Allow sharing quest solutions

Scarsung

This would make the quality of life of Achaea so much better for new players.

I'll just come out and say it.  The quest design in this game is bad.  Like, really, really bad.  Objectively bad.  Horribly bad.

And it's not like the devs don't know how to make good quests.  The quests in Minia are amazing.  You greet denizens, they tell you what they need or give obvious keywords.  There's lots to discover.

In every other zone, the quests are cryptically hidden.  Most of the time GREETing denizens does nothing.  Sometimes you have to ASK a specific keyword, sometimes you have to SAY it.

Sometimes you have to find an item and give it to a denizen without anything in the game giving you the slightest hint on what to do.

This is mostly coming from me trying to do the elemental lord quests, to give me a leg up to try to get Dragon.  And well.  I'm level 80, and the combat quests delete me from existence.  I have no chance.  So I try to do the non-combat quests.

And the non-combat quests?  Hoo boy.  One of them was to 'deploy guards.'  What does that even mean?  I go to the different guards in my plane, and try every keyword and synonym of DEPLOY.  ASK guard DEPLOY, ASK guard DEPLOYMENT, say DEPLOY, say DEPLOYMENT... all leads to nothing.  I do the same for the quest giver and it gives you not even the slightest hint on what to do.

Another was to find a document from an informant, with the only hint being it involves "making a wish".  What?  No really, that's what the quest is.  That's all you are given, period.  You aren't even given a general area on where to look.

A third quest involves giving the corpse of a jaguar to Rovalumm, to feed him.  With no hint on where the jaguar is found, or where Rovalumm is found.  I went everywhere in the Air Plane.  Can't find Rovalumm.

All of this... isn't immersive, it isn't roleplay.  Asking my citymates, they say, paraphrasing, "Yes, a lot of the quests in the end areas are difficult but we can't give any hints."

Why?

No really, why?  Isn't that the point of an multiplayer game?  Isn't that the point of a community?

Looking at HELP QUEST I see that it's strictly against the rules to provide quest help.  Why?
  
I'd understand if the quests were well-designed and intuitive, but they really, really aren't.  And, "Difficult"?  No, that's not what difficulty is.  A roguelike is difficult.  Dark Souls is difficult.  This is fighting magic syntax, and I guarantee you that most of the people who solve these quests have help-- they just aren't in channels monitored by the Achaea Gods/Devs.

And solving these quests?  There's no satisfaction.  I didn't step up to a difficult challenge or puzzle and figure it out.  There's no feeling of accomplishment.

It's more, after many minutes (or hours, or days) of trial and error, I finally stumbled on the correct Roberta Williams syntax of what the game wants me to say.  It's less of a feeling of accomplishment, and more a sense of relief that I can move on and actually play the game and not have to deal with syntax terror.

Just let people help each other with quests.  Allow veterans to give people the exact syntax they need to use, what they need to do, and where they need to go.  It would help the community, not hinder it.  It would allow cities to actually recruit and retain new members.  It would vastly improve the gameplay experience in every way.  There is literally no reason not to allow this.  Maybe if there were an artefact that gave quest solutions that cost 1k credits, and you wanted to lock down the sharing of those secrets, but that doesn't exist (if it did, I would buy it in a heartbeat; it would vastly improve my experience with the game)

Cooper

Some quests are easy, some quests are hard, and some quests are meant to be a significant challenge that take a lot of time to figure out. I've been frustrated with them too.

That being said, this post is asinine and not how you should attempt to interact with admin or other players. You have some major misunderstandings of quests and the rules around them.

Elemental Lord isn't a quest that should be done alone at level 80. It's an end-game quest for most people, or one that requires help from friends or a deep understanding of game mechanics to do before you're high level. They are also intended to be some of the hardest quests in the game because you essentially get a free class that doesn't require lessons to learn, and comes equipped with ~10,000 credits of artefacts. So yes, a quest with that massive of a reward is going to be exceedingly difficult and someone who has been playing the game for 17 days should not be able to complete it on their own.

To use your Dark Souls as a reference, your character has just beaten Margit in Stormveil and you're going straight to Leyndell to finish the main story.

Thray

In game design, there's difficult, and then there's frustrating.

A great example of a difficult quest would be, for example, go deep into this dungeon full of aggressive mobs and defeat this boss that has complex mechanics and needs teamwork, and requires multiple classes with different abilities to defeat.

A bad example of a difficult quest would be very vague information, and the expectation that you go to a specific area and find the exact syntax you need to finish the quest.  I might have long figured out what I have to do, but I can't actually complete the quest because I don't know the exact combination of words I need to do it.  That's not challenging and engaging, it's just frustrating.  It's poor game design.  I guarantee that the people solving these quests are getting outside 'illegal' help from someone else.

Jolyon

I gave up questing long ago; too much of a pain to figure out without help. 

There used to be websites and shared quest resources available that people used. 

It may open up more of the game to me but easier to just not do them. Additionally, there is some history there with text-based gaming and having to have the magic combo for quests, with many of them being complex. Some quest mechanics and magic combos I don't get how people figured out without insane trial and error. There is knowledge sharing, it just isn't public.

IMO, most people forget what it is like to be a new player and don't want "their" game changed unless it is how they want it. 

Ignore people saying "this isn't how you should talk to admins/devs for optimal results", do what you want. Admins/devs are going to do what they want anyway, it is actually their game. We're just optional customers. If it helps, they abandoned forums long ago, so they may not even read this thread.

Scarsung

Point-and-click adventure games are known for their great story and presentation.  They were notorious (as in highly disliked) for their vague, unintuitive puzzles.  Especially early parser-based ones.

A large issue is that there is no standardization on how quests are discovered.  Some mobs you greet, and they give you a quest.  Some you have to ASK specific keywords.  Some you have to SAY.  Some respond to both ASK and SAY.  Oftentimes you have to SAY a specific keyword to get a quest, and this keyword is never hinted at, anywhere in the zone.

It's apparent to me that quests were designed by different people with different philosophies and standards, and many of the designers... might have been good at other things, but they were not good at game design or fun quests.  They thought that being cryptic was a good thing.

Here's a great example.  In order to traverse the plane of air, you have to do something specific.  After reading related room descriptions, I got the impression that you needed to make a leap of faith.  So, I tried JUMP, JUMP NORTH, etc..  Finally I asked someone who happened to be in the area, and they told me the correct syntax.  I won't reveal it here because it's illegal and it shouldn't be.  The game should also give you more hints on the correct syntax to use.  This is just one example and one of the easier parts of the elemental lord quest series; the tip of the iceberg of the poor game design.

It's a great example because figuring out the correct syntax here is not challenging or immersive.  Figuring out that I had to make a leap of faith was fine and a good idea.  THAT was immersive.  But the implementation on figuring out the exact correct thing to say after I've pretty much solved the puzzle is not.

And hey, I could picture the quests being designed in such a way that you have to be late game and have a lot of knowledge about the world in order to do the elemental lord quests.  It gives you a free class with free abilities and free artifacts.  The quests should be difficult.  They could be nearly impossible without a group, and then cities could offer help to people who get involved in the community.   Difficult quests are not the problem.  Non-intuitive and immersive syntax is the problem.  Syntax is a limitation of the format, not an immersive feature.

Meloi

I don't really understand the issue you have with the complaint/request, Cooper.

Scars voiced their frustrations with how things are currently working in a good amount of areas/quests, and asked why the detail on not sharing quest solutions is handled the way it is, specifically because of their frustrations with the systems. Even better, they give us the reasoning behind -why- they are frustrated, how other areas have handled it better and such, which I think is much better than just coming in to call their complaint as a whole "stupid", they didn't just go "Quests are stupid", and I personally also don't think that fighting the syntax feels very nice.

As for the Elemental Lord quests, there are -loads- of them that are perfectly doable by yourself, even some tricky ones, if you know how to navigate and deal with spooky things well, most of em' aren't really "Difficult" by any definition either, and often involve saying or emoting something specific at something else in the game. Sometimes these are fine, but sometimes they genuinely get weird, very often you're just slightly off, so you stand there and repeat every single keyword you can imagine at a supposedly "living npc" and are torn out of the immersion.

For your Elden Ring comparison, I think the issue is that when you die, you can still point to why you've died, and usually this will be because you haven't reacted quickly enough, or messed up in some other usually obvious way, not because your controls suddenly change and you have to figure out how to attack again, or because an unmarked door was -actually- a real door.

Sadly fixing this in a more coherent, agreeable way would mean lots of work on said quests, to have some sort of HINT system, allowing people to share the info openly I think would help by putting that work on the players instead of the developers, but runs the problem of, well, turning quests into "Do this, that, and this, receive 5000 gold" bucket lists, kinda like what Quest Guides on the OSRS Wiki (Oldschool Runescape) look like. Personally speaking though, I feel like most of the Quests I've done did not -feel- very interesting, often feeling like menial work of some kind, where the only thing that I was actually caring about ended up -being- the reward, for stuff like that I think there's not much harm people essentially having "Guides" at hand, but I might not be in the majority with this.

In the future, I think an important thing would be to follow a design sheet when making a new Quest, so that people can easily look over it during development and see where potential issues might lie, weird syntax and such, ideally with standardized terms? Another suggestion would be quests that you maybe do once a week or month, but that are bigger in scale? Those you then disallow the "Quest Guides" for, perhaps, since you can put a bigger weight on their narratives.

That's uhh, all from me though, let's all be nice to each other, yeah?