[MUD-Dev] Player generated quests

[Alex Chacha]

wcoles at reflectionsinteractive.com wrote:

> Just throwing this out (partially as an extension to the previous
> discussion about fed-ex quests). Although I'm sure it's not a new
> idea. Giving players the ability to provide quests for each other
> and provide experience gains for completion.

This leaves a huge hole for exploits unfortunately.  There is
nothing preventing someone from leveling one account, then on
another machine starting another account and giving quests to the
lower level which are trivial for huge xp gain.  Minimal xp gain for
a high level player is a gigantic gain for a low level player, and
vice versa.  Anytime you have one player transferring anything to
another player, first thought should be how will this system get
abused, because it can and it will as soon as you introduce it, that
is the nature of the many users unfortunately.

Another option is obviously to have "trusted" players that give out
quests, but this involves validating people and checking that they
stay "trusted" and don't abuse the power, which is an obvious
overhead, and may be unreasonable in larger games.

Sorry to be so negative, but users find even the tiniest exploits or
holes and abuse them, which may possibly damage the balance and
economy of the world.

One thing that may work is to define what are all items of currency
and use that to "buy" quests that can be given out.  If you view xp
as currency then it will work but you probably don't want currency
to have more properties than just value (like leveling, skill
points, class abilities), because that will make balancing it that
much harder.

You can allow players to create quests which will yield currency for
completing a task, the cost of such a quest must outweigh the
reward.  For example: To gather 3 balls of fungus and 2 broken vines
will yield 1000xp and 50 gold (both deemed to represent currency in
this example), while the quest costs 1000 gold to create. 1000 gold
may be pocket change for a high level, but 1000xp and 50 gold is a
lot for a low level player; the task of gathering the items may be
time consuming for the high level player, but part of normal hunting
for a low level one. This will allow higher level players to help
lower level players at the same time gather the items them may
need. Does that make sense?
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