9 Journal Styles - Vote for your favourite!

Thank you

 

I think regardless of style some other issues need to be fixed first (just what I can think of right now):
- better sorting
- filtering (difficulty/main quests/location)
- search option
- toggle option for active quests

 

The current journal would be fine if it was actually functional.
Before my quest reset, I had timestamps in my journal to do tasks that I'd already done a year before. I had 3-4 duplicates of same entry. I had tasks to do that I had already done that would not go away. What your journal tells you to do, and what you actually need to do to get the quest to progress, are often completely different things. There's no finding anything either, as it seems to index things "sort of" chronologically but not always. There's a disconnect between "active tasks" and "knowledge" and if you take a break from a quest its almost impossible to pick up where you left off without a lot of tiresome trial and error. A returning player to the game tried to pick up the thread of the main quest and got so frustrated with it, despite what the journal was telling him to do not working, etc. He screenshotted page after page of his journal and sent to me, as I've done the main questline four times now (quest resets, 2 accounts) so that I could, with foreknowledge of the sequence of events, try to puzzle out exactly what he needed to do. It turned out, that what he needed to do was something that wasn't even in his current tasks but once done, he was able to continue the quest. It was not documented ANYWHERE, we simply worked backwards along the quest path until we found where it went wrong.

This is the opposite of functional. We'd actually be better off using blank books and journalling it ourselves.

The journal 'style' - I'm less concerned about. It should be clear what you are supposed to do - the journal should match the actual quest flags your character has progressed so if you need to go to Soltown to get the quest in advance, the Journal should say "go to soltown" . It doesn't need to be obvious. We don't need ! ?s or glowing compass indicators (I hate those, because they DONT MATCH THE JOURNAL EITHER making the whole thing even more of a mess) - but we do need a coherent quest journalling system. If you want it to be a storybook "I spoke with xx and he told me to see his friend xx in xx city...." that's fine - got no problem with that - as long as doing what it says to do actually has some result.

I think the revamp of the quest system itself will address a lot of these issues, but its a good opportunity to revamp the journal system so that it actually matches up with what you're doing / expected to do and make it less onerous.

 

Agreed. Definitely NO ! or ? markers and beelines to objectives. If there's one thing SotA does well, it's not adding a lot of the streamlined immersion breaking bullsh*t and fluff from other games. Solid state flagging and a good relational database are the name of the game.

 

I want our journal to be multi-functional if that is a word. I want it to list quests on a tab and break them down to for example:

Tab says quests then lists quests under categories:
Story lines
Dailies
Side quests
Tasks
Achievements

Then other tabs can say things like:

Control points
Events
Travel
Housing and tenant system
Player owned towns/ Npc towns
Playing and syncing songs/instruments
Pets/taming
The market place
Crafting
Mining and harvesting
Agriculture
Fishing
Guilds
Looking for group
PvP
The Oracle

Journals need to track progress and update progress.

So again an example if using the journal to better serve the game at least the MMO part

So wallah less players running around lost and confused.

 

I actually thing it would be nice to be able to pick a couple different styles in game.

But I agree with everyone that says no matter the style it need more functionality.

 

I like the book style but I want a chapter per quest. I'd like to be able to set quests to active / inactive in the table of contents (showing / hiding them on the current task list). For each quest I would like to be able to read the chain of actions so if I find a quest, do a few tasks, then leave for a week, I can figure out where I left off story wise. And maybe most importantly, I'd like clear feedback in the journal when a task is complete.