Chanele wrote:Drazson wrote:The quest where you are asked to return a clan standard from a minotaur chieftain near Solace is supposed to have a "full" completion, a lesser one, and a third option is to complete it at another person than the questgiver.
Wonder who's responsible for that one;-)
It's easy to say that the exp is negligible.... this sounds like än easy fix...even backlogs with compensation should be warrant for.
Just like the statement that the xp modifier was Only for a selective few and hardly anyone who benefit still plays...i call bull#$@$@ when i hear it.
I've always said the best solution is to fix the quests. But until that happens, I think it's good for everyone to know the amount of quest XP you risk losing isn't that big, since there aren't that many of those quests (I think!), and most players will do them "right" anyway, especially since most solutions include all steps, and some even warn you about not doing certain steps yourself. Many quests also stop you from solving it, and lets you try again later, in case you for example just found some quest item on the floor, and never did the parts in the quests. I think there may be a couple of quests where you are required to kill something, where need to be part of the fight. There is even rumoured to be at least one quest where you need to land the killing blow, but I am not sure if that is true or not. But we're not talking about a lot of quests here. So yeah, in the big picture I think the XP you risk losing is pretty negligible.
When it comes to the Toron standard quest, which I made many years ago, the NPC makes it extremely clear to you when you turn in the standard if you risk losing XP. If you try to turn the the standard in without the case, he will tell you to confirm that you accept less than full XP, or you can go out and find the case for a full reward. You decide. He does the same if you haven't completed the quest yourself and just found the standard somewhere. Again, you get to confirm the smaller reward, or redo the quest and do it "right". So if players end up with a smaller reward on that quest, they chose it themselves. And if they decided to not even read that the NPC said to them, (he says it twice), well, we what can you do. At some point players need to take some responsibility for their actions too.
Now, I made this quest as a newbie wizard many years ago, when the Krynn standard was to do quests like this. I am now generally against these types of quests, but at least the Toron standard quest gives you a choice. I think it's worse when you don't even know you get less XP, or what you did wrong. That said, if I would recode the quest from scratch I would make it so you can't even get the reward unless you have both the standard and the case, and you did all steps yourself. That would eliminate any potential problems, and in a perfect world that's how I think all quests should function.
Now, recoding the majority of all 300+ quests is... well, a daunting project to say the least. Fixing up the ones with variable rewards should in theory be easier, like you said, but probably not as easy as you think. The main issue here I think is identifying them, since you'd have to dig through the code for ALL quests in the game. Code from hundreds of different wizards spread over thousands of files in all domains, some commented and readable, some just huge uncommented files with tons of code in them. It's easy to spend 5 minutes writing a reply here saying you think it's an easy fix. But are you willing to spend the amount of time needed to fix it? If anyone volunteers, they will surely be taken serious in their request.
As for compensating players, that's pretty impossible since all we can see is who did a quest. Not how big of a reward they got. It's not possible under the current system. We've talked about this many times before here on the forums, and upstairs too, and the only way to make that happen is to redo the entire quest system, redo the rewards, and redo the QXP for all players. Doing this could also fix the XP multiplier issue. This project was once started, but didn't really get far, and it has not been restarted due to lack of interested wizards to take it on.
As for the current XP multiplier fix, it was always a band-aid solution, that at least evens out the advantage a bit. Nobody has said it removes the advantage completely, but until someone decides to redo the quest system, I think that's the best we can hope for. Or what solution do you propose?