[Suggestion] Quests

Quests or no quests?

  • Quests sounds like a great idea!

    Votes: 4 36.4%
  • With some small improvements, this could work.

    Votes: 3 27.3%
  • This'd only work with some significant improvements...

    Votes: 2 18.2%
  • Discordia doesn't need quests at all.

    Votes: 2 18.2%

  • Total voters
    11

Samlen

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I don't believe this has been posted for Discordia, or at least discussed to much length, but I think that quests could be a great addition to Discordia! Due to the nature of Discordia, several precautions would have to be taken to keep them more excitement and lore-based than ways of farming, but I'll explain a few ideas on preventing this in a little bit after the general idea is set out.
So it would be similar to what a quest sounds like, you go out on some sort of adventure to complete Objective A and return to get a reward! You can start off by talking to one of the questgiving npc's to start you on a quest, which if you accept, can teleport you to a special dungeon/area. These areas could be similar in some ways to the temples, yet different than the temples in other ways as well. The area will be no-break/no-place, but instead of having to go through a temple to kill a boss, different scenarios can take place, like defending the town of Barony from a zombie invasion, or going into a cavern to find a lost locket to return to it's owner! And to get out of these areas, you would simply need to give the required item(s) to the questgiver, whom would be situated to wherever you start out in the quest, which would then give you your reward and teleport you back to the normal world next to said questgiver. Different lore items with special names/lore would help prevent anyone from trying to complete the quest prematurely, and the quest itself could help expand a bit more on the lore of Discordia and people would probably be excited by the idea of quests, if this were to work.
Now like any idea, there ARE possible problems, the main one here being that people may use these quests for farming, instead of using it for the excitement and lore aspect of it. One solution is to make the reward not worthwhile to farm, but then almost noone would do the quests. Something else that could be done instead is to set a timer on how often a person can complete a quest; this could be only one quest per day, or only each specific quest per day, or could be changed to some other length.
Now going back to the idea of farming problems comes that people may use over-powered gear for a quest, which in some ways would ruin the essence of the quest by robbing it of it's challenge. One solution could be just to let it be, and have people decide if they really want to challenge themselves or not, but then this may lead back to the farming by smashing through these quests, even with a time limit on completing them. Another solution would be to make it difficult enough that you have to use good gear and even then get a descent challenge out of it, but this leads to the problem that newer people with less items/loot can't do these quests, which the quests would ideally be meant for everyone. Now possibly the most complicated solution I can think of right now, but perhaps the best, is when the player is transported to the quest area, they are given a new, preset inventory. When they complete the quest objective/return the quest object to the quest giver, they get transported back to the quest giver in the normal with whatever inventory they had before setting out on the quest, plus the reward.

Here's and example of sample quest that could happen:
Bob is a player on DoD, and he's itching for something exciting. He's not too established of a player, but still is off well enough to get around in iron armour and a diamond sword. He notices the Captain of the Guard of Barony is a bit distraught, and he goes over to ask what is the matter. "Well," the Captain says nervously, "the undead here are getting a mighty bit restless, and our scouts report that it seems a large number of em seem to converging nearer to Barony, and from their reports, we'll have a large group of em on us by tonight!" Bob's excited, here's a chance he could do something exciting! He talks to the Captain and the Captain excitedly responds that they could use all the extra help tonight in fending off the undead, and that a reward it likely in store for him. At this point, Bob can accept the quest, which does. Now Bob is teleported to the quest area, a seperate copy of Barony, only starting a minute from night. He realizes his inventory has been replaced with a guards uniform (full chain armour), an iron sword, and some steak to help keep him fed throughout the fight that night. With a minute to prepare for zombie horde, Bob looks around and gets into a good defending position. As night falls, the zombie hordes appear and a timer appears on the right, noting how long he has to survive and beat back the zombie horde before daylight comes and signals the end of his quest. When the time limit expires, Bob's tired but victorious over the zombie hordes, Barony can sleep safely from the zombies for now! As it's completed, he is teleported back to the overworld where he originally started the quest with the inventory he had before the quest, where the Captain congratulates him and gives Bob 500 Topians. Wanting to try the quest again, Bob tries to talk to the guard again, but Bob gets the message that he needs to wait another 23 hours, 59 minutes and 27 seconds before he can complete this quest again! A little disheartened by this, Bob decides to be content with his earnings so far and goes off for more adventure!


I've thought about this a bit and this is what I've come up with so far. So what do you guys think? Would this be too difficult to code, would it be absolutely awesome or just dull? The main idea of these is to help make Discordia more eventful/exciting whilst expanding the lore, with the reward being only a little side-note.
 
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Notme

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Well we had quests in Elysium, but quest makers AND quest plugin weren't reliable, although I liked them and they worked fine.

To make quest makers reliable let ALL Controllers+ or VetOps+ work on them, instead of single staff member.
To make quest plugin reliable, we should create our own :D

So yeah quests are lot of work. Even Skyrim the AAA game had bugs in quests.
 

Lee_scar

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Good lord wall of text man.
I know I put breaks way too often and too many times, though this def needs it.

The main issues are what raxo has said. Reliablity and enjoyablity also come into play. Since making a heavy epic quest would be a breeze for deeply invested players, but a hell to new players.
making a easy pansy quest for noobs is nice, but no fair to handout to the newbies rather then the invested players.
 

EggNog

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Quests have always been part of the game plan when we've been planning servers since JtE each and everytime it falls through the roof. They are hard to implement and tend to be difficult to figure out.

One jte we had quests but they were pretty much pointless besides giving you some slightly valuable items and so called "quest points" which did nothing. We never really went anywhere with them and because of this DoD basically scratched the idea of having them.

Fixing the farming portion of this would be easy just only let players do a quest once. However that is only one of the many problems with quests the rest I don't really feel like going into depth with but, Boredom, complication, and development are all issues with quests.
 

Samlen

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Good lord wall of text man.
I know I put breaks way too often and too many times, though this def needs it.

The main issues are what raxo has said. Reliablity and enjoyablity also come into play. Since making a heavy epic quest would be a breeze for deeply invested players, but a hell to new players.
making a easy pansy quest for noobs is nice, but no fair to handout to the newbies rather then the invested players.
They wouldn't be large epic quests, most would be relatively short to complete (15 minutes or so). With the idea of switching out the player's inventory for a preset one for the quest and then switching it out for their inventory they had before the quest once they complete the quest would solve issues between the quests being too hard/easy based on how much loot/good gear you have. Each quest could be tailored to a different difficulty, and maybe even let the player know what level of difficulty the quest they are about to partake in is. the reward would of course be based on the difficulty of the quest, but the idea of these quests are ideally more lore/excitement based than reward based.
Quests have always been part of the game plan when we've been planning servers since JtE each and everytime it falls through the roof. They are hard to implement and tend to be difficult to figure out.

One jte we had quests but they were pretty much pointless besides giving you some slightly valuable items and so called "quest points" which did nothing. We never really went anywhere with them and because of this DoD basically scratched the idea of having them.

Fixing the farming portion of this would be easy just only let players do a quest once. However that is only one of the many problems with quests the rest I don't really feel like going into depth with but, Boredom, complication, and development are all issues with quests.
I can understand them being hard to implement, and I most certainly expected it to be so, with so many things to take care of coding-wise. One way that might make quests simpler to develop is by taking some of the temple ideas and use a portal that leads to the quest area, where they can complete objective A (like gathering lore-named loot off of special spawned creatures, like the bosses, only they don't need to be bosses) and they can return through the portal at anytime. When they return, a check is run if they completed the task (Like checking their inventory for if they have collected enough of item X ) and if they have, it gives them their reward. This alone uses mostly just mechanics used for temples, and the added bits would be 1) the check of the player's inventory and 2) the switching of their inventory when undertaking the quest. The whole switcheroo thing with the inventory was one idea of making it so that a player's personal gear doesn't determine their success, just their skill does. This would probably be the most complicated part of it, and, if needed, could possibly be dropped and just tweak the quests a bit more to try and make them fairer.
I think the main idea of the quests would be to make them exciting and lore-based, with more emphasis on the exciting/enjoyable bit, witch would be the reason for implementing them in the first place. It might just be me, but I'd probably do quests mostly for the lore bit, though I'm sure most people would do them for the excitement of just doing the quest. The reward would be there to help people feel like they aren't doing the quests for no reason what-so-ever, and would most likely be small
Any possibility of farming could be easily fixed, from either being able to be completed only once, like you said, or make it so they can only complete a specific quest once every so often (a day, 3 days, a week) or the quest could only give the full reward the first run-through and give you a lesser reward for subsequent run-through's.
 

Notme

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They wouldn't be large epic quests, most would be relatively short to complete (15 minutes or so). With the idea of switching out the player's inventory for a preset one for the quest and then switching it out for their inventory they had before the quest once they complete the quest would solve issues between the quests being too hard/easy based on how much loot/good gear you have. Each quest could be tailored to a different difficulty, and maybe even let the player know what level of difficulty the quest they are about to partake in is. the reward would of course be based on the difficulty of the quest, but the idea of these quests are ideally more lore/excitement based than reward based.

I can understand them being hard to implement, and I most certainly expected it to be so, with so many things to take care of coding-wise. One way that might make quests simpler to develop is by taking some of the temple ideas and use a portal that leads to the quest area, where they can complete objective A (like gathering lore-named loot off of special spawned creatures, like the bosses, only they don't need to be bosses) and they can return through the portal at anytime. When they return, a check is run if they completed the task (Like checking their inventory for if they have collected enough of item X ) and if they have, it gives them their reward. This alone uses mostly just mechanics used for temples, and the added bits would be 1) the check of the player's inventory and 2) the switching of their inventory when undertaking the quest. The whole switcheroo thing with the inventory was one idea of making it so that a player's personal gear doesn't determine their success, just their skill does. This would probably be the most complicated part of it, and, if needed, could possibly be dropped and just tweak the quests a bit more to try and make them fairer.
I think the main idea of the quests would be to make them exciting and lore-based, with more emphasis on the exciting/enjoyable bit, witch would be the reason for implementing them in the first place. It might just be me, but I'd probably do quests mostly for the lore bit, though I'm sure most people would do them for the excitement of just doing the quest. The reward would be there to help people feel like they aren't doing the quests for no reason what-so-ever, and would most likely be small
Any possibility of farming could be easily fixed, from either being able to be completed only once, like you said, or make it so they can only complete a specific quest once every so often (a day, 3 days, a week) or the quest could only give the full reward the first run-through and give you a lesser reward for subsequent run-through's.
Samlen, everything that seems to be easy for player may be hard to developers to do, and vice versa.
We tried to make quests, but it went to nowhere, as quest makers weren't reliable in long term.
We would need some no live mlg pro dev to make quests for us.
 

JtTorso

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Yeah,
'fraid it can't be done, it's certainly something that has been considered but due to the lack of reliability and availability of such a plugin it's not something we'll be seeing on DoD anytime soon.