[MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[msew]

At 21:47 12/11/2000 -0800, Madrona Tree wrote:

> - Players should not be able to find the Items that Hasten needs
> without talking to him first and setting the flag.  Otherwise, folks
> will do quests out of order, which contributes to the camping
> problem, and which, btw, completely cheapens them.  I camped the
> Lens in [was it Runnyeye?] for about 4 hours because somebody had
> told me that if I did so, I could take the lens to some gnome and
> get a kewl staff.  I only went to talk to the gnome *after* my party
> had gotten their fill of lenses.

ok so now all quests are just N+1 steps long (+1 being the talking to
the guy to receive the quest).

Also with the above you have a really hard problem to solve:

Players A and B kill the AC.

Player A talked to Hasten.
Player B did not.

Player B looks in the corpse.

Player B tells the group:  "nothing there cept cyclops toes"

Player A and Player B decide to give up as it has been 10 hours and start 
to leave the zone.

*3 mins later*

Player C shouts:  "WOW I just got the AC ring off a corpse here!!! WOO 
WOO"   (Player C had talked to hasten.)


Further, it makes zero sense for someone not to see items while others
can based on whom they talked to.  Now while maybe this works for the
uber divine quests where people are looking for holy relics and what
not, but making some people see fire beetle eyes and others not is
pretty sketchy.


I think you CAN do something along the lines of: Player talks to rogue
in the jail.  Rogue tells that player: "I buried the treasure at
location x, y, z" and the game engine puts treasure at that location
for some number of minutes (ie we don't want the server to be loaded
down with a billion entries for buried stuff that no one ever digs up
:-), and also we can assume that if the rogue told the character he
told someone else or someone overheard or saw him burying the
goodies).

Or you can do something along the lines of: Wizard gives the player
specific instructions on the ritual they must do when cutting off the
ears of the AC to get the jboots.


The idea is the same as above but the implementation is different.  I
just don't think determining which items drop off a mob based on who
kills it, loots it, looks in the corpse makes sense.  But when you are
doing something specific to that mob based off some ritual to be
performed and what not that seems reasonable that a player would not
know ahead of time how to get the items.  (ie i return with the ears
cut off of the AC.  Hasten tells me: sorry bud, to make the jboots for
you I need ears done this way! *hands you ritual scroll*



As to "cheapens them" that is totally subjective :-) For the Achiever
archetype, the actual steps and the "story" and "plot" behind the
quest are pointless.  Only the reward matters.

Now if the "plot" of the quest actually affected the game state in
some way then it might matter, but as most quest systems don't do that
and just tell the tale of "some farmer losing his daughter to the
trolls and if you get back her bones he would be so ever grateful" it
just doesn't really matter in the long run of the game.  (if those
plot lines and stories actually did then it would be a different
matter)



Also as a tangent, most of the "common" quests that exist out there
(in EQ) are just a waste of time.  A player is better off killing mobs
and getting the rewards from that than spending the time doing the
quest.  Unless the quest system makes quests equal to what a player
gets from normal adventuring, then they are just extra chaff.


It would be interesting to do something along the lines of:


The Sword of Doom should take someone 12 hours of camping to get.  (ie
2 swords enters the game every day) The casual gamer will NEVER get
the Sword Of Doom from adventuring for it. And it will take a bit of
time for enough swords to trickle down in the economy for them to
trade for it.


enter quests: To get a Sword Of Doom via quests you have to do at
least 12 1 hour quests.  The casual gamer then is able to play for his
5 or 6 hours a week (if that) and be able to get his very own Sword of
Doom.  (NOTE: probably would want to increase the time for a quest
based version of the sword as the risks would probably not be the
same.)



I think the next generation of MMP games need to figure out how to
involve the casual gamer in the community and in the world (giving
them powerful items which they can get themselves and not have to buy)
while keeping the powergamers from feeling they are getting the shaft
since that guy who plays 12 hours a week has almost equal gear and lvl
to them when they are playing 40+ hours a week.


msew

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