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

[Vincent Archer]

According to rayzam:

> What do you consider a multiplayer world quest then?

In a largeish multiplayer world, you can't have Quests for everyone.

By Quest (uppercase Q), I refer to the kind that yield a "prestige"
reward. A fairly powerful object, a title, something out of the
ordinary.

It all boils down to content. If you want a prestige reward, you
usually have to put down a puzzle of some kind to solve. Once solved,
it always spread all over (specially on parallel worlds, like the
UO/EQ/AC shards), and people can solve it again. So, you want a non
repeatable puzzle (and possibly a unique reward).

It can be hand-designed or automatically generated. I have yet to see
an automatic puzzle generator that creates anything more than highly
simplistic puzzles.

So it boils down to hand-designing your quest. Then, you face a
problem: how many story designers do you have, vs players. Usually,
too few. It ends up with unique quests, but only one person out of 50
will ever have the opportunity to engage in it.

So, what can you do?

You can have tasks. Merchant X requires a weekly (game-time) trip to
his subsidiary store to arrange some business matters and hires a few
bodyguards (UO "quests": protect NPC to its destination). FedEx
duties.

You can have events. Border village is near the sea, and every once in
a while (at random intervals), when enough players are in the area, a
band of roving pirates (suitably scaled) come in, and you have to
defend the village.

You can have initiations. Player is not "considered" a full scale
sorcerer, until he has walked the maze (in medieval sense, i.e. a
linear but convoluted path that brings you to an inner sanctum).

But, if you want a quest to yeild a prestige reward, it cannot be
repeatable, which means it boils down to content production: can you
design (and test) the quest story fast enough for every player of your
game to have a chance at the quest of his life? Usually, you cannot.

The same applies of course to quest that shape the world. Asheron's
Call is a good example of that. A few quest/events shape the world
(well, it's all predestined anyway, but let's suppose that). But
Turbine can design and implement about one such epic quest a month,
and most players have about 0 chance of being involved in that
quest. They hear about it, but can't be actors.

> solving them. Figuring out the puzzles, doing the deed. You can get
> players who won't tell that information because solving it meant
> something to them. You can have players who enjoy it from the rp

That breaks down when you get large population, of course. Secrecy
works as long as *everyone* agrees to it. As your population that
"knows" the secret grows, the probability that at least *one* person
will spill the beans grows also toward unity.

--
Vincent Archer                                         Email: archer at nevrax.com

Nevrax France.                              Off on the yellow brick road we go!
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