Quest system

[Clover]

I got the phrase to tell Sharven about doubling the money on the first try.  But I cannot figure out how to tell Jayose about the notice of payment.

I\'ve tried anything from the simple \"money\" to \"Here is Shavrens money he accepts the payment and wishes you many more confusing transactions in which you annoy players as much as me.\"

Oh Well.
Back to finding those magical words.

[pata]

its easier to resolve most ridles than finding the trigger

[Berzerk]

I might as well agree as well, the current quest system (don\'t mean to offend or anything) but it down right SUCKS!, never have I seen such a cluncky and frustrating quest system, almost seems like you put less than a halfed *** effort into it in it\'s current state. I know its a lot of work already but its just awful to use and looks bad to many players who don\'t understand this stuff that well. I built a entire world and everything in morrowind and I know how aweful Dialog can be to be messing around in, but this is so far \"unacceptable\" as a quest system for beta porpouses it can remain like it is for more important things to get done first like game/server stability and fixing the millions of bugs it holds.

For the mean time I think there should be a open list for the commands, at least we will have half an idea of what to say instead of spending half the playing time talking to a single NPC.

There I\'ve basicly just resaid everything already said above. lol

[Nikodemus]

Not much to be said. I fully agree with Miya way of thinking about quest.
With current quest system it is real pain. I\'d like to do this what i\'m asked for, not guesing what to say.

[Ark]

I agree, it says everywhere that the game is supposed to be immersive. However to me it is the complete opposite of immersive when my character and every other player character doesn\'t even speak the same language as the NPC\'s and the NPC\'s can\'t understand simple statements.

[Sabrewulf]

Well I havent had any problems with the quest system.Yes I did get aggravated at some of the responses but in all they went smoothly.Sometimes it takes a simple phrase as opposed to a whole sentence.Right now you still have to treat the NPCs like they are stupid and everyone that played any of the quests in MB knows how to do it and complete them.Just ask any of your guildmates or even a friendly MB player for some hints. BTW i have found 5 quests and 4 worked perfectly.Only one had a bug dealing with items being traded which the devs know about.

[grek]

Yeah i agree that something needs to be done too. Im not a big player of these sorts of games to begin with so my questing ability probably isnt as good as others on here but i find it very hard to do the quests. On the lamp oil quest for the librarian (which i lost 200 tria on aswell ) I actually talked to the guy who has the falka but i didnt know the exact phrase to use and so thought i was just talking to the wrong person. I then asked another player if he could point me in the right direction and he kindly told me who i was supposed to be talking to but even then i dont know if i could have got the phrase on my own. It just seems that the speaking to NPCs is very contrived (is that the right word?)  at the moment.

Using the system Miya propsed probably would make the quests easier but it would probably make them more fun aswell.

[Berzerk]

well the system would work very nicely if the NPC told us what to say to teh next one for the quest so we don\'t geuss for hours. if we knew what the heyl to say it wouldn\'t be bad at all. Personaly the Morrowind system Miya suggested was not fun at all, I did not like it, it felt very fake and totaly unimmersive, the Morrowind dialog system was very powerful but it was not fun to read and use as it doesn\'t even feel like your talking to that person. But currently without a list of the commands for the quests the Morrowind dialog would be far better.

I say when talking to them (Like we currently do) there should be a update in the quest journal telling you the phrase to use when talking to that certain NPC. That would simplify everything and save a lot of work on the Admins\' hands.

Currently I haven\'t completed any quests cause of the hours of guessing needing to be done, I\'m usually a patient person but this fustrating stuff can even tick me off quite badly. So the quest system isn\'t that bad it just needs to tell you what to say to be any good otherwise yes it does suck.

[Miya]

Heya.

I\'m only using the morrowind system as an *example* of what could be done instead. There are lots of other quest systems, and we could even do a hybrid one that still has players talking directly to npcs, as long as it doesn\'t require guessing magic phrases.

Really the issue at heart is that the difficulty in doing quests currently is COMPLETELY in guessing the magic words the npc\'s want to hear. It takes a couple minutes to do the quest, and HOURS to figure out the magic words. Sure some people guess right the first time, but most players I think are having an extremely hard time with it. Adding more phrases that the npc\'s understand is not only time consuming for the developers, it doesn\'t solve the problem and never will. It will only make it slightly easier. It\'s still a guessing game, with lots and lots and lots of potential answers (seriously, over a hundred in many cases).

One interesting alternative that I had in mind was using a real natural language processor library like A.L.I.C.E. that had special databases for quests. Not only would this make it far easier to recognize player responses as valid (even if they aren\'t exactly like what the quest writer thought of) but npc\'s would seem to talk more fluidly, maybe even have full \"conversations\" with players. Now THAT would be interesting to see!

[Moogie]

There\'s no point talking about Morrowind chat systems. It\'s all been said before, and the developers are not going to change their system. Please be patient, and wait for the AI to improve. It will not always be so frustrating.

[Darakus]

It really is nice to know what we say to the NPCs is logged when they don\'t understand us, I\'ll use it to polish certain phrases and language characterisations, after all you don\'t expect a gentleman to talk like everybody else do you ? It would not be sensible.


Just one remark, wouldn\'t it be sensible to allow for single word recognition to simplify the system.

For exemple :

\"My greetings dear sir\" would be checked for single words and translated automaticaly as \"greetings\" which would amount to \"hi\"

Of course the system would be limited to adjacent words to limit the required time for analysis but it would already extend the number of phrases by quite a bit as common words used to embellish a phrase would not change it\'s signification.

Thus :

\"Arghhhh Matey I greet you\"
\"I greet you kind sir\"
\"per chance we meet but I greet you nevertheless\"

would all be equal even though used in three different characterisations.

Just to say that I\'m a bit tired of using phrases like \"you give quest me\" even though this has evolved a bit.