PlaneShift

Gameplay => Wish list => Topic started by: rtrentc on November 28, 2008, 06:47:09 pm

Title: Deleted Quests and keeping GM's from having to reset
Post by: rtrentc on November 28, 2008, 06:47:09 pm
Okay here is my take on the situation.

Your a new player to PS and you start out on a quest and get into trouble. You haven't been told about the problems of running multiple quests or why you shouldn't delete a quest. And in a fit of frustration you hit that delete button.  Now you find yourself not able to get that master crafted hammer or even worse you can't get into the winch through the quests you were on.

Here is my solution. #1, Make it so that a quest that is deleted is automatically reset. After all you didn't finish it. thus you didn't get the reward. This means you can start over and try again correcting the mistakes or even verifying that there is a problem with the quest. This won't cause you to be able to redo quests that you finish. Only those that you didn't complete. Or if you don't want to have a delete, make a reset button.

This would remove a lot of frustration that new players find in the questing system and now your GM's wouldn't have to deal with reset requests. Note I am only saying reset the current quest your on. Not reset a multi quest sequence all the way to the start.
Title: Re: Deleted Quests and keeping GM's from having to reset
Post by: Toox on November 28, 2008, 07:12:46 pm
I understand what you mean, and why you are frusterated. However, the solution you mentioned is prone to a lot of abuse. Say you do a quest, and in the middle of it you get a large amount of trias for whatever reason. Anyone could delete the quest, and replay it up to that point and get the trias again.

There is a problem. Hopefully we can come up with a better solution though.
Title: Re: Deleted Quests and keeping GM's from having to reset
Post by: rtrentc on November 28, 2008, 07:37:47 pm
Okay I can see where that could be abused. Of course one way to deal with that is that a reset is as it should be a reset. All items, tria etc that is made during a quest are removed as well. This would remove the potential for abuse. After all what I am talking about is a way for a player/character to back out of a quest. We know that if you are in the middle of a quest, you don't want to take another quest cause they can interfere with each other. And sometimes you just can't figure it out, but might be able to later. This would let you back out of a quest so that you can head in a new direction and if you decide later you can go back and try the quest again. In the case of a multi quest ( or chain of quests, you reset the quests in reverse order so you don't delete a quest that is a pre-requiste to a quest your on until that quest is reset or deleted.

And of course the final option is to remove the delete button so that you can't just delete a quest, but have to ask that it be deleted or reset. My point is that if your going to allow quests to be deleted they then you should be able to later do them and all positive results should be removed upon deletion.
Title: Re: Deleted Quests and keeping GM's from having to reset
Post by: Lanarel on November 28, 2008, 08:31:37 pm
Things are never simple :)

You haven't been told about the problems of running multiple quests or why you shouldn't delete a quest. And in a fit of frustration you hit that delete button.  Now you find yourself not able to get that master crafted hammer or even worse you can't get into the winch through the quests you were on.
Running multiple quests is no longer the cause of problems. We are even checking if it would be ok to have more quests open with the same NPC. The problem here seems to be the delete button. Would be easiest to remove that :)

Here is my solution. #1, Make it so that a quest that is deleted is automatically reset. After all you didn't finish it. thus you didn't get the reward. This means you can start over and try again correcting the mistakes or even verifying that there is a problem with the quest. This won't cause you to be able to redo quests that you finish. Only those that you didn't complete. Or if you don't want to have a delete, make a reset button.
As Toox already explained, there are quests that give a reward before you finished it, which would make resetting an easy exploit. Another thing is that many quests now have different routes. Being able to reset would mean that you could start again after finding that you took the less profitable path.

This would remove a lot of frustration that new players find in the questing system and now your GM's wouldn't have to deal with reset requests. Note I am only saying reset the current quest your on. Not reset a multi quest sequence all the way to the start.
I think 99.9% of quests are multi quest sequences. It is the way they are defined. Many quests have others as prerequisite, which may be what you mean by multi quest sequence. These are never influenced by a reset anyway.

The best way to solve the frustration (for players and GMs) is to fix the problems. Most of the problems with quests at the moment are with errors in the scripts, or answers that are very difficult to guess. Best way to get those fixed is to describe the problem in the bug tracker and set the category to settings. The very active settings team can than fix the problem and prevent the need of resetting for others. Try to describe the problem without giving away spoilers, or just open a report and ask it to be made private, after which you can give as detailed information as you want.
Title: Re: Deleted Quests and keeping GM's from having to reset
Post by: rtrentc on November 28, 2008, 09:44:18 pm
then based on that the best thing to do is to remove the delete button. If a player really, really wants to give up on a quest let them petition a Gm to, delete the quest. This would keep new players from using that button and causing unneeded frustration.
Title: Re: Deleted Quests and keeping GM's from having to reset
Post by: Prolix on November 29, 2008, 01:53:43 am
instead of deleting quests you should change the button to abandon quest which moves it to an abandoned quest tab where you can later resume it. In the meantine it will not clutter up your current quest tab.
Title: Re: Deleted Quests and keeping GM's from having to reset
Post by: rtrentc on November 29, 2008, 03:21:11 pm
That would be good if the quest wasn't considered active by the npc's.