Competitive Daily Quests are a Pain: Wrothgar Edition

VaranisArano

This is a recurrent complaint with most Events when everyone and their mother swarms a single zone and runs all the dailies, but I think it bears repeating.

Devs, designing your dailies so that players have to compete with each other for limited quest resources is a pain. Anytime that players need to get item(s), but only one player can obtain it and everyone else has to go find their own or wait for a respawn is poor game design that pits players against each other or forces players to sit and wait around.

There are lots of dailies like this and my own list here isnt exhaustive of the ones in Wrothgar.

Storytime:
Today I got "Breakfast of the Bizarre" as my Wrothgar Delve Daily, with the requirement to gather 13 harpy eggs. That resulted in me and five other players hovering around the nests in two rooms and a hallway, snatching up whatever eggs we could before the others got to them. At least the respawn was quick, but it wasnt good gameplay and made other players into worse "enemies" than the NPCs. There were several times where, rather than helping a player fight, I thought "Oh, good, they're distracted so I can get this other egg first!"

Not all delve dailies are that quick to respawn. The other day I had "Getting a Bellyful" and after running through half the Delve with no durzog feed spawning or other players beating me to it, I decided my best strategy was to camp a spot where I knew two pieces spawned. So I sat there for about 5 minutes while I waited out the respawn for 6 pieces of durzog feed to spawn so I could finish the quest. This is exceptionally thrilling gameplay here. Also, my apologies to the six players who ran by me while I was camping those two spawn points - I hope you got your durzog feed eventually.

The best daily I've seen yet is The Skin Trade! It requires six werewolf hides, but in a flash of design brilliance, the Devs made it so that you can acquire the skins from either them appearing on the ground OR from killing werewolf mobs. This makes it very easy to gain what you need as you complete the delve normally and makes it a much more cooperative experience with other players since they can help you get the skins you need by fighting together with you instead of directly competing for all of the same materials.

Every time I do one of the other delve dailies, I wish there another way to get the items like there is for the Skin Trade. I'd gladly kill extra NPCs or mobs to get the items I need rather than race other players to whichever egg we saw first. Its nice to actually fight mobs with other players and know that we are both getting the items we need.


Goal: I'm not just here to complain, believe it or not.

Devs, when you design future dailies, please learn from the mistakes of Wrothgar (and Clockwork City, and the Murkmire Prologue, etc.)

Please design dailies that encourage and reward player cooperation.

Please don't design dailies that force players into competition with each other to get quest items.

Thank you for your consideration.


(Players, what are the dailies you think are well-designed? Which ones do you think are poorly designed?")

corpseblade

It is unclear from your post: you know that eggs can drop from the people you kill and feed will drop from the durzogs you kill? Thus those quests are similar to the werewolf one. No need to camp a spawn point.

VaranisArano

corpseblade wrote: »

It is unclear from your post: you know that eggs can drop from the people you kill and feed will drop from the durzogs you kill? Thus those quests are similar to the werewolf one. No need to camp a spawn point.

Interesting!

I tried, and that never worked, but I may have simply been unlucky.

If so, perhaps ZOS has already fixed my main issue, which would be lovely!

daemonios

VaranisArano wrote: »

(Players, what are the dailies you think are well-designed? Which ones do you think are poorly designed?")

Edu the Goblin King has to take the crown. I can only imagine the countless hours of hysterical laughter ZoS staff have had watching players race from one spawn spot to the next hoping to free the prisoner, only to have it spawn at a different spot that you reach just in time not to get credit. Then you decide to wait in one spot, but the respawn takes so long that you decide to check out the next spot. Which is empty, because of course it is. Because the prisoners are being farmed by a dozen players who won't share the quest with the people spamming zone chat because they don't want more competition for the prisoners. And after 20 minutes, having finally completed the quest, you realise it makes no sense to run around for so long for a single repeatable quest and decide to drop it if you ever get it again.

Then you look up the issue in the forums and see this has been the case since Wrothgar launched, with one change to the respawn timer that clearly wasn't enough. But hey, I bet it's pretty complicated to add more spawn spots and/or make the prisoners spawn faster.

As for well-designed dailies... I'm sorry, but to be perfectly honest I despise daily quests. They are a carrot dangled in front of players to get them to replay old content. Content should stand on its own merits, not on some arbitrary prize. How many people actually even bother with these world boss/delve dailies outside of events? Still, I would say the undaunted pledges are borderline acceptable, since they require a bit more dedication than the typical fetch or kill dailies.

Dusk_Coven

Or, like Secret World Legends, they could sharply limit the population in an instance. I'd like to see slightly more than a full raid for overland, and max 4 for delves.

Ulfgarde

Very interesting OP I agree with what you say but don't forget about the dot meta.

corpseblade

Clockwork City daily that has you scramble for materials. During the event it is insanely hard to gather mats that aren't that plentiful to begin with.

VaranisArano

corpseblade wrote: »

Clockwork City daily that has you scramble for materials. During the event it is insanely hard to gather mats that aren't that plentiful to begin with.

Yeah, Clockwork City ones are among the worst. From running around the tunnels conpeting with everyone for mats who's quest markers have to respawn, to nuking the rifts as soon as they show up, to racing everyone for the clockwork plaques because you only get a couple from the WB...yeah, I'm not a fan of those CWC dailies.

GenjiraX

I think it’s fun, even though I usually come off worst in the race for the resource.

redlink1979

The items respawn faster during events... And farming nodes as well... What's the big issue here then? You can't wait for the respawn, is that it?!...

Edaphon

VaranisArano wrote: »

corpseblade wrote: »

It is unclear from your post: you know that eggs can drop from the people you kill and feed will drop from the durzogs you kill? Thus those quests are similar to the werewolf one. No need to camp a spawn point.

Interesting!

I tried, and that never worked, but I may have simply been unlucky.

If so, perhaps ZOS has already fixed my main issue, which would be lovely!

They didn't fix it, it always worked that way.

TequilaFire

Be more fun if PvP was enabled for the event.

corpseblade

redlink1979 wrote: »

The items respawn faster during events... And farming nodes as well... What's the big issue here then? You can't wait for the respawn, is that it?!...

I feel like a little piggy camping respawns. 😋

zaria

corpseblade wrote: »

It is unclear from your post: you know that eggs can drop from the people you kill and feed will drop from the durzogs you kill? Thus those quests are similar to the werewolf one. No need to camp a spawn point.

The werewolf always drop fur so that is easy. However the harpies don't always drop eggs.
The ones close to the boss tend to drop them, some other npc close to entrance also do from time to time but the nests are the safest way to get them.

Edaphon

zaria wrote: »

corpseblade wrote: »

It is unclear from your post: you know that eggs can drop from the people you kill and feed will drop from the durzogs you kill? Thus those quests are similar to the werewolf one. No need to camp a spawn point.

The werewolf always drop fur so that is easy. However the harpies don't always drop eggs.
The ones close to the boss tend to drop them, some other npc close to entrance also do from time to time but the nests are the safest way to get them.

The harpies never drop eggs, the Winterborn dudes do.

VaranisArano

redlink1979 wrote: »

The items respawn faster during events... And farming nodes as well... What's the big issue here then? You can't wait for the respawn, is that it?!...

The issue, aside from my apparent unluckiness with drops when I tried to kill NPCs for the items (which I can't blame ZOS for ), is that waiting for respawns makes for thrilling gameplay. Worse, if there are other players around, we're directly competing for the respawns.

These arent the only dailies where this happens. ZOS had issues with this with the Murkmire Prologue dailies, so I do think its worth pointing out where some design elements are frustrating, especially when there are dailies like The Skin Trade where it has worked flawlessly every time I've run it.

But maybe I'm just unlucky. *Shrug*

Kagukan

Haven't had any issues at all with this event. Others I have. But so far this event has been very smooth for me.

master_vanargand

ZoS is like a demon that confuses people.

Araneae6537

I do think that if anything, players should be rewarded for working together and not the opposite (such as grabbing the quest item or resource node while another player is occupied). One of the things I like about the design of GW2 is that resource nodes and quests items are never depleted by other players. Now I haven’t encountered a huge problem with this in Wrothgar and still find resource nodes and only have to spend a bit more time killing enemies or circling back to spawn points to finish some dailies but I think it could be better.