Mistakes You dont want to see Repeated

[Seytra]

Well, it _would_ remove the MM aspect from quests (mostly), agreed. It\'s be more realistic, though, but I don\'t know how many ppl. see this as a backdraw.
The MM aspect would still be available for parties (invitation-only) and general areas (questless, though), like towns or the areas between questspaces (like wide grasslands or forests, rivers, etc.). These reasonably are the places ppl. meet anyway.
Whether questspaces are implemented or not, I prefer a well-implemented randomness to fixed quest locations due to the protection and uniqueness they yield.

[RonHiler]

I think the randomness thing has potential too.  However, I worry that it will devolve into \"FedEx\" quests or kill the \"big bad\" quests.  The problem (as I see it) is that with a random quest, you can\'t have a special location (like a scary dungeon) and thus you are somewhat limited in the sorts of quests you can design around this concept.  They have to be quests that are workable no matter where they occur, and that pretty much exludes special landmark type stuff.

How about a combination?  Some quests random, some quests predetermined (so they can be in specific locations), some quests with questspaces, others open to the public.  Some doable once (or with timers in the range of several months), others repeatable.  If we give people a choice on how they want to quest, it would hopefully make for a better game.

I\'m kinda with rifft about the questspace issue.  If ALL your quests were limited, you\'d lose much of the MM aspect, which is, after all, what these games are all about.  I would be wary of making every quest involve questspace, althogh I like the idea in general for some things (I intend to implement questspace for particular special quests in my game that involve profession advancement).

And, BTW, rifft, don\'t ever feel bad about expressing your ideas and opinions. You may be right, you may be wrong, or you may be somewhere in between, but it doesn\'t matter, because it\'s the discussion that counts. Dialog like this is exactly how good games are designed (or at least it\'s part of the process, heh).  Something you say here might end up impacting PS or Sov or some game not even started yet

Ron

[rifft]

Hehe, well I was just re-reading my post and I relized I sounded like I\'m pushing only random quests, etc. That\'s why the comment.

I do agree with you Ron, that some quests would require special landmarks and would be limited by how random they could be.

But I think the key is in design. For example if you think about quests in terms of sets of goals as opposed to in terms of one. There could for example be a long running quest where eventually 10 kings would have to be dethrowned, these kings are all NPCs. Each king has some set of advisors and and assistance, lovers, wives, children etc. You a lowly adventurer happen to meet a dark stranger in an ally, where you are instructed to go and kill some low kitchen worker place poison in on of the advisors foods deliver the food, and leave. Then meet that NPC again at another city. When you meet that NPC again he tells you that the advisor has(or has not) died in which case the quest, if you choose to accept it, continues. There could also be consequences for breaking a quest. I simply propose a framework within which you could develope a quest in such a way as to allow not only static story driven quests, but also dynamic story driven quests. Not only would they be non-linear, they would also be random. For the above quest I described obviously there are many static parts, however you could still allow for random direction. Event A occurs, Event B is Rand(Events E1 - E25),  once Event B is resolved some Event C is Rand(Class A of Events D1 - D24) You know,  more complex hierarchy that involves random assigment with some set of constraints. FedEx missions are the simplest and should exist, obviously, but they don\'t have to be the only kind of quest that exists. There could also be truly unique quests that are only available after a certain amount of other quests have been completed. I mean here we have so many possibilites, we just have to make use of them. I think I might develope a small web interface that may provide an example of what I mean, of what kinds of quest could be generated. Though it may be sometime before it\'s complete since I\'m taking a full time summer semester and exams are coming up, so I\'m swamped with work.

Anyway, there is no reason _questspace_ can\'t exist, though I think it might have to be slightly alterted, to allow only certain part to exist in this extradimensional pockets. For example some part of the dungeon is available only to you, after you go through a certain door, it is now available only to you (You know the secret door thing). You could even allow certain rouges or theives with sufficiently high skill to see these hidden passages and rooms and enter them at their own peril.

Another way to allow for more unique quest experience is to generate items that are specific for that kind of quest. You need some sulphur to hunt some little beastie that would otherwise be invinsible, cute things like that, and of course make such things dynamic.

Anyway, I think that\'s about all for now.

[Dargerok]

Well, I have a simply idea and I don\'t know what is wrong in it. If the problems are people who could go to kill quest monsters, why not do that once you have completed a quest you can\'t kill the quest monster again? And, if the quests are personal quest (I don\'t think this be good, because, like many people said, I think it will need too space in server) you can do that just the player who must do the quest and his party (if he got) can kill the monster.

But I think personal quests won\'t be good, the PS team would got too work in the quests and too space in servers.

It\'s better to have a lot of quests able to be done for everybody, but that everybody can do only one time, and maybe a little of quests that can be done all times you want (but I don\'t like this).
Which is the problem in this quest sistem?

[Seytra]

The problem is the wait queues at the quest NSCs. In this system, the i.e. head boss would need to be killed by every player doing the quest. However, it is only there _once_, therefore the other players will have to wait until it has respawned after you killed it, and so on. Therefore, the quest experience is higly unrealistic in that it clearly displays the game mechanics, completely destroying the immersion once you think about it (and I inevitably do that, that\'s why I didn\'t even finish NWN ).

I wish to make clear, however, that by \"unique\" or \"personal questspace\", I do _not_ mean \"a quest that is designed for any single player. I mean that the questspace, i.e. a copy of the quest, should be private to the player doing the quest. The quest in question (*g*) may well be assigned to every single player in the game at the same time. Each player would, however, be absolutely alone in their particular questspace (unless they team up for a formal party).
Therefore, yes, the MM aspect would be worked around for the quests, for immersion\'s / realism\'s sake. In non-quest areas (towns, etc.) it would still be there, however.

Maybe we can, once again, give the choiche to the only person it matters to: the player. They could, on a per-quest basis, decide whether or not they wish to enter a questspace, and if they choose not to, they\'d share the quest with everybody else who choose to share.

I know, if you have a quest beginning in a house and you\'re following a player into that house, the questspace will prevent you from following the player as you or the other player or both would get an own questspace. Still, this is going to happen way less often than kill queues...

Unkillable opponents and invisible items would prevent harvesting and level-grinding (anything that prevents this is good!), but neither killing queues nor loss of immersion.

I\'d like personalised quests, but I don\'t think it\'s feasible since the devs would indeed waste great amounts of time on them, only benefiting one single player, which is IMO a bad thing. Maybe as a _very very special_ reward (or punishment, hehe), but not as a general thing.

[Dargerok]

Well, I understood better your quest sistem now. I like it. But I see 2 important problems:

Problem 1: If there is an area where only one player can enter, the quest area, this mean that he can hide easily objects (and sometimes himself from other people who attack him) in this area, and nobody will can enter. This could be a problem.

Problem 2: Got special areas, quest areas, for each player, give the same problem. A big big amount of space dedicated to quests, and making lag in the server.

Have you any idea about this?

[rifft]

Hmm, well the whole bit, where for each quest a set of appropriate NSC\'s will be generated. For randomly generated quests, solves the lineup. I mean we are talking about a massive scale.

Anyway, questspaces as you propose them I don\'t think are feasible. But the pseudorandom quest generation is, well more so anyway.

Though I think a combination of the two would be optimal.

Oh, and giving the player the choice I think also ruins the immersion.

And yet another thing, when I mentioned secret doors, what I meant is this:

You still have a questspace, though it begins after the secret door that only _your_ PC or party knows about. Therefore allowing an explination for a questspace. It\'s simply a way to integerate it into the game without breaking immersion.

[Seytra]

Originally posted by Dargerok
Well, I understood better your quest sistem now. I like it. But I see 2 important problems:

Problem 1: If there is an area where only one player can enter, the quest area, this mean that he can hide easily objects (and sometimes himself from other people who attack him) in this area, and nobody will can enter. This could be a problem.

Well, the self-hiding aspect can of course be a problem. However, I\'m not sure to what extent, because you can probably run off and hide somewhere anyway. OK, questspaces should not be easily reachable, then, reducing the possibilities of in-city quests.

For item storage the questspaces would probably not add too much difference, because IIRC there will be some sort of such storage anyway. OK, the questspace would be completely untouchable whereas a house might not be.

I don\'t know how bad this would be, though. Especially if the MMORPG-typical parasites (griefers, harvesters and grinders) would be eliminated by this, it might be worth the backdraws, but maybe not, as it may well breed new parasites that I can\'t think of ATM.

Originally posted by Dargerok
Problem 2: Got special areas, quest areas, for each player, give the same problem. A big big amount of space dedicated to quests, and making lag in the server.

Have you any idea about this?

The space problem can partly be solved by downloading the questspaces to the client, but it has other issues (mostly synch). For a questpace in use I don\'t see any way to free memory usage, though, maybe by always only keeping a small chunk in memory and offloading the rest to the hdd, but this might be too laggy for constant reloads. This depends on the actual memory footprint of the quests, i.e., if they can be made very small (by working off a general copy and only storing per-player what really is different) it could be reduced, but worst case is that each player does a different quest.

Giving the choice might hurt immersion, but maybe not if the selection would be done before the connect, and / or if it were selectable from the \"file\" or \"options\" menu (which will most likely always be there anyway).

[RonHiler]

Originally posted by Seytra
Giving the choice might hurt immersion, but maybe not if the selection would be done before the connect, and / or if it were selectable from the \"file\" or \"options\" menu (which will most likely always be there anyway).

Well, I wasn\'t thinking about a menu selection.  My thought was that some quests are designed in each of the different manners we\'ve been talking about.  One quest would use questspace (I like that term, did you make that up Seytra?) and would be on a three month timer, another quest would be repeatable at a random location, another quest would be one time only at a constant location, and so on.

I think this would allow players to gravitate toward the types of quests they prefer.

[Dargerok]

Ok, if we forgot the self-hiding problem, and we can do that don\'t being lag in the game, there is yet another problem.

If we need special quest areas for all the players in the game, and imagine they are 10000, this mean 10000 special areas. Or the world is really really big, or we won\'t can walk, because everything will be full of quest-areas. And the quest areas won\'t be in important sites, obviously. This mean we will have to walk hours for go to a non-visited area, where we can do our quest. This isn\'t fun. No city quests (I know you said this), no quests in important sites... not, not good. I preffer to wait a little for kill someone.

Oh, and Ron:
Your sistem of choosable quests is good, I see one problem and I got one question.
Question: Could the players do all the quests of all sistems, or only the quests of one sistem, or only a limited number of quests?
Problem: If the number of quests is limited, all players will do the quests with better rewards, not the quests of the sistem that they preffer.
If the players can do all the quests, they will do all, and they will do quests of all the sistems, liking or disliking them.

With \"sistem\" I mean the class of quest, quest with player area, quests that can be done all times player want, etc.

EDIT: Huh, sorry for my bad english. English isn\'t my language, I learned it from forums and chats.

[RonHiler]

Originally posted by Dargerok
Ok, if we forgot the self-hiding problem, and we can do that don\'t being lag in the game, there is yet another problem.

If we need special quest areas for all the players in the game, and imagine they are 10000, this mean 10000 special areas. Or the world is really really big, or we won\'t can walk, because everything will be full of quest-areas. And the quest areas won\'t be in important sites, obviously. This mean we will have to walk hours for go to a non-visited area, where we can do our quest. This isn\'t fun. No city quests (I know you said this), no quests in important sites... not, not good. I preffer to wait a little for kill someone.

AO solved this issue by making everyone use the same doorway, but then giving them their own questspace once they went through the door.  So there is only one door that leads to 10000 private areas (well, not ONE door, but you get the idea).  This way, there won\'t be excessive quest entry areas all over the place.  Doesn\'t really work with the \"random location\" thing though.

Oh, and Ron:
Your sistem of choosable quests is good, I see one problem and I got one question.
Question: Could the players do all the quests of all sistems, or only the quests of one sistem, or only a limited number of quests?

Well, in my own head, I wasn\'t intending on limiting it in any way, you can do any quest you want as long as you have fullfilled the pre-requisites (talked to the right NSCs, gotten all the proper items, or whatever).

Problem: If the number of quests is limited, all players will do the quests with better rewards, not the quests of the sistem that they preffer.

This will happen no matter what system you use.  If quests give varying rewards, players will learn where the best rewards are and tend to congregate there.  Quests timers and one-time only quests will mitigate this somewhat, but not entirely eliminate it.

If the players can do all the quests, they will do all, and they will do quests of all the sistems, liking or disliking them.

Well, we come back to the ideas of A) having MANY quests such that any given player cannot do ALL of them for a long time, B) random quests, and C) quest prerequesites (must be a certain class or level, must have fullfilled other quests, talked to specific NSCs etc).

I don\'t see anything wrong with allowing the players to do whatever class of quest they feel like doing that day, I can\'t see any reason to limit them to just one type based on a menu selection

Ron

[Dargerok]

Oke, I like your AO sistem. (it have the little problem of self-hiding, but well, is the best sistem anyway).

I\'m agree also with not menu-choosing for quests.

You talked about 3 quest ideas (a, b, c).
Which do you think is the best? I like idea \"A\", it could be so fun, but it won\'t be too hard to make? A lot of work for PS team...

And, about B and C, they got problems.

B: If there are random quests, this mean also random rewards. Then, a lucky player got better rewards or easier quests than other. And, if the rewards change in each player, it lose some of fun, because you can think, for example, \"Wow, I am going to win a shadow sword when I complete this quest ^^\". And, also, rare quests rewards will got a high price, and usual quest rewards low price. All it bad for stable economy...

And C, do that each player can do only a very limited number of quests, and add another fact to choosing job. This mean, the job with best rewarded quests, many people will choose it.

If A option couldn\'t be for work problems, what about a B option, but quests giving ever the same reward?

[Seytra]

Originally posted by RonHiler
Well, I wasn\'t thinking about a menu selection.  My thought was that some quests are designed in each of the different manners we\'ve been talking about.  One quest would use questspace (I like that term, did you make that up Seytra?) and would be on a three month timer, another quest would be repeatable at a random location, another quest would be one time only at a constant location, and so on.

I think this would allow players to gravitate toward the types of quests they prefer.

Yes, I made it up, glad you like it!

As for the selection of the quest system to use: How would you implement it if not as menu selection (without hurting immersion)? How would the player know before accepting the quest?
OK, I didn`t think of giving the option of entirely differet systems (questspace, random, general-access, on-time, etc.), but only to choose whether or not the player wishes to have the quests in a questspace, essentially not changing the quest itself, only whether others will share it or not. The exact same quest, either in traditional MMORPG style or in questspace style.
Of course, if we add several different systems this choice would not suffice.

@ AO system: I also meant to have special entryways (mostly doors, perhabps scrolls, paintings, etc.), not entire areas but obviously I failed to get it accross.

I agree that it\'d most likely not work well with the randomisation idea, so randomised quests would not be inside questspaces, but as they are designed to be analternative to questspaces, they don\'t need to.

I think we all agree that option A): immense amount of different quests, is preferrable but also very hard to accomplish

Well, different quest rewards _are_ a problem. I strongly believe that there should be _almost zero_ special items to be gotten through quests (or any other way). The quests that _do_ have these items should be given to players only if they solved a number of prerequisite quests (that would be a tiny subset of the available ones, i.e. you need to solve 5 quest types (assassination, fed-ex, rescue, espionage, tournament), but of each type there are 1000 different ones available. Either you could randomly select wich ones will be prerequisites for any particular player, or all will equally do.
Not a perfect solution, though.

I mean, I _love_ special items, but that is also why I wish them to be _really_ scarce, no \"sword +1\" at all, only the \"enchanted sword of the shadows\", the \"singing sword of the dance\", etc. (and only exactly _one_ of each _in the entire game_).
Also, the quest, but maybe not the special reward should depend on what the player does (i.e., if it is an assassin who likes bows and also heals, whatever).
However, this would require much work, unless the special items are based on a general system that is flexible enough to give, say, 1000 unique items.

You know, I really _hated_ to find \"the sword of the ursurper\" (or whatever it was called) in a dungeon, only to be able to buy _a second one_ in the next shop I visited. Takes all joy out of getting seemingly unique items.

This would allow most quests to be rewarded fairly equally, making only the special ones a choice, which wouldn\'t hurt that much as they\'re going to be \"once in a RL year\" opportunities, making the reward valuable all by it\'s rarity alone (well, it should still be usable), abd the rarity of them makes balancing less hard as well. It would overcome the item inflation present on all computer RPGs that I know of.

[Harwen]

1) Weapons should only take \"Durability Damage\", that\'s degrade in shinyness and battleworthyness, when they strike critical hits. I mean, come on...

\"Jeez, my Scimitar of The Dark Dragon\'s Gizzard really took a beating from that Crazy Forest Hedgehog!\"

2) Npc\'s should only sell the most basic, most newbie-ish stuff... like bread...or the ingredients to make bread, or..maybe flint or scissors....whatever

3) Do not...I repeat in a nicer way, please do not make the point of the whole game to obtain a peice of armor, or a certain pair of golden-trimmed  underpants. ( I\'m looking at you runecrap)

4) The game would truly suck major eggs if it were littered with the remanents of someone\'s campfire, or someone\'s failed attempt at cooking....keep our virtual world clean! (again, looking at you runecrap)

5) Do not make me run 30+ miles back to the nearest town just to buy potions of \"oddly filling juice\". I would imagine most of us would be able to find a way to eat other than buying funny-smelling fruits from some greasy food vendor picking his nose with his +1 finger.

6) Hmm...oh yes, a map would be nice, a good map. Please. Because while I was running around Zone B4 I was suddenly killed by a giant field tapeworm, oh dear, what is one of those doing in Zone B4..., oh wait, this is zone 4B! The spawning ground of the Giant Field Tapeworms,...silly me.
 
7) This has been said before, many times I think...but a bad battle system that has me hitting at air in a poor attempt to make the purist RPG aspect of MMORPG seem all-too exciting. This includes swinging your sword like you were a Nutcracker with an eye-patch. Y-and uck.

Mommy, why can\'t that man bend his legs?? I\'d like to see a nice screenie of my friends and I enjoying a nice round of Ale at the tavern, hmm, yes and possibly sitting down. I\'d like to be able to sit on a chair proper.
I doubt many of us sit on our barstools crosslegged. So injun\' style won\'t cut it.

9) Ease of chat...no annoying button combo\'s to get into chat.

10) Ehem..../shout = /s.....*cough*

[rifft]

Yeah, it would be nice if could create aliases.

You know I\'ve been reading all about the problems these questing systems have, and how they are all seperate. But in my mind\'s eye, I see no reason for them to be seperate. Also about _questspace_ if you say get the quest with some party (random, not buddies) then you log off without finishing the quest. Then you log on, but the entire party doesn\'t have to log off at the same time. What would you do batman, what would you do? And to complicate matters even worse, what if you select another group of people to be in your party (not all of whom have the required pre-requisits). I mean we were riding along just fine on our shiny new bycicle, but someone just stuck a stick through our spokes.

Anyway, one way to resolve the issue woule be to split the quest at the moment you log off, so that when you log on next time, the quest remaines unchanged by the rest of the party which you had with you. If you invite other people to your quest, I don\'t think there is a problem, after you delt with the initial problem of loging on and loging off while questing with a party. Alternatively questspace quests could only exist for solo quests, so you would not be able to do those quests with your friends. Both have drawback, not entirely sure which would be better at this point, well I guess I\'ll leave you guys with this.