Quest Fatigue

[AcidCat]

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.

[HRose]

This is a Hero's work?

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.

[ahoythematey]

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.

[SnakeCharmer]

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.

[AcidCat]

the player that starts today doesn't feel like they missed out on two years worth of content / events. 

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.

[Margalis]

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.

[Slayerik]

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 :)

[Murgos]

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.

[LK]

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.

[Kageru]

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.

[Calandryll]

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.

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.

[AcidCat]

To me the key to breaking up the monotony is to give more ways to gain XP.

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

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." 

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.

[Alkiera]

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.

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

[Lantyssa]

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.)

[Typhon]

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.

[Venkman]

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.

[lamaros]

Quests suck.

I hate them 99% of the time.

[Calantus]

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.

[LK]

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.

[Phred]

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.

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.

[squirrel]

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.

[tkinnun0]

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.

[Endie]

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.

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.

[squirrel]

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.

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.

[Simond]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[waylander]

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.

[Calantus]

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.

[ajax34i]

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.

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.

[Nebu]

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. 

[tazelbain]

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.

[shiznitz]

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.

[LK]

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.

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.

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.

Get rid of exp/levelling. Use quests for faction building only.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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. 

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. ><

[Calandryll]

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.

[WayAbvPar]

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.