At the moment I am working on an extensive research assignment on Ancient Rome. My class were told to look into a certain aspect of the society such as slavery, or the military back then and then present the results a few weeks later. As an extensive research assignment it is worth a significant amount of our semester mark so its important to do it well. Of course, I have been procrastinating like crazy and only now realize how much work I'm going to have to do. As we were given about 4 weeks to do the assignment I had half-heartedly tried to get an early start on it but almost instantly lost interest and then stowed it away and forgotten about it, but now its come back to haunt me. This is a quite bad metaphor of some the types of quests that I have encountered in my mmorpg gaming life.
The quests I am talking about are the ones that are too difficult, take too long, or just aren't very interesting and quickly accumulate. When you grab one of the said quests you of course have a stab at it, but then realize how boring/long/hard it is and just leave it for later. Note that these are not the quests that do not give any decent gear because those you can easily discard without a second thought, these quests are the ones that really mean something, that have great rewards and incentives. As a result you keep those quests in your options so you can always do it later when you are more powerful. Soon, these quests compile and you are stuck with tons of quests whose rewards aren't that great anymore because you left it too late to try it again.
So what's the solution? Well, the logical one is to make all the quests easier/more interesting. Yeah, thats simple enough. I had an idea that these quests rewards could increase slightly over time as you gain lvls, but the objective remains the same. I mean, as the player gains lvl the gear in the quests improve slightly, not very much, just a little. Leave it too long and the gear quickly becomes redundant, but if you wait 2 or 3 lvls then the gear could still be nice and the objective much easier. I haven't thought a whole lot about this, but it would be interesting to see how well it would work in the situation. I know I would certainly like to have it, but it is my idea after all. But while I think there is a solution for the boring/time-consuming/tough quests, there will never be one for the quests where you carry around a 'quest item' that hogs your inventory space except, of course, for total extermination. *Shudder* Those quests are evil.
The quests I am talking about are the ones that are too difficult, take too long, or just aren't very interesting and quickly accumulate. When you grab one of the said quests you of course have a stab at it, but then realize how boring/long/hard it is and just leave it for later. Note that these are not the quests that do not give any decent gear because those you can easily discard without a second thought, these quests are the ones that really mean something, that have great rewards and incentives. As a result you keep those quests in your options so you can always do it later when you are more powerful. Soon, these quests compile and you are stuck with tons of quests whose rewards aren't that great anymore because you left it too late to try it again.
So what's the solution? Well, the logical one is to make all the quests easier/more interesting. Yeah, thats simple enough. I had an idea that these quests rewards could increase slightly over time as you gain lvls, but the objective remains the same. I mean, as the player gains lvl the gear in the quests improve slightly, not very much, just a little. Leave it too long and the gear quickly becomes redundant, but if you wait 2 or 3 lvls then the gear could still be nice and the objective much easier. I haven't thought a whole lot about this, but it would be interesting to see how well it would work in the situation. I know I would certainly like to have it, but it is my idea after all. But while I think there is a solution for the boring/time-consuming/tough quests, there will never be one for the quests where you carry around a 'quest item' that hogs your inventory space except, of course, for total extermination. *Shudder* Those quests are evil.
3 Comments:
Doesn't making the reward better as the quest gets easier go against the whole "risk vs. reward" paradigm?
And why are you posting on your blog when you should be studying ancient Rome? (Sorry, the mom in me escaped) ;)
lol :)
@esri; The way I thought of it was as the best reward quality/difficulty would be at the best ration when you first receive it. And this would gradually depreciate the higher you get.
I'll just ignore the rest of your comment. :D
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