Quest list idea in WoW

[ketsui]

In an old rpg I used to play quests were given points and a 'top quester list' was posted in the town showing the top 'questers' by point ranking. Hopefully something like that or at least a completed list is in WoW. Anyone else think that would be an interested way to compete with fellow players?

In that RPG I played it was fun to kill other players but when I got bored of that I'd work on questing to compete with the players who preferred thinking over player killing.

Competing with both types of players was entertaining. Hopefully WoW will get something like this so players can compete in various aspects of their characters besides hp/ac and gear.

Ketsui

[Jait]

AC2 only redeeming feature is exactly what you mention. Though they add more each month there is a limit.

What you're talking about reminds me of a few good MUD's, a system that ProgressQuest spoofs. Personally I think it's a great idea, especially when it's tied in to different catagories with different rewards. Quests for local/regional/kingdom faction along with all your generic fare of quests.

Someday I'd like to see a mmorpg branch out into minigames. Imagine a Norrath with Fooziball, a zone with hockey-like game in which Tanks make up the blockers, Rangers and Druids are Recievers. Or even a Gladitorial Arena with a running script allowing players to sign up and be sorted according to level then given the option of being summoned when their scheduled turn was up.

Well, someone creative can think of something. But without becoming "SimQuest", there should be ways to compete beyond the obvious Fantasy goals, loot, loot, and oh yeah, loot.

[Furor Planedefiler]

Originally posted by ketsui
In an old rpg I used to play quests were given points and a 'top quester list' was posted in the town showing the top 'questers' by point ranking. Hopefully something like that or at least a completed list is in WoW. Anyone else think that would be an interested way to compete with fellow players?

In that RPG I played it was fun to kill other players but when I got bored of that I'd work on questing to compete with the players who preferred thinking over player killing.

Competing with both types of players was entertaining. Hopefully WoW will get something like this so players can compete in various aspects of their characters besides hp/ac and gear.

Ketsui

Have you had a chance to play World of Warcraft yet, Ketsui? The reason I ask is because most alpha/beta testers would probably tell you that something like this really would have no place in the game. Additionally, any kind of 'rivalry' dynamic won't make itself known until the game is completely fleshed out, raid and pvp content put in place, etc... I am quite certain that when these things happen, you will have more than your fair share of the MMORG competition paradigm. So much so that you may even feel overwhelmed.

*To further clarify: Quests are not designed to frustrate players or push them into some form of pseudo inter/intra-realm rivalry. Quests are designed with the philosophy to give players something to do other than grinding while often times (heck, always) showing them the gameworld (the storyline, areas, et al) and the creatures/NPCs that inhabit and bring said gameworld to life. I am certain that there will be some very difficult and involved quests but forcing player competition for these quests is probably the last thing on a designer's mind - even passively. It MAY happen but that's a function of player mentality and not game design - and don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just something not taken into consideration (and often times avoided completely) in a world that will no doubt have over thousands and thousands of quests upon release.

Lastly, the reason a system like this may have worked and even been seen as 'fun' in other games is due solely to the fact that said games were not built up on a foundation of questing but instead they (quests) were seen as an 'aside,' or something extra for the player to accomplish.

[Thug]

I have to say I agree with Furor here. Rankings, especially point based ones really have no place in a RPG game.

Aside from the competition it breeds it will sometimes also limit what some players are willing to try in the game. EQ currently has a ranking system for the LDoN adventures and there have been times where some members of the group wanted to try a "hard" rated adventure but some members did not because they did not want to take the risk of a loss and lose their 100% success rate.

It also made people more picky with who they grouped with because having a cleric or enchanter in the group whos not really known for being all that attentive would risk the groups success in the adventure.

I do agree that it would somewhat be nice to see maybe a list nailed to a tree of some of the top players in all the lands of but time available to play the game is not a real good metric when it comes to determining how skilled a player is (If MMOG's even require skill to begin with, but thats a different topic for a different day) as time invested is really what these rankings tend to indicate.

Perhaps I'm just biased due to EQ's implementation of it and I'd love to hear ideas about systems where they did not rely on the above as a basis for scoring.

Lastly, I really think that describing the "quests" in WoW as quests is a bit of a misnomer. I think the word tasks would be more fitting as anything along the lines of collect 12 of X or kill 15 of Y can hardly be referred to as a quest. This goes for other MMOG's as well.

-=[ Thug ]=-

[ketsui]

Originally posted by Furor Planedefiler
Have you had a chance to play World of Warcraft yet, Ketsui? The reason I ask is because most alpha/beta testers would probably tell you that something like this really would have no place in the game. Additionally, any kind of 'rivalry' dynamic won't make itself known until the game is completely fleshed out, raid and pvp content put in place, etc... I am quite certain that when these things happen, you will have more than your fair share of the MMORG competition paradigm. So much so that you may even feel overwhelmed.

*To further clarify: Quests are not designed to frustrate players or push them into some form of pseudo inter/intra-realm rivalry. Quests are designed with the philosophy to give players something to do other than grinding while often times (heck, always) showing them the gameworld (the storyline, areas, et al) and the creatures/NPCs that inhabit and bring said gameworld to life. I am certain that there will be some very difficult and involved quests but forcing player competition for these quests is probably the last thing on a designer's mind - even passively. It MAY happen but that's a function of player mentality and not game design - and don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just something not taken into consideration (and often times avoided completely) in a world that will no doubt have over thousands and thousands of quests upon release.

Lastly, the reason a system like this may have worked and even been seen as 'fun' in other games is due solely to the fact that said games were not built up on a foundation of questing but instead they (quests) were seen as an 'aside,' or something extra for the player to accomplish.

I haven't had a chance to play the Alpha or Beta yet. I guess i'm looking for a reason to complete low level quests at a higher level. What do you do when you stumble upon a level 10 quest at your level 30? do you do it for the fun of it? or ignore it and leave it uncompleted in your log?

Ketsui

[Balek]

I use the abandon quest button for low level quests usually, but I like to keep a organized quest log. Most of the newb quests take a whopping 10-20 minutes so for the anal retentive freak (which I can be sometimes) it really isnt hard to pound out newb quests.

It would be nice if they implemented something like the silver exclimation mark for lower quests too. Like silver for quests 1-5 levels higher then your level. Yellow for your level to 5 levels lower. Blue for 6-10 levels below, and just make quests 10+ levels below you unavailable. Maybe they have something like this already but when I traveled to the human newb area I was bombarded with newb quests on my 16 rogue (maybe 16 was still to low for the newb quests to dissappear).

[Lenardo]

orange = quest in your level range
silver = quest higher in level range (3 or less i believe)
green = flight route guy
blue - binder(spirit healers now though no arrow present) (nolonger active since they did away with binding)

if the quest is REAL low level compared to you, there is not an arrow currently

with no binding anymore blue would be an option...

[Jait]

Originally posted by Thug
[b]I have to say I agree with Furor here. Rankings, especially point based ones really have no place in a RPG game.

Well there goes half the RPGs out there that keep score. Role playing and Fantasy are two different things bucko. And many RPGs keep score, even Fantasy ones. Of course screw all that Tolkien, Salvatore fiction about party members keeping count of their kills. That has no place in your Universe. Even Wizardry, Might and Magic, Final Fantasy, etc... kept score.

Aside from the competition it breeds it will sometimes also limit what some players are willing to try in the game.

No one said anything about limiting anything. It's about having a list to see what you've done in this game and nothing to hinder you from the personal achievement of finishing every quest you want to. You can't automatically start blaming the players for a system that doesent even exist. You work for SOE by any chance?

Many RPGs, especially CRPGs keep track of every quest, every major kill, even occassionally building/generating entire journals off this.

You can go look through your characters history and see you killed Foozle on May 11th, and Foozles mother on June 12th.

EQ currently has a ranking system for the LDoN adventures and there have been times where some members of the group wanted to try a "hard" rated adventure but some members did not because they did not want to take the risk of a loss and lose their 100% success rate.

It also made people more picky with who they grouped with because having a cleric or enchanter in the group whos not really known for being all that attentive would risk the groups success in the adventure.

Everyone blames the player and not the developers. Gotta love it. Seriously, this is about concept, not about past implementations.

If EQ added a list to everyones character showing all your quests that you had completed and at the bottom of that list it says.

1239/12365 Quests completed
800/5000 Antonica
100/2200 Kunark

etc...etc..

You guys looking at this as something you *HAVE* to do, should've used the same arguement in Tradeskills. There's quite a few people trying to complete every tradeskill there is, but no one whines about being *forced* to do it. Or how there is a competition where none should exist.

If you don't want it, ignore it. It's there for everyone else.

[ketsui]

Originally posted by Jait
If EQ added a list to everyones character showing all your quests that you had completed and at the bottom of that list it says.

1239/12365 Quests completed
800/5000 Antonica
100/2200 Kunark

etc...etc..

You guys looking at this as something you *HAVE* to do, should've used the same arguement in Tradeskills. There's quite a few people trying to complete every tradeskill there is, but no one whines about being *forced* to do it. Or how there is a competition where none should exist.

If you don't want it, ignore it. It's there for everyone else.

This is exactly what I'm talking about, the reason it wasn't really something I felt that belonged in EQ was because quests could be done infinitely in that game and half the damn quests didn't work. If such a list did exist I'd have something to do to occupy my time when not 'hunting for phat lewts'. Even if the list was only able to be seen by ones self.

This would also be a way to keep players occupied besides character development.

Ketsui

[Tuco]

I heard from a friend that when one approaches a much higher level than the recommended quest level, the NPC lacks an exclamation point over his head, or something similar.

I hope this is changed for two reasons:

1. For those who quest for the fun of the adventure rather than the gain of the end, this impedes their ability to complete quests for fun.

2. Most importantly, certain newbie quests open up higher level quests.

(As for the ranking thing, I hope there's a way to log all incoming text into a file so I can record 'everything' my character does, especially quests done, and how many mobs I've killed, if I have a 10mb file I can program a parser and make it do all sorts of fun stuff)

[Immy]

Well this brings up another issue. How many quests in WoW are "sequential" in nature? Meaning, you start the quest at level 10, then the quest continues at level 15 at another point...then at level 20 there's another addition to the quest.

Example, level 5 you kill a bunch of bandits, level 15 you kill the bandit boss in another area, then level 25 you goto the bandits den and kill the big bad boss banana bandit, so on and so forth.

Now say I'm new to the area where the bandit quests starts, and I'm level 25. Would I even be able to do this quest? Will I start with the level 25 portion of the quest? Or will the entire quest be unavailable to me since I'm too high level to start it from the first tier (level 5)?

[Tuco]

Ideally in my mind it should either start you off at the level 5 quest, or allow you the choice to do the level 5, level 15, and level 25 quests, if you were level 25(and only give you the option to do the level 5 and 15 quests if you were 15, etc)