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Can We Handle Quest Exp Differently?
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
Disclaimer: I'm a person who doesn't believe in players receiving XP without doing PvE. It leads to all sorts of ingame behaviours I disagree with.
I think I've 'solved' it. Intrepid, as always, it's free to use, as it counts to me as 'an MMORPG positive standard'. My arrogance shines upon ye.
1) Create a separate 'Banked Exp' bar similar to Exp Debt, but in the good way.
2) Fill this bar when players do quests
3) When players PvE, grant some bonus Banked Exp per kill from this bar, according to the exp they receive naturally, e.g. I kill a mob worth 200 XP, and receive that 200 XP + a bonus 100 XP from my Banked Quest EXP.
4) The bar has no limit.
Players are no longer 'penalized' for spending time questing, as long as they also PvE at SOME POINT.
Players are no longer penalized for 'not questing' and balancing quest XP is easier.
Less worrying about players who try to level purely by quests and avoiding others and never learn to use their skills.
Relatively easy to implement.
This could also be applied as a way to actually give PvP players something, i.e. they could get some of their banked exp for winning fair fights where both combatants are purple, have Banked exp, and are within a certain range. If you want to discourage this from just being a weird grind, make them lose some Banked exp when they lose the fight too so that they have to at least create 'Quest Alts', which then, in turn, must... PvE.
Basically make 'this process' of leveling by PvP involve questing, setup, time, and grinding all on the scale of or higher than the PvE requirement, with a hard limit of 'however much Quest XP is available in the game or via dailies' ( don't @ me on this, I hate dailies more than I hate Quest Exp ).
You can give feedback, but I'm really really arrogant, so don't be surprised if I ignore it, whether it be praise or condemnation.
I think I've 'solved' it. Intrepid, as always, it's free to use, as it counts to me as 'an MMORPG positive standard'. My arrogance shines upon ye.
1) Create a separate 'Banked Exp' bar similar to Exp Debt, but in the good way.
2) Fill this bar when players do quests
3) When players PvE, grant some bonus Banked Exp per kill from this bar, according to the exp they receive naturally, e.g. I kill a mob worth 200 XP, and receive that 200 XP + a bonus 100 XP from my Banked Quest EXP.
4) The bar has no limit.
Players are no longer 'penalized' for spending time questing, as long as they also PvE at SOME POINT.
Players are no longer penalized for 'not questing' and balancing quest XP is easier.
Less worrying about players who try to level purely by quests and avoiding others and never learn to use their skills.
Relatively easy to implement.
This could also be applied as a way to actually give PvP players something, i.e. they could get some of their banked exp for winning fair fights where both combatants are purple, have Banked exp, and are within a certain range. If you want to discourage this from just being a weird grind, make them lose some Banked exp when they lose the fight too so that they have to at least create 'Quest Alts', which then, in turn, must... PvE.
Basically make 'this process' of leveling by PvP involve questing, setup, time, and grinding all on the scale of or higher than the PvE requirement, with a hard limit of 'however much Quest XP is available in the game or via dailies' ( don't @ me on this, I hate dailies more than I hate Quest Exp ).
You can give feedback, but I'm really really arrogant, so don't be surprised if I ignore it, whether it be praise or condemnation.
Sorry, my native language is Erlang.
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Comments
I don't know how it would feel to complete quests and instead of getting exp, get a chance of getting more exp from other activities. I'm not sure if this solves any issues that isn't solved by adjusting exp gained from these activities.
I don't know if it's the solution the players wanting to level through pvp want. Doing quests so that they can gain exp through pvp could feel a little weird.
This mechanic alone would not change the leveling "meta." It would come down to how it's balanced.
The moment questing becomes a relevant way to level, then the grinders just optimize the questing and still do the same thing, whereas those who take their time and experience quests organically fall behind anyway, but now every 'guide' to the game, every expectation, is based around 'did you do this quest to level?'.
Ashes could get around this with Node content somewhat, but it's opening up an optimization path that doesn't need to exist. Hence the disclaimer.
Give questers a way to make sure that the questing isn't a relative exp loss, without incentivizing every grind-focused player to clear the quests.
Ashes doesn't seem to have any way for PvP players to avoid PvE anyway, it's not part of the design intention, so they will be sidetracked into 'PvE stuff' either way.
The point would be to incentivize PvE and stop explicitly rewarding 'people who avoid social interaction by soloing their quests'. To avoid a massive amount of 'Ashes of Creation Starter Guide' videos that consist mainly of 'here's the quickest path to follow to maximize your quest exp through this questline'. And to avoid that weird balance thing where people set out on a quest chain and the quest mobs are all tuned based on 'the level they would be if they did all the quests before' that marks our usual modern Themepark.
Because going the other way gets you the 'I don't understand why I can't beat this enemy for this quest, I did all the quests up to here, why do I have to go actually PvE against other open-world enemies?' in a game like Ashes. Because anyone coming in with the expectation that PvE is not necessary to level up for quest chains, will be irritated if it does.
I don't want to always have to kill the 30 Prescribed Goblins required to 'Make me need to PvE for a quest so that I do PvE'. I like my quests to be exploration or knowledge or just cool stuff, and then I go fight what I want to. Especially in Ashes. Because I want to 'take my banked Quest Exp back to my own node', you see.
Themeparks are a poison seeped into our genre so deep that we sometimes forget why aspects of them even come into being.
I get the irony that I am indeed giving you feedback, but this is more for the benefit of other people who might waste their time reading this thinking they can have an open dialogue on this topic.
I understand this feeling, I hope.
The problem is that people can like things that are almost objectively bad for design, in games, especially certain genres of game. Sometimes open dialogue therefore just devolves. It's similar to someone who comes and says 'We should have flagged PvP in Ashes'.
Starting from Ashes' core design, there's only certain meaningful discussions one could have on that. There's no 'need to entertain the perspectives of those who believe that Ashes should change to flag based PvP'. It's not that every possible perspective or discussion is bad, but when someone has a knee jerk reaction to the way something is said, or to something that makes them feel a specific way personally, sometimes they react without scrutinizing either the initial data, or even properly interpreting the original thing said.
For example, I didn't actually say that I don't care about feedback. I was warning that I'm arrogant enough to ignore things that I consider to be based on ignorance. This often happens when the poster offers little to back it up beyond 'I don't like how this feels'.
I'm going to therefore assume that this post, for example, isn't doing that. I gave a suggestion directed at Intrepid because this is where I give those. I gave a warning based on self-awareness of my toxic personality, to others who might wish to engage with that suggestion. Your advice is that this is a waste of my time entirely.
Is it a waste of my time because you assume that my warning meant that I was saying 'I don't want to hear any counteropinions', or is it a waste because 'Intrepid doesn't listen to arrogant people'?
Sure there are tasks to be done in any node that could use a hand, but it would be cool if folks did them to advance and protect the node - not to grind or bank xp.
I’d prefer quests to be rare, dangerous, and difficult. Otherwise, leave them at the door. I don’t want my hand held.
If Ashes were going to be something like a Multiplayer Evolving Online World or a Throne War Simulator MMO, sure, xp and levels could be radically different.
What I thought wasn't very good was that it leveled up by grinding. If you want to level up your pistol shooting, shoot stuff over and over and over again. If you want to level up your music-playing, go sit in a cantina with a Kloo Horn for hours. If you want to level up your crafting, go make a bunch of junk that you'll sell to a vendor for nothing.
That was a failing of that game though. There wasn't a lot to do but grind. This was a long time ago; remember that SWG came out even before WoW or EQ2. Missions were auto-generated "go here and kill X number of critters from a lair, then come back for your reward and kill some other kind of critter, repeat". Actual "quests" with stories and such were very rare. We could definitely implement much better content nearly 20 years later.
I did like the freedom such a system offered. And I feel that with AoC, even though it's following the traditional class/level system, the augment system will be what makes it stand apart and I think we'll be able to experience a similar kind of freedom with this game.
I can't wait for release...
I was a bit puzzled why you wanted to bank the xp until I read this part.
In the end it'll roughly even out XP wise of course, because other people will do the same to your node. But I guess banking XP lets you go to a node you don't want to progress, do their quests, and then bring it back home. Still though, even that is gonna even out over time as citizens of that node does the same to yours.
As for your idea in general, I come from a different perspective I guess. I don't see it as a problem that players can gain a lot of immediate quest XP from quests that don't require a lot of mob killing. If the quest was fun, challenging in some way (no more or less challenging than grinding mobs), and took a decent amount time to complete, yeah, gimme a bunch XP! Time spent should be rewarded if it's meaningful to the game, whether it be grinding mobs, solving a puzzle or destroying a well-defended caravan.
Quests should not just be about mob killing. There should be tons of quests that are not about mob killing.
Yes, I absolutely wish that everyone could do that. Especially if it evens out.
I just see a difference between 'player driven content' and the upgrade 'player directed content'. The first is just emergent from whatever players do in response to various cues given by the developers. For example, if quests boost nodes, then whichever node has 'the most rewarding quests' levels faster. This is obviously emergent, but I don't consider it engaging because it's not directed.
I believe it's good if people can experience a lot of things in Ashes, and I would like if people could have the feeling of 'completing a story in one node' or journeying far and wide and then being able to 'come back to their node' and 'tell the story' and have their node benefit, rather than 'well the good quests are in Winstead, so Winstead will level first' and then Intrepid having to devote anyone or anything to balancing out the world quest-exp wise.
As for the other part, I understand that the 'no exp from quests!' is a relatively strong position against both the norm and the conceptual experience of MMOs nowadays, I'm just from a different MMO-type and am wondering if this is 'so ingrained' these days that players will be upset if they have to actually defeat things for most of their exp.
I'm just really not looking forward to the 'YouTube Guides' that come up from games where the path is advertised as 'play how you want' but the game tells you 'well the best thing to do is actually this'. It leads to the unnecessary creation of so-called 'casuals', people who just want to play and don't 'know the best route for leveling their Alt via quests', when those people might otherwise be equally engaged just by standard applications of game psychology.
I gathered a lot of data from the Dev Discussion on the matter, and concluded that people are definitely not tilted in the same way you and I are, but the other issue is that quests are usually static exp amounts, and only 'difficult' if you are not over the level required.
Ashes at the moment uses the Exp-per-kill that I'm used to. Enemies don't grant static amounts, they grant 'a set value according to their level difference from the player'. Which in turn makes leveling via quests laughably easy to optimize, as you can just skip entire areas, enemies, challenges, etc.
I'm just really hoping for a game that doesn't punish adventurers and trivialize early game. I study MMOs a lot to see what probably could be done better, and this is, to me, one of the worst emergent points of the current crop of them. Someone finds the way, makes a video about it for clout, and 'adventure' goes out the window for anyone who wants to keep up.
This wouldn't solve it, but sometimes just 'being better' is still good. I can't say that one could convince even 80% of players to just 'do quests, but all the quests are challenging', but I would bet that anything sufficiently challenging would just become some streamers' 'YouTube Content Farm'.
If you don't mind, then, could you answer something else?
"Why should quests allow you to level at all?"
In an attempt to answer:
- Because most players expect experience from quests
- Because experience is a (additional to other rewards) reward for doing and accomplishing something
- Because experience motivates players to do quests which ought to make them have more fun in the game and keep them playing?
What do you think?
Experience is what you get for spending time participating in core gameplay mechanics that are relevant to the class you are levelling. It's even in the name: "Adventuring Class". It's not called a Combat Class. Going on a quest is an adventure. You level up your adventuring class by doing adventures. Combat is part of that too obviously, but combat doesn't define "Adventure".
To quote from the Wikipedia:
Since this is a fantasy MMO, some of that has to be translated in those terms obviously, but the point still stands.
We can certainly discuss how much XP each type of quest should give. For example, a simple errand quest in a safe area should give next to nothing XP wise, because there is no risk. If you have to pass through a dangerous area, even if you manage to completely avoid combat, XP should go up significantly because there was a risk. A hard quest with several steps to kill a boss and learn a bunch of lore while doing so, should give oceans of XP.
I just unfortunately spend a lot of time in the design space where the less 'engaged' player ends up. You know the person I mean, the ones who would immediately buy the strategy guide, in the old days of gaming, not to help them get through a difficult area when they got stuck or didn't understand something, but who would just read the thing and do what it said.
Now, thankfully, many of those people just watch other people play games now instead, I think, but the MMO genre is trying to revive, right? Sometimes you gotta pull the levers.
If people are really against the feeling but want challenging quests, then the only feedback Intrepid would need is 'please make quests challenging'. I'm not used to quests being challenging anymore, particularly in MMOs where they're something you can just do later when you're leveled up too high for them to be challenging.
I just don't want another BDO, and I spend a truly unfortunate amount of time playing that game to study what's wrong with it, in support of one of the current lead designers that is fighting a massive uphill battle to slowly rip out all the cruft and install something better.
If the 'difficulty' of a quest can be offset by 'watching a YouTube video and doing what the video says', I feel like the MMO experience is cheapened, and if players are incentivized to do those quests by instant exp, I fear for the result.
That said, thank you for all your data, I'll think more on your points and see if I can figure out why the difference in concern exists.
There's something in my head here that wants to differentiate tasks from quests. If so, I'd rather have tasks award skill or reknown/rep, while quests award XP and/or raise the node to the next level (figuratively or literally). Tasks seem like reps to me. The same way you groove a skill. Kill 10 rats is a task. You go to Angie's list and add that to a board. Tasks are essential to developing or maintaining a node.
A quest would place you in a situation that's just beyond your ability without any assurance of the outcome. Go to Japan and bring me a 500 year old sword - that's a quest.
Makes leveling less tedious and monotonous.
Node xp should, for the most part, remain local - although...!!!
There will be quests from Node A that will send you to Node Y - I would expect that kind of quest to provide xp for both of those Nodes.
I don't see a reason why a Node would benefit from "telling a story". Nodes benefit from people doing activities associated with the Node.
I also don't understand why the "good quests" would be in Winstead, or some other foreign Node, instead of your home Node having quests that you like - because they benefit your race, or region or your Node type or the types of buildings and services you are helping progress.
Your home Node might send you to do some quests in Winstead. You might go do those quests and gain xp for both Nodes. You might choose to do some Winstead-only quests while you're there to gain xp for your Adventurer class, but those Winstead-only quests may have nothing at all to do with your home Node, thus, there's no reason to be "bringing that xp back to your home Node".
Ok, sure. I feel like you missed the point, but I can't exactly argue with yours. That was the reason for the disclaimer.
As I said, I come from a different type of MMO than others, but I don't want to change Ashes from whatever it is intended to be, and what others like or are used to.
I do, however, want to play a game that makes less obvious design mistakes than the current ones. If Ashes doesn't make them, great. If it does, another game will come eventually.
But here's the one thing that causes me to make this sort of post, whether I'm right or wrong about any given thing. Ashes isn't trying to be another standard MMO. And there are things that work in standard MMOs that don't seem like they'd work well in Ashes without much more work than would be necessary if they just... weren't done.
Maybe this isn't one of those things, but I hope you can give me the benefit of the doubt in that regard. I don't point out this stuff because I necessarily want it. Certainly that's the case more often than not, but sometimes it's just 'looking at a design thing and thinking it is weird relative to their stated goals'.
If you're telling me to believe that my Home Node will have as much engaging content on its own to stand up to another nearby node because... all Nodes have approximately equal content...? Then I'd question why.
But you're usually not saying that sort of thing, which is why I can never actually counter anything you say. I simply don't understand it enough. It usually boils down to 'the experience you want doesn't matter' when I try to interpret it.
Sure, fair point.
(I would focus more on the RPG part of MMORPG rather than the MMO portion, in this regard, though.)
Yes.
Can't really say what to believe before we have a fair representation of quests implemented - probably Beta.
But, by design, the Node quests we're doing should be improving the Node where we are citizens in ways that are also beneficial to our characters. Home Node quests should be making travel safer in that region and allow us to progress and defend the Home Node, along with improving our needs based on race and type of Node as well as based on crafting items available. So...those should be "the best".
Even if I'm off on my own doing a quest for Scientific Node Y, that's not really going to help improve my home Node, Scientific Node A... unless my home Node sent me to do specific quests in Scientific Node Y.
One of the differences in Ashes is that there are several different types of progression to focus on besides just Adventurer progression. We can still be accruing Adventurer xp while we are doing quests for our Home Node or quests in a different region that won't provide xp for our home Node.
"The best quests" is too broad of a concept, I think. Because it really depends on what your specific goals are at any given moment.
(I think rather than "the experience you want doesn't matter", what I'm typically going for is, "the experience you want isn't necessarily what everyone wants" though often it may be a reminder that, "the experience you want doesn't seem to be what the devs want.")
Ok I think I understand a bit better now. But please correct me if not.
You potentially see Ashes Nodes as being somewhat similar to Star Systems/Factions in Elite Dangerous, with a constant stream of slightly different quests with slightly different outcomes, each somewhat natural or interesting to a given person in their own right?
I dare not dream of a fantasy MMO that does this (though honestly Ashes fits it better than most others) because it's so hard to do without 'sameness' annoying players.
So what I'm probably erroneously seeing here is a situation where Node A has a non-repeatable exploration quest that gives 24,000 exp in total, and Node B has no such quest, followed by 'a lot of players going to do that Node A quest and ignoring Node B because they want to level faster and can do the exploration quest solo.
If quests give exp and all the exp from that quest goes to Node A regardless of anything else, then Node A should rise more than Node B by human nature. Node B might have something else going for it, but the general point is that it's hard to balance against optimizers, and MMO players are often even unintentionally optimizers.
But, if my definition of 'the best quests' is 'the largest exp for the lowest cost of time and interaction with other people', because that's what I normally experience (to the point of having trouble integrating into guilds and similar before, because I didn't seek to play 'efficiently enough') then is your opinion that there will probably be balance between such quests, that there will probably not NEED to be balance between such quests, or that it does not matter and probably does not require solving even if there is no such balance?
Perhaps I misunderstand the system, but I believe the node system is specifically designed such that players questing in a particular node's area will affect that node. This is related to the system where nodes affect the types of content in an area. Doing content unlocked by Node A and taking the benefits to Node B goes against this idea, it seems.
Nope, I think you understand.
They are challenging the current system because they feel it punishes them for wanting to quest. We don't have the details but it's not crazy to imagine that if you want to level a node, the best way will be to grind in the area and probably do node tasks. This may get repetitive for some so they want the option to leave the node and do narrative quests in other areas without being punished by contributing to a node they are not a part of.
Yeah, I'd love to see epic quests.
But a part of me also feels like the Quest Completion needs to be distinguished from the Quest Journey:
I personally like when progress is more so measured by expanding skill points or upgrading a weapon... As opposed to... your toon is level 15, maybe you can be 16 by tomorrow and 17 by monday.... making your toon stronger! I think granting experience based off of the content you do is important... killing people in world, should give you points towards pvp abilities... handing in a random pve quest, not so much. Keep the rewards for the content done, relevant to the content you pursue. If I am spending a lot of time crafting... reward me with discounts to sell on the ah/ or allow me to craft faster! If I am killing with my axe, give me rewards so I am more efficient with said axe. Do not say... you are now level 18... so you magically gather faster and kill better with said axe, simply because you are now level 18 and not 17.
Also, me suddenly being more powerful in pvp because I handed in a quest from killing pve adds, makes no sense... me killing a boar is not the same as me hunting down jonny who is corrupted because he was grieving players.