Make all quests visible

Jhulavdra

Listed by name and region. Details can be unlocked when you activate the quest. I don't quest because, for one, it seems a poor return for the amount of work involved (I could easily make tons of gold and buy credits by hunting or fishing), and, two, because I don't even know where they are or how to activate them a lot of the time. If I had a list and knew that there were, for example, 10 quests in Tir Murann, I'd work much harder to find them and complete them. But, if I have no idea how many quests are even in a region, I don't have any desire to spend countless hours trying to say the right word or enter the right command to activate them.

Idea 459 -- please vote and let me know what you think.

Thaisen

Yeah, if you don't have the patience and persistence to find quests, you likely won't be completing them, just telling the truth. From what I've seen it seems to be either a love it or hate it activity. Some people love puzzling out solutions and then others (like me) get pissed after like 5 minutes and kill every moving denizen in the area.

Jhulavdra

You don't think that having a QUEST LIST <area> would at all increase the likelihood of people completing quests?

Accipiter

Quests are one of those weird things where they can't have a decent reward because once you know how they work there is very little way to make them hard. Voyages having a large time component baked it is the only way they work.

I personally would prefer quests to be able to be shared simply because I would like to be able to learn the lore but I have no patience in trying every emote in every room in a area to try to get to the next step, but I understand why they aren't.

Taryius

QUEST LOG <area>

QUEST LOG COMPLETED <area>

Lots of your suggestions are already in the game. While I agree the rewards for most quests are lackluster, part of the fun is exploring the area and denizens enough to learn how to find all the quests, and you'll already find 90% of them by just greeting denizens and asking for quests.

Minifie

I am not against some, or most areas having a few quests in QUEST LOG area having some information for a few starter quests, or direction. Not any walk throughs, but for, say, forestwatch:

 The buckawn lord and witchdoctor lead cruel forays against their mortal enemies: the dryads. Seek to assist these foul creatures, or end their reign of cruelty?

Something akin to this for a light direction for quests. Some lore gives it aeay, but some others it is just a poke and hope. 

Astarod

Minifie said:

I am not against some, or most areas having a few quests in QUEST LOG area having some information for a few starter quests, or direction. Not any walk throughs, but for, say, forestwatch:

 The buckawn lord and witchdoctor lead cruel forays against their mortal enemies: the dryads. Seek to assist these foul creatures, or end their reign of cruelty?

Something akin to this for a light direction for quests. Some lore gives it aeay, but some others it is just a poke and hope. 

That'd be a great idea, honestly. Though it's kind of already used in the adventurer's journal talisman so theoretically they could lose money because of it, so it might not get implemented. 

Iocun

No. Please don't add even more things that do away with immersion in favour of mechanical convenience.

Quests don't need to be things with great rewards and great convenience. We have tons of things that give good rewards already, so just keep doing those. Quests are for delving deeper into Achaea, exploring, learning about your surroundings by actually interacting with rooms and denizens and thus feeling as a part of an actual world. Any sort of OOC information repository strongly detracts from this and the more we emphasize it in favour of a completionist playstyle, the more we lose in flavour.

That's why even @Minifie's suggestion goes too far, in my opinion.

I agree that there are some "unfair" quests, where there simply aren't enough in-game hints for you to find the right obscure command or "password" to use - but the solution here is simply to redesign these quests by adding such in-game hints. But it doesn't need to be easy. Sure, spending weeks to figure out a quest that gives little reward isn't for everybody, but it can still be incredibly rewarding for those who stick to it.

You may say that all the developer's quest-writing time is going to waste if only very few people actually do them, but I don't think that's true. Their careful quest-writing is going much more to waste if people just plough through them without even noticing the subtle hints and connections the writer may have left for you to discover.

Reyson

If quests were difficult, that'd be one thing. But quests being undoable without someone else telling you the answers is more common than not, where Yggdrasil and honours quests are concerned. Add to that mechanical issues like keywords being wonky, random things that make the quest undoable/unsolvable for reasons outside of your control, etc., and it proves itself to be a pretty deficient system. 

How many people can you recall have had a lot of fun spending weeks figuring out a quest? In all my time of playing Achaea, I've known maybe... what, twenty serious questers? If that? 

Twenty. In fifteen years. 

Iocun

And people would have more fun if given a (partial) solution? If quests aren't solvable, then they need to be made solvable. That's the only fix that makes sense. Anything else helps nothing for making quests fun and only serves to make them an XP/gold farming tool.

Austere

Alternate point of view:

I enjoy incredibly difficult questing. Caer is one of my crowning achievements in Achaea and the build up to finishing it was some of the most fun Ive ever had in Achaea.  Waterlord(I was second, iirc) was equally challenging and gave me a reason to want to login.  @Veldrin actually gave me a run through on how he thought the "drug" part worked, but beyond that, It was very much a solo task. Logging in early, throwing myself at a single goal with a noticeable reward? Count me in. 

If you take either of the above, dumb them down or hand out solutions(one is probably already there), it detracts any sort of enjoyment I would get from it, and instead turns it into a "grind until you get there". The adventure means more to me, personally, even if it can be frustrating at times.  

Shirszae

I like difficult quests too. A lot. But genuinely difficult quests. Not quests where the chief difficulty is guess the keyword. That's really my main annoyance with many quests in the game. 

Rackham

Seeking a draconic wizard, or a metallic beach, makes me feel good for exploring and knowing these things.

The correct method with which to tickle a flower, not so much.

Jhulavdra

I apologize for just getting back to this.

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding here. My original suggestion was to have a list of all quests. Just a list. I don't care if the quests are difficult or not, I just want to know that they are there. I don't want to greet every denizen with a name because they -may- have a quest associated with them. I will not try. I don't care to play guess the keyword. It's a bad use of time and it breaks immersion walking around saying "quest, quest, quest, quest..." to everyone. 

Now, if I know there is a quest in a certain area and that I'm not wasting my time, I'll happily work on it. This is not so different from many other games. You get a quest listed and you figure out how to complete it. The point is, you have to know there is a quest in the first place. How is that detracting from anything?

Those of you who figured out quests on your own, good on ya. For me, personally, almost every quest I've ever done came from someone essentially giving it away. That just seems like bad policy/opportunity for quality of life upgrades.

Thaisen

Yeah, this exists....700 credits in Delos

Keorin

The elemental lord quests have their start very well advertised, have how to get into the planes hinted, and who you need to talk to hinted at. At the same time, no one would say that these quests are easy at all.

I think there's two separate problems. There's quests that are just plain too weird to solve, which should be addressed. But I think that for people who want to get into questing and have a hard time (a situation I've been in) -some- hints in -some- areas could help newer people at least give things a try.

Iocun

Sure, but what's so different about the difficulties of getting a quest started and the difficulties of continuing in said quests?

If you hate "guessing the keyword", then there's usually much more key-word guessing involved during the quest than for starting it, so that doesn't seem like a good argument.

If you feel it breaks immersion to greet everyone in an area and say "quest", then first, you absolutely don't have to do that. I don't greet everyone in a new area. I greet some people and ask them for work if I feel like it, but I don't do it for everyone. And if just brute-forcing greet/say quest throughout the area is your way of going about quests, then this will be your way of going through the rest of the quest as well, so if the first makes you lose your immersion, your immersion is going to be ruined anyways, due to your own choices.

I really don't see how this does anything but cater to a completionist playstyle, to help you check off all the quests in a given area then move on.