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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Repeatable Collection quests and other quest feedback
Veeshan
Member, Alpha Two
So with the rogue addition i went through the new player experience again and did a bunch of quests and the burn goblin trash one was rather nice tbh collect 12 trash items from goblin and burn it for like 2k xp (XP on quests probaly need a decent buff but thats another issue i wont get into atm).
I think these kinda quests are a good addition to the game and would be nice to see more of them there not required but it allows mobs in area to be valuable when grinding having collection of trophie quests around the place where u can turn in items mobs drops like the fire one would be a good and easy alternative to leveling and would be prety easy/quick to put in a few more before phase 3 hits.
there kinda like Everquest gnoll fang or crushbone belt hand in quests they were a little bonus to your grinding and breaks up the repetative of it since you want to hand them in when you inventory filled up with them :P
Additional quest feedback
Also with quests they need more interesting unique rewards outside of glint/XP especialy the puzzle kinda quest where u realy gotta take time to figure things out, The bag quest (stockade sack) in lionhold is a good one too in regards to this getting basicly another sanctus bag was a nice little reward there.
Some of the quests that reward armor (Goblin patchide chest) for example would be nice if you could also acquire the ability to craft the item, instead of a recipe the NPC should only give you the quest if you have the profession high enough to craft it and the reward should be him teaching you to craft it, this way there more crafter progression that requires crafts to go out in the world to unlock instead of have somone else bring u a recipe, would make these crafters with the recipe unlock very valuable especially with higher level quest armor rewards where they might not be able to do the quest solo.
I think these kinda quests are a good addition to the game and would be nice to see more of them there not required but it allows mobs in area to be valuable when grinding having collection of trophie quests around the place where u can turn in items mobs drops like the fire one would be a good and easy alternative to leveling and would be prety easy/quick to put in a few more before phase 3 hits.
there kinda like Everquest gnoll fang or crushbone belt hand in quests they were a little bonus to your grinding and breaks up the repetative of it since you want to hand them in when you inventory filled up with them :P
Additional quest feedback
Also with quests they need more interesting unique rewards outside of glint/XP especialy the puzzle kinda quest where u realy gotta take time to figure things out, The bag quest (stockade sack) in lionhold is a good one too in regards to this getting basicly another sanctus bag was a nice little reward there.
Some of the quests that reward armor (Goblin patchide chest) for example would be nice if you could also acquire the ability to craft the item, instead of a recipe the NPC should only give you the quest if you have the profession high enough to craft it and the reward should be him teaching you to craft it, this way there more crafter progression that requires crafts to go out in the world to unlock instead of have somone else bring u a recipe, would make these crafters with the recipe unlock very valuable especially with higher level quest armor rewards where they might not be able to do the quest solo.
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Comments
L2 had a ton of these and their rewards would vary from just a bit of money per item to "you loot certain items from certain mobs and then you can use combinations of those items to trade them for recipes and mats for crafting".
And quite often the quest would have 2 layers. The main part would be "bring 100 items, and receive 5g for each", but then there'd be additional/optional part of "any items over 100 would reward 7g". These quests would be repeatable, but you'd need to return all the items at once, so you'd be starting from 0 if you repeated the quest.
Also, I hate my inventory being swamped by quest items, so this better be a quest inventory tab thing.
As for all the other quest rewards, pls no fucking full item rewards. Give me recipes, mats, basic resources, glint, treasure maps, etc - but no full items.
there already full item rewards from quests there only green quality though (https://ashescodex.com/db/item/Gear_Armor_Medium_GoblinPatchhide_Chest) and like i said they should offer a chain afterward that rewards you the ability to craft it at a better quality if ur that profession you have leveled.
How big are the stacks on quest items? Iirc when I did the goblin fire thing the quest item tab was still broken, so they just spammed by inventory with low stacks.
over 61 which is what i got to on one of the items before i handed in, im assuming 100 but never hit the cap
I don't think that people hate the quests, I think they hate:
1) Being railroaded by either not being able to progress or not being given their Gear Rewards until they do them
2) Having a specific timing where they must do the quest within their leveling path, which is almost the same as the above, and that timing being there mostly to pad out playtime.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
If you're killing them anyway, just for xp grinding, you may as well accept the quest while you do it.
you dont even need to accept the quest :P the hand in quest like the goblins trash drops even without quest and u just go hand it in when you feel like it so it quite nice system much akin to Everquest 1 collection quests of gnoll fangs/orc belts and what not
And I'm now curious how much grind Steven is planning to have in the game. He has already shifted away from "we don't want grind" to a "yeah, you'll still have to grind" (which is exactly what I've always expected), but how far will the design go. I'm completely fine with grind, but I'd imagine that for quite a few people this would be a shift in design direction akin to the open sea change.
It's actually not assured, though, like, the effectiveness gap in Ashes should be even smaller than in FF/TL (you'd have to tell me what L2 was like, and ArcheAge is... complicated).
Basically, the three things required for quests to mostly be okay in this way are:
1) I don't need to do them to get something vital
2) A sensible character in the game would have some good reason to do the quest anyway even if it is just to train a skill (this is different than a player response, but I'm shorthanding this)
3) The game doesn't make one specific setup or timing for doing the quest extremely optimal.
Technically 'Commissions' and 'Contracts' and so on are the better way to do this, which is the plan, since there are still supposed to be 'Tasks' and so on.
Choice matters 'the most' for this, in my experience, for dealing with those people who aren't just in the camp of 'bro just give me everything I didn't come here to play the game I came here to feel good about achievements/power in a place where I can lord it over other people'.
Figuring out if your playerbase is mostly made of those people is the difficulty though.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
Lvl20 is the break into a new tier of gear, but obviously you won't have it as soon as you get onto the lvl, so you'd be farming mobs/quests like these until you get that gear, because everything else would be too hard.
Lets say you farm it till 23-24. That's around 1kk xp (right column is the required to lvl)
That's 1k mobs, which is 5 repeats of this particular quest.
And it also has a continuation, which also gives you a piece of jewelry from the new tier (or BiS from the previous one), but, as you see, it's tied to 2 other quests: one is lvl15 "talk to npcs" quest and another is a lvl24 get 34 items from mobs quest (both are repeatable as well), which only further proves that you'd be farming orcs till ~24.
So, would this be "effectiveness" of repeatable quests in L2? 9lvls of it, where you can get items from the new tier of gear, while also getting some money that you can use on the market (or buy items from npcs), all while getting a near-perfect variety of crafting materials, that you can sell to high lvl players for a good price or use yourself for crafting.
To me this looks like a nice set of quests to do while leveling, but I'd imagine that people just see "kill thousands of mobs to lvl up" and do a loooong sigh and an eyeroll.
Contrast that to FF11 where quests are sometimes fairly rewarding in terms of 'fun, or weird gear', but can be completely ignored and almost never actually require you to just kill mobs, and TL where quests aren't very rewarding even in the story (compared to doing whatever you feel like or going to dungeons if you like that) and are for completionists (and most of those also don't require you to kill mobs).
But it's also not 'fair' to judge it that way because L2 is decades old and doesn't have the options that TL has for 'Contracts', and FF11 is about your character's chosen place in the world, since it's a Final Fantasy/Seiken Densetsu game with an MMO packed into it, particularly at the start.
Basically, it comes down to how bad an idea it would be to skip doing the quest and killing the specific mobs. If there are other mobs to kill and you don't need those quest rewards (like, you can get something similar from another activity of similar tier), then I can say that no one I know would complain, and it would be another thing that TL takes from its 'parents'.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
In other words, you can definitely just buy the reward from a vendor. But the more optimal alternative would be to use the money to buy other items, while you get the rewards from the quest.
Does optimality of the action matter too much, when it's not the ONLY way to get the thing?
Like, there's this quest
https://l2hub.info/il/quests/373-supplier-of-reagents
It is REQUIRED for a waaay later part of very important progression. But at lvl57 it has mobs to kill that go up to lvl74. And quite often people would grind this quest up for a loooooong time.
It gives you full items of 4th tier of gear (which you can wear from lvl52, so this is not quite timely acquisition), but more importantly it gives you mats for crafting 5th tier of gear (though just torso/legs and not extremities).
And there are still other sources for those items (namely spoiling mobs), though those do require way higher lvls and way more effort.
I'd imagine that Ashes will probably not have this kind of stuff, mainly because the entire process of crafting gear is way different, so your sources for mats/resources are also different. I definitely expect totally required quests for stuff like class acquisition and/or other augment sources, but those are most like one-offs, rather than repeats.
And while I did like these kinds of repeats in L2, where you'd just grind and grind mobs in hopes of getting the stuff you need (or trading the stuff you got for what you need), I don't really see AoC's repeatable quests go much further than "here's some glint and maybe some general mats".
Mostly because glint is a very important currency that can be applied near-universally for your aims, while even general mats would be almost useless, considering the rarity part of crafting. L2's situation was much easier and straightforward, so rewarding mats in quests made sense, but how do you apprach such rewards in a system where going up a rarity could mean a huge boost in power.
But, quite simply, neither Ashes nor Throne and Liberty actually takes much philosophically from L2 quest design as far as we know, so it basically never comes up.
Things are shuffled around to make it feel more normal overall, but again, this is basically because L2 is older. What TL has now and what Ashes intends to have are basically 'the right way', and they're both tuned really well to a smooth experience. Good foundations.
If a quest/Contract says 'kill 15-20 of this, here's an in-world reason, here's a small reward equivalent to the time spent doing something harder', they're not obnoxious. In Ashes (or even TL if they eventually care) these can be explicitly offered by Social Orgs (in TL it would be better to keep them as random Contracts that are affiliated with Social Orgs because TL has a good design based around not being able to just repeat the same contract bot-style forever, but Ashes hasn't shown any signs that they'll be adding that benefit).
Even light RP-ers like this sort of thing, so it's really just an automatic win for almost no effort if done correctly as long as it isn't so optimal that it can't be ignored by the average player.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."