Food for Thought - Quests

While I have taken my 4-5 month break from SotA I have been filling my time with other games. I have had an Eve Online account for 3+ years but never really played that much. One thing I have done is set my training queue up and been learning skills that take collectively take years to learn and I still have more to go.

I've been learning the game and it is super complex. The complexity makes SotA look like playing checkers. But... the questing system (Training, Missions, Epic Arcs, etc) is fantastic! Story plots that make sense. Plots that give you stuff to do while exploring and learning a bit of the ins and outs. Quests if you just want to mine, if you want to be a courier, if you want to fight, and so on. Plus it allows you to get a lot of loot and currency to help you move forward.

Today I did run into a hitch with one quest where it didn't fire off correctly. I knew it was a problem and submitted a support ticket and expecting to hear back within 24hrs or so. To my surprise a support person replied back to me with 2 minutes!

My point here is that while you attempt to redesign the existing quest system... you should really take a good luck at how games like Eve handle it. Look at what it does, how it leads you through it, how it rewards you, how it's there to teach you how to play a complicated game. If what they created can help someone learn such a complicated as Eve, then it might be something to mimic for SotA.

Good luck... and here's to hoping someone is listening.

P.S. You may want to look at their economy and market system as well... WOW!

 

They handle it with gobs of money that they throw at these things called employees. Crazy idea... seems to work though.

Get rich, Port Fam. Money works great for problems.

300,000 active subs (in 2016) makes a lot of possibilities a reality.

Miss you, Elaina. Sry you soured on the game, but life move


:throws money at post button:

 

Miss streaming it and the community too! I'm still on the hook for that EPS2 PoT, we'll see what they do with the game between now and then.

 

I'm sure you could find someone to buy that token from you.

 

I'm sure I could do a lot of things with it... sell it now, sell it later, never sell, never move anything in it, move one house in it, move people in and have fun evicting them, name the town "Barugonville"...

 

Maybe I could name it "DJ Ville" and open it for Darkstarr and his awesome DJ sets too.

 

Yeah, just for the voucher, but one it is real I can dump if I want. What's up Oops!

 

I wanted a POT, I didn't want a POT, I procrastinated until they weren't available anymore, I lamented about how I missed my chance in some thread, someone PM'd me and offered to sell me their POT for what they had paid, I jumped on it and now I have a nice town with overworld access that only I live in.

I'm still glad that I bought it though. It's been pretty fun setting it up. I once had another resident but he stopped logging in after they made changes to planters so that they couldn't stack anymore and his houses recently went poof.

 

Eve launched on May 6th, 2003... It's almost 16 years old, under constant development for all of that time, and has had a consistently high player population supporting a large development staff.

 

I'm sorry. Maybe you could see what other towns have. We just made Wizards Rest all claimable by anyone and of course it's all about the residents so we have resident amenities. Also mention your town occasionally. With the upgrade to village deed option and all players ability to get 2 deeds towns will be needed to place them. I know we don't have room for many more ATM. Sorry off topic perhaps. I'm sure your town is lovely.

Also I do have comments after today's livestream regarding questing structure in Shrouds. I start to get concerned when focus goes completely on player completed content or so my mind imagines it is going there. While we definitely need it and lots of interesting, wonderful tools for that aspect and possibility for the game I still believe in my heart that failure to as in game the achievement system and game task system woul be a big mistake. We must have dailies for crafter, pvpers and to pull scenes into a cohesive world. Every scene should have quest givers, and discoveries to involve the players in a total world not one broken up by scenes. We already made this mistake once. It needs to be rectified. Lore and discoveries such as fishing up clues to the world mysteries to bring it together. Also giving some ability for crafters to not be so combat centered if they prefer. Give them lots of repeatable dailies.

Edited

 

I do and the lots are all free for the taking. I also have lots of amenities and I have gone the extra mile to have 20 lots claimed (in an out of the way place) so that the devotionals provide the maximum benefit. With that said, I'm not going to beg people to live there. It's there, the lots are open, I treat it like an NPC town and nobody would ever get booted.

 

@Barugon Put your town name in your signature.

 

The part that concerns me the most is that, often, it's like pulling teeth to get them to recognize a problem exists, let alone lay any plans to do anything about it. We're still working on cracking that impenetrable field that "the economy is doing fine"

 

The argument, that they have limited resources, would have more impact, if the resources they had weren't misappropriated. People aren't coming to the game demanding a BR-style PVP arena, or to build underground basements with fishing spots. They're asking for a functional quest system, compelling storyline, functional economy, etc - the things that are barely hobbling along.

 

@oplek I don't disagree, but resources are still a major factor in this problem. Money = support personnel, devs and artists. No doubt money wasn't well spent (i.e. we have vast world that's 80% irrelevant landmass)

 

Personally i think the story is pretty darn compelling. Its more of a omg whats about to happen while you dig up bits and pieces of a forgotten history.

Just seems like some folks arent so good at digging, or arent initially i terested in it, or just dont like digging and want the main quest to read it to them. Im not against cutscenes either.

 

Or hate reading things written on a postage stamp.

I tried to get into the story but the UI made it a chore. Even though there were interesting things happening walls of text on a tiny window, having to scroll back up, and me answering in monosyllables (help, name, love) made it underwhelming.

One hope I have is that the responses started to be sentences so could have some personality. They are a bit polarized now, could use some subtlety but that is way better than uttering grunts at the NPCS.

 

The keywords are a relic of thier idea (they changed due to player feedback) to Make conversations flow more naturally by having npc’s lead you into asking the correct questions, which you can still do. Some npcs respond to keywords that arent shown but can be discovered by conversation. That wouldnt had worked well with full phrases because you would need entire exact scentences.

When the quest system was in its infancy, people didnt like the unfinished placeholder responses (now npcs will hint at what you can ask if you dont ask the right questions) and wanted a more guided format. Im seeing most people prefer not to read, want a scentence telling them what they need to do and will click past everything to get to that, which makes them miss the story. The change from freeform to mutiple choice responses is a big part of the problem with the quest system, because the devs designed it for a particuar style, and player feedback changed that style

Lots of new folks are having other folks just tell them what to click. While thats dissapointing to me, not everyone wants to be immersed in lore as i do

 

It's the rare chicken and egg problem where we have a definite answer. They had over 22,000 players on deck at the end of the Kickstarter, folks that had already bought the game. At launch, they had around 5% of that, on top selling thousands of more accounts. Having players was never a problem, losing them due to decisions that prioritized appeasing a small portion of higher paying customers is why the game is just about on life support these days.