Quests: How to make them better

Aegoth

Hi everyone!

As one of Achaea's most prolific and experienced questors, I have been giving the system some thought

Right now, questing is way too obscure and misleading. I'm not really talking about figuring out quests after starting them, I'm talking about starting the quests themselves. How many quests are ignored or missed simply because there's absolutely no way to know how to start it, or if it even exists in the first place? To this end, I would like to ask the Admin to consider marking mobs who are quest givers, no matter the difficulty. Much like literally every other videogame/mmo has, this would allow us to actually explore and beat our heads against the quest brick walls you have so painstakingly created throughout the years. It will allow us to discover more about the deep and rich lore you've all written, and appreciate the thousands of hours of hard work you've put into the game. 

Any other ideas or suggestions or thoughts are always welcome!

I am a firm believer that quests should be a challenge, however I do not think that challenge should include where to start. Put those floating ?s on those mobs!

Dalran

I can say I personally would likely do quests more if I somehow knew so and so gave a quest versus going around and seeing if there are any quests to get. I currently like never do quests but if I knew there was one in an area i'd be much more likely to do it for sure.

Thaisen

I'm guessing that isn't the problem, but it would probably help. From what I have seen questing is kind of a love it or hate it thing in this game. I don't hate questing because I can't find them...I hate them because from my experience the way that difficulty has been ratcheted up is simply by making it an infuriating guessing game, which I personally don't find fun. But some people do, people like what they like.

Kog

To me, the issue with questing in Achaea was clarified by a quest-help script I found. It tries to tag every single word in a room description with the @item, then removes the first word it can't tag, and repeats until every. Single. Word. In the room desc is tested, to find hidden things to interact with.

Having to try to read the entire room desc, then guess which item- if any, because maybe I'm a moron and misunderstood the quest- is interactable, as well as HOW to interact with it- is a huge headache. Flagging quest-givers would give you a good hook to start the quest, but the issue of 'solving this quest is a bitch' remains.

Highlight the key word in-room, if any, maybe. OR just stop hiding items and let them sit there, visible on LOOK but not get-able. Like, if I remember 'hey the Great Rock has a cabinet just sitting around', then I know I need to play Guess the Syntax if it doesn't work, but if the Great Rock room desc mentions cabinet...how many other thousand rooms that also mention cabinets do I need to check if all the basic commands I think of don't work?

Tl;dr make me play Guess The Syntax OR Find The MacGuffin, not both, to make questing tolerable.

Torrent

The guess the syntaxes game is the most annoying thing about questing, especially if its in a phrase. This goes for room descriptions as well where you have to spam over 50 commands to try and get the right syntax to use an item or something in the room.  I agree with Aegoth that finding quests is a major problem, only from a RP standpoint. Greeting a denizen over 50 times just for then to offer the quest is a tad silly. I thing questing should be switched to a ask function, like ASK DENIZEN QUEST. It would remove the quessing game on which denizen has quests or not.

Sobriquet

I'd love to see quests that are not reliant on Mobs being alive in high footfall bashing areas.