A Question of Substance

[artic]

Personally i think you CANT quest in Icesus. Or it is near to impossible at least for my level.

Reasoning:

* Monsters too hard. Sometime i get really pissed if i start a quest line, it seems interesting and than im HALTED by a huge monster with very sharp claws that RIP through my chitinium silk eq. Makes sense tho, if the monsters were weak, no NPS would need help killing them.
* Monsters gone. Some quest monsters are constantly dead. Im quite sure some highby wolks areund with a ring-mail hauberk made of quest reward (finger)rings.
* Quest already completed, unless your the first person to enter game after boot. Im at a disadvantage here cause i cant start questing right when the world boots up, i have to first spend hours creating a minion.
* Quests are too difficult. I dont have the brain capacity and the telepathic abilities needed to quess the key words for the 'ask x about y' and 'search x'. im just a hair away from creating a marcro to 'ask monster about <enter entire dictionary here>'

[osma]

Pre-note: have only solved about 7 quests, so dont flame me too much about talking about what i dont know.

That said, from what i have noticed, quest rewards are at times not as useful as would be expected from the quest difficulty. using all.'s idea of easy > medium > hard, i agree that easy quests should not give you dragon killer swords, but when you spend two or three hours trying to figure out to search xxx with a certin command, or talk to a specific mob (that might or might not be there if it was killed), a pouch that holds little more then my mithril coins and reduces bulk slightly is not that good of a prize.

Perhaps hard quests provide great and useful stuff that i have not seen yet, and i agree that easy quests should provide simple things, but think about the difficulty of the quest involved and the effort people will go through to figure it out, and reward them accordingly.

Thus it is said, and thus it is written by Osma the Noob

[allanon]

...when you spend two or three hours trying to figure out to search xxx with a certin command, or talk to a specific mob (that might or might not be there if it was killed), a pouch that holds little more then my mithril coins and reduces bulk slightly is not that good of a prize.

Uh...if you're talking about the pouch you get from the Gypsy firebreather quest (sorry if that's sharing info., most have already done it), that is not a bad reward considering the quest. All you have to do is give <item> to certain NPC, ask another NPC about something, then go to library and search. It even tells you, "it looks suspicious", so...all in all, it can take less than ten minutes to finish. Considering that the reward is worth at least 30k, and put the exp reward on top of that, it's good reward. And they do hold a lot of stuff: I can fit everything I own into my (*cough*) three pouches...so I don't even really need a locker anymore.

...anyway, there's my rebuke to that specific criticism. If you really want a quest with horrible reward, look no further than the newbie Athansir quest. What is the reward? An unsellable healing vial!...And it's not even very potent. Basically worthless.

Artic:

-Monsters too hard. Well, that is what parties are for, no? It's true that it seems unfair that you have to spread the reward around or pay others to finish the quest, when "highbies" can do it solo, but such is the way of the middle/lowbie. Hey, finishing it is better than never doing it, right? Besides, if you know who to ask, sometimes you can get help for free.

-Monsters gone, quest already completed. I suppose maybe you earth_priests would have trouble, since you need to make minions...but unless it's once per boot monster, if you're really concerned about finishing quest, then take the patience to wait until it respawns. That's part of the questing process, being patient...Yes it's unfair when same person(s) completes quest every boot, but you can't claim they're doing anything legally wrong, since there's no rule saying they can't do that. It's not like the wizzies can step in and say, "hey Allanon, you've done the giants bracers quest for last five boots, why don't you stop and give Artic a chance." Well, I mean, yes they can...wizards can do anything...but you know what I mean. It's really up to each player's conscience to regulate how often they complete quests over and over again. The best thing to do is just wait your turn, or calmly explain to the "quest hog" why you deserve to get a turn at it. You might be surprised to find that if you ask nicely, many players are willing to step aside for you...(but not as many as would be nice, sigh. : L)

-Quests are too difficult. Unfortunately most coders can't make complete hack-n-slash quests, since those are generally seen as boring and uncreative. And because of sharing information, it can be hard to recruit help from others regarding keyword <x> to ask or search. Admittedly this can be somewhat of a problem: quests with too few hints, no way for un-clever players to get help, too complicated keywords. Part of the problem is probably that not all coders think in the same English, but that can't be helped. Only solution I could think of, is require that there be at least two keywords for every search or ask. Or for every quest that requires brainpower, make alternate route where a player can "smash his way through". But that seems kind of overdoing it, and current quests wouldn't be affected immediately. Otherwise, there doesn't seem much remedy for syntax quests, and folks like you, Artic, will just have to accept that the quest wasn't coded for your level of questskill...

(Go ahead and make that macro...probably won't help you
much. Most significant monsters have specific triggers that are for words not in dictionary, or forms of words like plurals and past/present tense and such, so you'll just be spamming.)

[artic]

Well, that is what parties are for, no? It's true that it seems unfair that you have to spread the reward around or pay others to finish the quest, when "highbies" can do it solo, but such is the way of the middle/lowbie.

(Go ahead and make that macro...probably won't help you
much. Most significant monsters have specific triggers that are for words not in dictionary, or forms of words like plurals and past/present tense and such, so you'll just be spamming.)

First : Ok, if quests for my current level require me to recruit a party, than it makes sense that quests for mylevel-20 would be soloable at my level? So where are those quests? Finding them is very hard, cause you wont know the quests level until you get ripped apart by a uber-monster or until you are rewarded something that is worth less than 5 minutes grinding.

And that macro would never work. It seems monsters sometimes dont answer your questions unless you ask them in right order. For instance i am positive i tried asking the fisher who wants to be warrior about warrior and he sayd nothing, but would react to the same word after being asked 50 more things (out of witch he reacted to mabe 2).

Also sometimes it seems quests are easyer to understand if your finnish. Like there might be hints that make different sense when translated to finnish.

PS this topic is becoming quite the spoiler. Maybe wizards should ban some people.
:crash

[dunn]

Syntax should never be a problem of achieving the exact thing you're trying to do, when speaking of creativity.

And that's exactly why I don't bother with the Icesus quests, because even if I have the right idea about what I need to do, actually making the game recognize it is futile. So it ends up being disheartening and a creative let-down.

The Icesus syntax is the equivalent of bashing your head against a concrete wall.

[artic]

Syntax should never be a problem of achieving the exact thing you're trying to do, when speaking of creativity.

And that's exactly why I don't bother with the Icesus quests, because even if I have the right idea about what I need to do, actually making the game recognize it is futile. So it ends up being disheartening and a creative let-down.

The Icesus syntax is the equivalent of bashing your head against a concrete wall.

I remember when me and a party of 3 made it to an area that is now removed and saw a rock and we knew we were supposed to tie a rope to a stone and although all four of us had a rope and we all tried everything we could think of we never managed to get the rope up there. We just never figured out the right syntax. After a while we returned to the area and a highby had tied the rope where we wanted it and we were able to explore the area (it was killed clean and with the monsters respawning the rope disappeared).

[echcua]

Syntax is a problem and it is one that I hope one day will be at least lessened. There is a project in the works that may or may not lessen this problem but don't hold your breathe as it will take a _long_ time to finish and then fully implement. I just like to say that its a recognised problem and it is being worked on.