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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Generic Commission Quests repeatable and denoted on world map.
McShave
Member, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
In my feedback for the commissions livestream, i stated the following:
"For the general quests about killing 10 minotaurs and other such kill/ gather x quests, I would consider having them repeatable and denoted on the world map. I would like to be able to open my map and just see the areas I need to go to do these generic quests. Also, making them repeatable means I can open my map, go to the area, and grind for as much time as I want."
By denoted, I mean you don't have to accept the quest from anywhere, you just go to the area and start doing the quest (much like Retail WoW's world quest).
What do you guys think about repeatable grinding quests? Also what is the general opinion of having generic grinding quests just show up on your map, no need to go to a quest giver/ hub to accept the quest?
If the quests are not repeatable, then the importance of not having a quest giver is diminished, since you will have to go to the quest giver regardless for the non-generic quests. Also, I am assuming the generic quests change over time (they say approximately every 30 minutes in the livestream).
My one concern for this is the fact that people do not need to converge on a single hub area on a regular basis if they are doing the average day's gameplay loop (grinding). This might be ok though, as you will doubtless meet people in the questing area and can form groups there. On the positive side, I think my example provides a more streamlined process of deciding where you are meant to go and enables the start of your gameplay session more quickly.
"For the general quests about killing 10 minotaurs and other such kill/ gather x quests, I would consider having them repeatable and denoted on the world map. I would like to be able to open my map and just see the areas I need to go to do these generic quests. Also, making them repeatable means I can open my map, go to the area, and grind for as much time as I want."
By denoted, I mean you don't have to accept the quest from anywhere, you just go to the area and start doing the quest (much like Retail WoW's world quest).
What do you guys think about repeatable grinding quests? Also what is the general opinion of having generic grinding quests just show up on your map, no need to go to a quest giver/ hub to accept the quest?
If the quests are not repeatable, then the importance of not having a quest giver is diminished, since you will have to go to the quest giver regardless for the non-generic quests. Also, I am assuming the generic quests change over time (they say approximately every 30 minutes in the livestream).
My one concern for this is the fact that people do not need to converge on a single hub area on a regular basis if they are doing the average day's gameplay loop (grinding). This might be ok though, as you will doubtless meet people in the questing area and can form groups there. On the positive side, I think my example provides a more streamlined process of deciding where you are meant to go and enables the start of your gameplay session more quickly.
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Comments
Everything else should be taken from a quest giver (even if it's just a billboard).
World Events are repeatable quests/events that happen "randomly".
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/World_events
Otherwise, just go back to the node, and get new commissions.
These refresh every 30 minutes. It is highly likely that players will be accepting rare or higher commissions to complete later as they won't have time to do them before the 30 minute refresh. That seems to be one of the reasons to make it a grab and go style.
I also would rather not have 12 new POIs popping up on my map every 30 minutes.
What is the 'point' of a quest, in this case, in your experience?
Like, for me, quests are for story more often, and let's say 'for the equivalent of Node rewards'. There are few if any 'quest rewards' that matter for anything, except 'stuff that people need generally once'. Repeatable quests are ignorable content in my preferred games.
The act of fighting the mobs is itself rewarding either economically or to the underlying Conquest or Territory system of the MMO. Quests are closer to an 'ingame built-in guide to direct players who are directionless if left alone'.
So my answer is skewed by this perception of quests. 'Why would I ever care that a quest is repeatable without going back to town?' I believe I can answer your question, if given a slight idea of how much benefit you expect them to have, compared to 'doing the same thing without the quest active'.
To clarify by what I mean as quest, let's look at the commission board
If we look at these quests objectives, a lot of them are "kill things in an area." These are the kind of quests I consider to be of low significance (or generic).
We know that it will take a lot of grinding and farming to level up, so it can be assumed that a typical player will spend a lot of time farming mobs in an area for no purpose other than the xp and the materials dropped.
So why not give a bit of structured incentive to farm specific mobs or do specific tasks that will contribute a bit more xp and reward to the player, give the player some loyalty points to the node (whatever they call this), and give the node more xp and resources (through completing node commission; I'm not sure if this is a realized aspect of the game).
As players, of course we don't want to be handheld and pushed to do specific things we don't want to do. Maybe we want to farm spiders instead of minotaurs. Intrepid would have to find a balance where the rewards aren't too great that anything else is not viable, but also have it feel rewarding enough that people enjoy doing it.
Also, where people farm can be player driven. We know that killing a large amount of mobs of a certain type in an area can influence where the node main story progresses. Therefore if the commission quest says "kill minotaurs" but as a node you decide to kill all the spiders, then that should be an option available to the players.
edit:
Also I know killing the minotaurs leads into killing the minotaur boss, but what we saw in the dev stream was a extremely sped up version of that. I assume that a node's players would have to kill 100s of minotaurs for the boss to appear. So making the quest repeatable allows players to stay in the area and feel a sense of purpose to the grinding (more than "eventually something will happen", but "every 15 minotaurs I kill, i get a bonus x xp").
So you take the 'kill 10 Minotaurs' quest, you run back to maybe get it one more time, but it's no longer there at all, maybe not for like 2h, or more (especially if it disappears because enough Minotaurs were killed).
If Commissions quests turn out to be the sort of thing where 'the thing stopping you from repeating it at full speed' is 'having to run back to town to take the same quest again', I'll consider the system to have failed.
My opinion of 'repeatable grinding quests' is that even the idea that they exist like that goes against the dynamic world Ashes is trying to be, and my previous scattered feedback on the matter would stand. That would make it like TL Contracts, (which I think Ashes would be better off without) instead of Elite Dangerous Missions (which is what I'm hoping the system is).
EDIT: If you mean something like 'can I set something up so that I, the Minotaur Killer, gets alerted every time that quest DOES appear on the board, without having to go back', I believe that the Commission Sharing function is meant to handle this and make it social.