Request Regarding Community Quest writing

So I'd like us to be in this thread to offer our help to the development team more than debate player developed quests good and bad. We could write tons of side quests or help to at least if given the opportunity.

 

As someone who is occasionally involved in peer review, I am well aware that something we think is "finished" can often require a lot more work. I can see that accepting player created quests would place a tremendous burden on Portalarium, who would have to painstakingly go through each quest and make corrections. It might be more useful to accept suggestions regarding ideas for quests, rather than attempted quest implementations. Much as I would love to create quests for Portalarium, I think my efforts would be better spent making unofficial quests that are not submitted for approval and therefore do not become a QA burden.

 

Are you sure? The side quests can be simple quests that lead players to different parts of the world. They do not need to be all involved in the story, Lum and FireLotus are doing the detailed quests. I am talking the something to do and give us reasons to adventure the world. We so need these imo.

 

The last quest I created started in Brittany Alleys and led people on a journey through Central Brittany, Aerie, Neath, The Caverns Under Neath and the Isle of Ghosts. Successful completion of the quest also required either excellent knowledge of Novia or scouting trips to two underground passages that were mentioned in found texts.

 

I think that's fantastic but it will not be accepted by the anti-social who just want to pick up their quests and not be bothered with others, unless it could be made that player quests don't have the isignia that they are player quests. Well if that makes sense. Truly I have met many who run away and just want to play their own game. I hope I am making sense. I am trying to flesh it out.

 

I fully understand that many people are actively opposed to even seeing player created quests, let alone doing them, and I have no problem with that. That is their choice. Fortunately for them it is highly unlikely that they will encounter such quests (they all take place on private property) unless they actively search the forums for them.

Also, Lum and FireLotus are far more talented writers than the vast majority of players, myself included, so I don't think they need any help. Please let them create their own stuff, rather than force them to inspect other people's efforts, searching for and correcting errors.

 

I understand what you are saying and I really do respect and admire your talent. I was hoping that this would be possible and not just hearing let them do their job type of thing. We are a very powerful and talented community all together, we have done amazing things so far, and I do not believe or accept that there is not a way that we cannot help to provide some of this if allowed to figure it out.

 

Well, maybe if we also had people who were prepared to volunteer to do peer review, but a lot of people would not like having their work critically examined by other players. It's all quite difficult.

 

Womby, I agree that Lum and Fire Lotus would be too busy with their own writing duties to take time out to review player written quests , but based on my past experience as a former member of the Scholars of Novia, I highly doubt that a peer review system would work

 

I can see one of the possibilities of exploitation being repeatable quests that people do for loot or XP. There is a simple solution: no repeatable quests. This way if I chose to craft a quest and reward, say 1,000 gp, then that's all a player will get. And if you leave XP out of it you elimiate any type of exploit on that front.

 

Why is it considered exploitable because we have repeatable quests is my question. Many games have repeatable quests and the rewards for them can be decided to not exploit but to give people who want them an option to going out adventuring.

 

I've always thought that player vendors could be used as originators of player created quests. You could script key words into your vendor to start someone on the quest and give them a quest description. You could use your vendor as the end stage of the quest to provide any reward you wanted that you owned (maybe including xp from your pool, but capped) based on quest completion criteria that you set. After initiating a quest on your vendor, you might be able to add additional steps to other non-main story NPC's by right clicking and and choosing 'add quest step' where you could script dialogue and quest advancement criteria. Since all rewards would come from players (and could be capped in some way) you could prevent exploitation; as well, since you receive the quest from a player vendor, you know it is a player generated quest, so 'caveat emptor'.

I think you could do a lot of funny, or serious, things with this type of system without creating imbalance, that could be completely ignored by anyone not interested. I'd be willing to risk getting something boring or offensive (which could be reported) for the chance to get some thing really entertaining.

 

Yes that is a great idea, if we had the tools to make them act and look like an actual quest, but some will say there is no way for portalarium to patrol these, but if there was a report button to bring it to their attention, hmmm I'm not sure, but I do wish it all would work.

 

I was referring to player-made quests. In a game like Neverwinter, if I am not mistaken, they had the Foundry for player quests and it was used to grind XP and loot, I think to the point that the Developer curtailed them or just outright stopped supporting it. In that instance, players were just re-running player made quests for loot and xp.

 

Yes I did play that game. Even though the quests were pretty cool mostly, I did not do that many of them. Oh I did not know that.

 

I'm with @majoria70 , this game was originally planned to be crowd sourced, if we can help lets help.

I'm against shooting down ideas right away, as often happens on these forums. Improve upon them instead. If the Devs are absolutely against the idea they can say so themselves.

Learning from the previous troubles with user created content, we need to be able to submit finished work that can be integrated with less time than it would take for Portalarium to make it themselves. This could be a win, or we could just debate it forever here and it goes nowhere.

 

In that case players can create quests, announce them on the forums, and tweak them in response to player feedback. If over time they are well received then submit them to Portalarium, who can then decide whether to adopt them as an official side quest.

 

I would say they should also be formatted as Port wants them.

 

From my questioning of players not playing the game because of lack of quests and things to do. They say it is not necessarily that they want complex detailed side quests, just a reason while pveing they are killing creatures or going to a new location.

NPCs are stuck in their stores, they run out of things, they can repeatedly give us sob stories to get them things. Not everyone will want to do these because it is not their thing, but I still think these types of quests should be in game in abundance as well as meaningful quest lines. These are types of quests I also would love us to write and perhaps simple achievements which no steam players do not have at all.

So things like *visit every player owned town in the game*, *eat every type of food*, things like this for example. So what could be wrong about writing things like that?

They are simple and if the team of quest writers were chosen specifically to help and considered from applying to that type of job to help the game with no request for rewards, this is the best help we can offer. I am not in it for rewards ever, I give my time freely and this is who I would want on the team. What matters to me is that this game gets what it needs and I want to help or at least get the help for the game if it is humanly possible.

 

This is a great thread! Per usual while waiting for the update to patch I find myself pulled into the forums...

I am both super intrigued by player-made quests, as well as player-generated lore for "official" game quests. How to successfully implement a review process is most definitely a core challenge in either of these scenarios. Unfortunately, at the moment I don't have much to offer in terms of any strategy to implement something like this that doesn't stand a large chance of running into the same kinds of problems described elsewhere in this thread, and others. Nevertheless, I wonder if there might be at least some limited circumstances in which we could begin to experiment with this on a wider scale.

What comes most immediately to mind are player-made repeatable of "daily" quests. For example- we already have the rudiments of a "Purchase Order" system in the game. Why not allow these to be incorporated into player-based order fulfillment quests? These types of quests generally only have a paragraph or two of written content, and generally follow a fairly prescribed pattern.

EXAMPLE: Jaanelle the Druidess is planning an expedition to the Opalis Ruins, and is in need of Garlic to make healing potions for the Expedition Team. She has asked you to bring her 20 Garlic to help replenish her supplies. Reward: 50 gold; 50 xp.

(The ability to offer xp out of one's pool in addition to- or in lieu of- gold would be a neat option to consider.)