow impact the gameworld, if there's some reasonable way to do that...

FFXI has a lot of problems, but of all the MMOs I've played it's the only one to keep me engaged for more than a month or two
(probably about 2 years of playing it, with a few months downtime in the middle).

- Q

I'm hitting that now as I play.  As you do a couple dungeon runs and get some blues, the quest rewards you get in the upper 60's turn into funding your epic mount.  At Lv. 70, it rains gold, because the experience to gold mechanic kicks in.  But we're doing Karazhan and I'm finding that the only difference between the blues I got on right now and the purples that are dropping are a couple stat points or changing the focus of the equipment from Crit to Hit or AP.

Oh, and sockets are awesome (even I can't tell if that's sarcastic).  The thing is you have to get gems that make it worthwhile.

I was being serious about the sockets actually . Maybe it's because I'm not in Kharazan, etc, but what I've seen is basically stuff that's pretty much a very incremental upgrade to greens, and even that's only after they've been socketed with good gems.

Yeah, it's a shame.  The sockets stuff is a trivial bonus at the moment and not the interesting thing I was expecting.

Too bad there isn't a horadic cube.   :heartbreak:

Damn, that would rule.

Socketable gear is the only thing that's really an obvious upgrade to me at this point. I'm mostly in quest gear (some from instances), AH blues and some instance gear (it's funny, most of my instance gear is off spec).   The quality of quest gear (there's some really high AC pieces for a feral), the quality of some BoE drops, and the underwhelming quality of instance drops (not counting heroics) makes upgrading a piece of gear an exercise in scrying.

I mean hell, one of the major tools I use for upgrading my gear is a spreadsheet some guy put together to compare gear for bear tanking, cat sustained dps, and cat burst dps.  Otherwise, how the fuck am I supposed to weigh 50 armor v. 10 stamina v. 12 dodge or 6 agility? Because that's all you get.  Points shuffled around.  At least when i'm given sockets I can push the stats in a direction I want.  I can throw on an 8 defense gem or 9 stam gem.  Hell, if the socket bonus sucks you can just push a single stat if you want.  BTW, up yours Blizzard for making the 12 stam gem recipe so goddamn rare.

The thing that's pissing me off about TBC quests are all of the 5 man quests with the very nice gear. No one does these anymore.  No one wants to help with these anymore.  Thus, those of us that leveled a second char to 70 aren't able to complete these.  SUCKS.  It's hard enough finding someone to complete a 2 man group quest without begging someone in guild chat.   The game just has a very strange social dynamic now.  No one wants to help others complete group quests even if they've got the same group quest (*crickets*), yet it's perfectly reasonable to send me a random tell while I'm in a PVP instance to go tank Shadow Labs.

You're still playing, and you're still paying, so Blizzard's still smiling.

If my only reason for playing was frequent, sizeable increases to ePeen, I would have quit a month ago.  Alas, I still somehow enjoy the game.  Money still being well spent.

Edit: We're allowed to dislike portions of a game while still playing it.. right? 

I'd play a Gothic3-inspired MMO game.

Nope, you are a walking wallet. It's a binary situation.  Either your wallet is open or closed.

In truth, until the whole wallet wave-function collapses at the end of the billing cycle and he gets charged for one more month, he's a qubit: he could be cancelling and re-activating every 30 seconds just to spam them with good bye hate messages that some peon in some basement has to go through so that they can figure out how to increase retention.

So I just hit 70 on my priest and I can now understand where some complaints are comping from. Lordy-lord but killing 30 of everything that moved in Nagrand was not really fun at all. I think the issue is that the grinding part of the quests comes so thick and fast that the grind is not hidden very well at all. It's like an XP production line where you just move along it and get your xp in measured doses at specific points, there's no real breaks like there was in the old world, just more "kill X of Y" every time you hit the quest hub. In a way it's a victim of its own success, Blizzard has refined the quest delivery so that you are always doing something, always fighting or searching. Now, this sounds good to me in theory, but I find I don't actually want to always be doing something in practice. When Linkin sent me to the other side of the world no less than 4 or 5 times I didn't really appreciate it, but I sure as hell would have appreciated a little of that halfway through Nagrand (but isn't it pretty though?).

I still say it's better than grinding. :P


EDIT: I said "real world" when I meant to say "old world". I'm hoping that isn't some kind of freudian slip.

What you describe is the reason that a skill-based system is so attractive to me.  You select skills that engage you and you perfect (gain points) that skill by applying it. If someone could just develop an engaging game with a well-balanced skill system, I think we'd all be happy.   

Though like anything else, I'm sure even that would get old after a while.  Tough to find variety and balance with a good storyline these days.

It seems most of the "Go to the other side of the planet" quests were reserved for the group-based quests.  For example, I did the "Buying Time" questline in Nagrand last night on my priest.  There was a bunch of running around in the middle of it that would have been tedious if I haddn't been grouped with a mage at the time.  I seem to recall a few others being the same way when I was doing with my wife when BC first came out.

There do need to be a few more 'rest' bits worked in.  The lack of/ ease of traveling around makes things really busy all the time, and is kind of burning me out.  Also, they didn't integrate pathing people into dungeons nearly as well as they did in the Pre-BC game.  I blew past Anurochdown and Coilfang dungeons before I realized, "Hey, I really want to go back and see those."   Yeah, they kind of lead you there, but they aren't the 'ending' of the zone story the way they were with VC:Westlands, the keep in Silverpine, the one in Deslolace, Scarlet Monestary, Scholo/ Strath in Plaguelands and BRD, L/UBRS for the Searing Gorge & Burning Steppes.  (Note I didn't mention Ulda, Gnomer and several others.. which coincidently were also underplayed.)

That's a pretty interesting insight right there. I did Hellfire Ramparts & Blood Furnace and also did an Underbog. From what I can tell doing Hellfire Citadel is pretty common, less so for Coilfang, and the other 2 instances are pretty rarely done on the way up. If we look at Hellfire the main thrust of the zone leads into that instance. Zangarmarsh leads you to Coilfang but then kinda drops it with most of the quests coming from the Sporeggar, all of which are totally irrelevant to the naga problem. Terekkor leads you around Auchindoun and has you do some related quests but there's no main thrust leading into the instance, I got a couple of quests saying to go there but nothing that screamed "this finishes off the zone". Tempest Keep is kinda tacked onto the side of Netherstorm and I'm not even sure I've seen a quest to go there.

Buying time takes like 45 minutes (this is assuming folks have their epic ground mount by now).  Not too bad for a fairly long quest line.  All of the parts of the quest are in zones connected directly to Shattrath or right near Altruis.  Only real pain in the ass part of it is the guy in bone wastes, where you have to run through a bunch of aggro mobs (that place is too tightly packed).   Of course, I've done this quest so many times for guidies it's become mechanical for me. 

Blades Edge, Netherstorm (god I hate this zone), Shadowmoon Valley and Nagrand do have a decent number of quests with stupidly long travel times built in.  I'm just thankful that flight paths seem to be a lot zippier in Outland.


There's a quest that originates in the ghost village that ends up there.  A few others go there that I've seen but they didn't originate in Netherstorm.  Auchindoun is kind of grating.  It just seems like they threw it in there.  And does anything at all lead you to the Caverns of Time besides the Karazhan quest line?

Nope.  Or at least not that I've found.

45 mins is impressive on the Buying Time line. Took me about 2 hours last night to do the whole thing.  When you start at 8:00, that's an entire evening for one quest line, a significant enough amount of time for me.

Interesting that you hate Netherstorm so much.  I despised shadowmoon valley for its "run around in circles through mobs and around this mountain thing" layout, and found Netherstorm to be pretty fun on my hunter.  The difference was, one I had a flying mount for (nether) the other I didn't.  Was that the case with you as well?

On my latest, it was a druid.  So I had a flying mount for both at 68. IE, me.  I'm still not done with the non group parts of Netherstorm.. I can only stand a little bit at a time.  I just don't like the zone.  Only zone in Outland that I have a pretty visceral "hate it" feel.  I don't like Blade's Edge Mountains much either, but it's just a pit stop zone.  I didn't even finish off the quests on my druid and left an entire line mostly undone (Rexxor line, I'm not a messenger boy).

I really didn't do much of Shadowmoon Valley on my shaman, but I hit 70 pretty soon after reaching there.  So, I haven't experienced much travel frustration.  My only issue with that zone is that everything there ends with a 5 man group quest when the entire 20 quest deep line leading up was solo.  That's just balls.

I liked and disliked Netherstorm. I liked the quests well enough, and I love etherials and the eco-domes were pretty cool. I hated the overuse of mana burn mobs, and the placement of some graveyards. Luckily I only died once, but when I did I took the spirit ress and flew back because the bridge was waaaay too far away to run it (I died in the etherial camp at mana forge ultima, graveyard was at stormspire). Part of that liking could be because I hit 70 about halfway through and so could fly everywhere by the time they sent me to areas where traveling would be a pain. I'm in shadowmoon now doing quests for gold and its pretty nice, can't talk about travel cause I fly everywhere.

Actually the tilting in netherstorm was kinda annoying. And outside the ecodomes it's an ugly place... I think I only sorta like it because of the etherials. :P

Netherstorm is an ugly zone, but it is a great place to level. Due to the island makeup, most quests send you just a few steps in one direction or another, so you can bang out a bunch without a ton of wandering around (compare this to someplace like The Barresns. UGH).

The one I hate the most is Zangarmarsh. I haven't done any of the quests there (outside the dungeons). I don't like the look or the color scheme, and the mobs are stupid.

Zangarmarsh was a pain in the neck, even with an Epic mount. Reminded me a bit of Duskwood with all the running. I found almost every other BC zone to be comparatively dense with minimal travel time (except for the Altar of Storms quests in Nagrand).

This comic made me think of this thread (earlier on, anyway)

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=900 (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=900)

(http://shamusyoung.mu.nu/images/comic_lotr56.jpg)

I suppose at the end of the day that "Quest Fatigue" and really fatigue of anything that is somewhat repetitive is why I play WoW to raid. Now that I've completed all my reps, gotten all the gear I can, and done most of the instances fifty times over, I'm back to where I was before TBC: only logging in for raids. The main reason is that raids provide a challenge that isn't beaten in a few minutes, or even a couple hours usually. Even farming old raid content, you're only killing the same boss once a week. It gets old but you still have a few months of killing the same boss before it has gotten tired and old. A few months in we abandon an old raid instance as we're starting to work on a newer one. For example, a few weeks ago my guild moved Karazhan to optional off-night raid status since a lot of us were tired of it and we needed the time for other instances. I ran it for a couple months and now I'm bored of it.

I think for most people anything can become boring after enough repetition and quests are often so similar to each other that is just feels like the same thing over and over again, hence Quest Fatigue.

And this is an awesome example of YMMV. I find raiding to be the absolute pinnacle of repetition. After the first few times all I think the raid group is doing is trying to not fuck up so we get our guaranteed 1% drop. This doesn't bother me when I first start raiding at the cap because I'm still in that "gotta keep improving" zone. But after awhile, the effort-to-reward just dies out. I don't find raiding even with friends very social at all because of the pace, and there's no way I'd accept even more downtime between fights just for more socializing. So basically, raiding and me don't mix for long.