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Hi Everyone ...
Some good discussions have taken place recently on the Official Forum (what,
you don't read it? C'mon!) that have lead me to believe we might have the
interest in the community to take on something that has been needed on the
donut for many years - quest reform!
Considering the issue, and doing research into what has been proposed and
discussed in the past, I've come up with the following proposal, which I'd
like to put forward. I've shown it to Cotillion, who has also been interested
in getting rid of brutality for a long time, and gotten thoughts from various
other wizards and players. I'll toss it out to the community now to digest
and consider. Below the proposal, I'll outline some things that will be
needed to get this going.
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Quest Revision Proposal
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I. Commission a team of experienced questers (who do not necessarily
need to be wizards) to go through each quest, by domain, using the
orbs as a reference, and produce:
A. A list of design improvements needed to address issues of:
1. Syntax
2. Sufficient clues needed to solve
3. Disruption potential (can it be ruined?)
4. Availablility (once per Arma = problem)
5. Exclusivity (ideally, all players have access)
6. Death Traps (justifiable, but RARELY)
7. Variable reward (penalizing players because they
didn't do it "right" is just maddening)
B. Up-to-date solution (runthrough) documentation for each quest
once implementation of the above improvemens has transpired.
These will not be made public, but are important to have on-
hand for wizard reference.
C. A suggestion for the correct amount of qxp reward based on
some global rubric. A well-considered rubric has been
developed by Tapakah at: /w/gorboth/open/qxp_rubric.txt
Nota Bene: It will be necessary to share wiz-info with players
on this team to achieve certain goals, which will be
considered acceptable for the greater good.
II. Commission a team of wizards to implement the design changes needed
for each quest.
III. Create an AoE module that stores the correct amount of qxp that has
been awarded to any player (by name) for events.
IV. Change game design to remove entirety of a player's qxp at logout.
V. Expand quest-orb tech to:
A. Store revised qxp reward amounts for each quest.
B. When a player logs in:
1. Check their quest bits for each domain
2. Add qxp for each solved quest.
3. Add qxp based on the AoE event module.
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This design has many implications. Among them:
- Equality is achieved among old and new players in that rewards for
quests that no longer exist are removed, and unequal amounts based
on modifiers of the past no longer persist.
- A new modifier that we choose to apply would affect all players,
not just for those quests they do in the future, but also those
they have done in the past.
- Quests could become a true alternative to grinding, becoming
worth vastly more than they are currently. There would be no
need for a cap to qxp.
- We could remove brutality.
- Potential exists (though would need to be thought through) of the
ability to transfer solution of quests between officially registered
alts. In this way, players who dislike questing could benefit from
having done them on one character, and having the chance to
transfer that accomplishment to others, perhaps as a reward for
time spent in the game, or some other incentive-builder.
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Submitted September, 2014, by Gorboth
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This proposal addresses a few major issues that I see as problems, and that
many people complain about.
Firstly, quest experience currently functions in one primary way - it limits
the amount of combat experience you recieve based on brutality. If you don't
have enough quests, you much more quickly experience the soft cap and stop
feeling growth without tons of combat effort. Quests should not be mandatory.
Rather, they should be an alternative option for serious growth for those
people who do not enjoy *only* growing through the combat grind. The above
changes would allow us to disconnect questing and grinding entirely, so that
quests are no longer mandatory, but could be considered a fun and exciting
way to gain size in their own right. This would involve making them worth
MUCH more exp than they are now.
Secondly, quests are really inconsistent throughout the game in terms of
their quality and their rewards. The game has many, many truly wonderful
quests that are creative achievements that the game and their creators can
be proud of. The game also has many stupid, poorly-designed quests which
are either completely impossible without hints, or easily rendered unsolvable
by other players messing up the pieces, or the game not resetting them
properly. These sorts of quality issues deserve to be addressed, bringing
quests throughout the game to a higher standard of excellence that players
can enjoy. Also, we should not have some quests that are very easy to solve
be worth a ton of exp, and some that are dreadfully hard to solve be worth
relatively little. We need to go through them all and apply the same metric
for reward.
These two main issues are what I'd like to see solved with this effort. To
make it happen, we will first need to see interest from the player community.
I will wait to hear from people who know the quests like the back of their
hand. This sort of thing will take effort on the part of many people. We do
not have many people as wizards, and this has to start with players. If we
get this right, it can make a huge difference for the game, going forward, so
I invite you to seriously consider throwing your hat in the ring.
Once I hear from enough players (I'd like 5-10) will form a team and assign
roles to get it started. It will then be up to that team to tackle item #I
in the proposal above. That is the lion's share of the work, truth be told.
Once that has been done, it is relatively simple for a wizard to step in and
implement the changes that have been discussed and agreed upon by the team.
So ... if you like what you read above, then please contact me if you have
the knowledge, interest, and availability in being part of the process.
Thanks!
G.