Player-created Quests

Meathook94 · May 2017

How about adding the ability to create quests for other players?

Hanokihs · May 2017

Three reasons why "No." is the inevitable answer:

The quests we already have are often glitchy/unresponsive enough on their own.
Player-created quests have high odds of interrupting the lore.
People would abuse it in the name of faster grinding, because quests come with XP and item rewards.

Danikat · May 2017

How do you envisage such a system working?

Would players be given access to the developers tools to create NPCs and items (and maybe locations?) and add them to the world as quest givers, bosses etc.? Or would it be more like a writ board - text only quests sending you to kill existing enemies, collect items etc. without adding anything new to the game? Or something else entirely which I've not thought of?

How would you stop people abusing it? What's to stop someone setting a quest to kill 1 mudcrab which awards 1,000,000 XP and a full set of gold items?

Meathook94 · May 2017

Danikat wrote: »

How do you envisage such a system working?

Would players be given access to the developers tools to create NPCs and items (and maybe locations?) and add them to the world as quest givers, bosses etc.? Or would it be more like a writ board - text only quests sending you to kill existing enemies, collect items etc. without adding anything new to the game? Or something else entirely which I've not thought of?

How would you stop people abusing it? What's to stop someone setting a quest to kill 1 mudcrab which awards 1,000,000 XP and a full set of gold items?

It's simple, really. Give no XP, and rewards must be given by the person setting up the quest. For it to work, it would have to be pretty mundane, like just being able to drop something in a barrel in a delve and telling another player to basically come and get it. Maybe you could create a quest title somehow, or more likely pick a pre-written quest title like "Come and get it" or "Noobie Freebies" before linking another player to it (so as to prevent any random player from looting the placed object).

Think of it as a way to make other players, who are asking for free stuff, work for it lol

TheShadowScout · May 2017

Hanokihs wrote: »

Three reasons why "No." is the inevitable answer:
The quests we already have are often glitchy/unresponsive enough on their own.

Player-created quests have high odds of interrupting the lore.

People would abuse it in the name of faster grinding, because quests come with XP and item rewards.

Indeed.

You forgot...

It would require a LOT of coding to implement in any meaningful way, thus a lot of extra expense to pay the code jockeys, without ANY extra profit for the suits in charge to be convinced this is a good idea...

Balibe · May 2017

This an MMO, not a single player game. So all data needs to be available to all players, not just he player crating the quest. There is no way a player created quest will work as there is the potential of any character on the server to be in your area/instance/quest you just created .....

Do you even see the coding issue for this the developers need to do? Even if they consider implementing this, implementing it would break so much existing code creating a bunch of new coding bugs .....

[Edit to remove flaming]

Enodoc · May 2017

If you know how to use the API, you can actually do this already...

Teulisch · May 2017

City of Heroes did this with their mission architect.

if you make these into the equivalent of daily quests, they can work easily enough. the logical conclusion, however, would be some players would build achivement-hunter quests that either focus on hunting a specific mob type or else a farm for drops (such as a leather-farm or a wax-farm).

if you use a short list of pre-built dungeon sections and mob spawns, it could work well enough. add in a couple of NPCs with text, or a book or two, and your about done.

Euant · May 2017

Teulisch wrote: »

City of Heroes did this with their mission architect.

if you make these into the equivalent of daily quests, they can work easily enough. the logical conclusion, however, would be some players would build achivement-hunter quests that either focus on hunting a specific mob type or else a farm for drops (such as a leather-farm or a wax-farm).

if you use a short list of pre-built dungeon sections and mob spawns, it could work well enough. add in a couple of NPCs with text, or a book or two, and your about done.

Came here literally to mention CoH's design for this.

For those unaware (and who missed out on a GREAT game, imo), the Mission Architect worked as a little hub that let you create to share and access missions made by others. All of the missions took place in their own zone/phase that you had to load into similar to the Dark Brotherhood/Thieves Guild dailies.

With it you could customize:
-The type of mission (kill all enemies, collect stuff, kill a boss, etc)
-All text including the mission itself, object names, and what mobs would say
-What the NPCs involved were, including allies, neutrals, and enemies. You could use existing assets or create enemies with new abilities.
-The difficulty of the enemies (this was a straight number scale like mild to super hot).
-What map design you use with existing assets. CoH had buildings, parks, caves, sewers, dimensions, and more already used for real missions so you just picked which one you liked.
-The ability to turn one mission into a whole chain up to 5 missions long.
-A rating system so others could give your creativity a boost to the Featured section or shun it to page 3421 of 5031.

It was as balanced as the main game if I recall. If you filled a mission with a bunch of weak enemies you would get little experience and you could just leave the Architect building and do that anyway. There were some accolades associated with it but most of it were cosmetics.

All of that said, I have a very hard time imagining it in ESO. The "flavor" of the Architect was the use of holograms, something that would be very hard to translate into fantasy. Also, I can't imagine anyone in ZoS would be willing to devote time or resources to its creation. City of Heroes was the epitome of self-expression in MMO's with power customization (including effects/color), small to massive bases, large hangout zones, the best character creator in any MMO I can think of, and more so the Architect was an almost natural inclusion. ESO's resources seem better spent on more PVP and PVE content as opposed to character created content (although I love Homestead).