Quests and XP

Karlach

So based off Portius' library discussion I sat there and thought "Surely there has to be more fun ways to generate experience than just bashing" then a thought hit me.

Quests currently give experience, but it's so minimal it's barely worth talking about, and yet quests have so much story, lore and depth to them that people go through this game and never find out about. Not to mention some awesome admin spent their time designing these things, it's a shame they're so underused!


So here's the thought process I went through:

"Well, why not just raise the value of quest completion XP!"

Then I stopped and realised that it'd just have demigods farming them all day.

"So just do it for non demigods!"

Then I realised all that would happen is people would farm one quest over and over and over again.

"What if every time you complete an honours quest, and gain a new honour, you get a whacking great big chunk of xp for doing so? It's a one shot deal, you can't repeat it* and it's not going to be monopolised by any one individual, because they'll gain nothing from doing it twice!"

And that's what I'm proposing. That every time you gain a new honours line (as the game so kindly tells you when you do) you get a large amount of xp/essence.


Now I'm aware some quests are bugged, some are broken, and some might never be fixed. But despite that, there's tons of quests out there, roughly a hundred. Imagine if each one was worth (PRELIMINARY NUMBER THAT ISN'T FINALISED FOR BALANCE PURPOSES) two million essence. Sure you could go from 0-demigod in 60 quests, but you'd have to do 60 unique quests first. Also there'd be people saving quests for when they hit demigod for their buffer, for second trade, for cult. It's a finite resource people can partake in at any given time and reap the benefits of.

There's a few of balancing issues, that I'd like input on: How much essence/xp exactly would it generate, would it be affected by xp% buffs, or high essence diminishing returns and is it going to suck for people with honours that there probably won't be a great big retroactive backpay? Also anything else you think I've missed balance wise (I'm already wondering if Newton honours should be excluded for various reasons) feel free to raise concerns.

So, would this encourage people to quest more, would it be a break from bashing/influencing grinding or a completely different way of levelling? Should you be able to level purely from doing quests (without repeat farming any?) Could you even do enough quests to level without having to bash or influence during them? I'd love feedback on this, positive or negative, just keep it all constructive.

Thanks.



*Yes I'm aware that there are some quests that give you a set of honours lines that are cancelled out by/cancel out the honours line from the counter quest. There may have to be coding change it to the current way the Gutter and Lirangsha work, for example, where you can have both.

Xenthos

Since the game already knows when a person has the other line (it removes it), just make it not give the extra XP chunk if it goes through that particular subroutine first (the quest line is "hardcoded" to only let you have one honour line so you should only get the XP for completing it the first time).

Seems fair to me at least.

Synkarin

I think you'd want to weight xp gain based on Quest difficulty, some quests take days, others take 20 mins

Ssaliss

Also, with how some quests are now trackable, it'd be easy enough to add a way to check if a certain person has completed it before, and just give XP on the first completion. For quests that aren't tracked (yes, I'm aware there are plenty of these), no XP would be given.

Karlach

Synkarin said:

I think you'd want to weight xp gain based on Quest difficulty, some quests take days, others take 20 mins

I considered that, but I'm not sure if the game code recognises each individual honour and can set weights appropriately.

As it's a one shot deal, I didn't think it was all that critical. I know it goes against the risk/reward mantra to have a generic reward across the board for any and all honours, but unless the system has a way of determining, I'm not sure if you can set individual values. If you can then certainly, harder quests, bigger rewards.

That said, considering what Xenthos suggested about quests that remove/replace, which would certainly work for stopping any potential back and forth farming, it may be possible. Would need someone who knows the code to say how viable that is.

Marcella

This is a really good idea. @Ixion might shoot up to 1st in essence ranks retroactively though.

Portius

I am, unsurprisingly, very strongly in favor of anything that puts XP gain on the interesting parts of the game.

Keeping it per unique honor is a good thing to keep quests from getting monopolized. Do not implement XP for quests without that feature. Curio farming already contributes to keeping some quests locked down, and we don't want that to get worse.

Along those lines, you probably want the opposed honors to only give XP once for doing either side, to prevent farming on the same basis.

Newton honors are an interesting case. They're way more complicated than some of the other quests out there, so I'd be inclined to give them XP on that basis. But at the same time, you don't want people to do them and get kicked out of Newton immediately, so you'd have to reduce the XP a lot to prevent that. What I would do to solve that problem, as a special case for Newton and only for Newton, is give a pair of lips (reskinned lips if you want it to be cooler and fluffier) for completing those quests. That lets them get the XP for questing, but delays it so they don't get pushed out of Newton early unless they want to be.

There is the concern on XP numbers that I'm not sure how to address. Quests take hugely variable amounts of time (compare Estelbar to Facility, for example) and for the puzzlier ones even a single quest will vary a lot from person to person in terms of time commitment. That means you can't really do a per hour equivalency for it.. For simplicity's sake I'd be inclined to go for a flat amount per quest, although that doesn't account for the relative difficulties. But if you wanted to account for that you'd have to set each quest individually, which seems impractical to me. I think the best way to pick values would be decide how many quests it should take, hypothetically speaking, to go from 0 experience all the way to demi, and then divide the XP required to do so by that many quests. That'll give you a decent way to calculate the appropriate reward.


There are two special cases on quests besides Newton that we should look at, too.

Number one is that Hallifax gets an honor for its power quest, and nobody else does. In the interest of balance between the organizations, you want to either tag that honor so it doesn't give XP or give an equivalent to each org. I'm in favor of the second option, personally, because honor lines are cool and it feels good to get one as a newbie.

Number two are epic quests, both for the org epics and the aetherepic. Getting the final honor for these is a weird case, since it just recognizes that you've done a set of quests rather than being a quest itself. Part of me thinks that they should also be tagged to not give XP, since they're not quests themselves. On the other hand, in fluff terms they're all really big deals. That makes the rest of me feel like they should be worth more, if anything, due to their fluff significance. Mixed feelings here.

Enyalida

Non-boostable would be best, so that you don't need to set up a bunch of quests and complete them all in a short time frame to avoid shooting yourself in the feet.

Synkarin

Portius said:

Number two are epic quests, both for the org epics and the aetherepic. Getting the final honor for these is a weird case, since it just recognizes that you've done a set of quests rather than being a quest itself. Part of me thinks that they should also be tagged to not give XP, since they're not quests themselves. On the other hand, in fluff terms they're all really big deals. That makes the rest of me feel like they should be worth more, if anything, due to their fluff significance. Mixed feelings here.

You get the orgbix, and that's pretty swell. Plus gobs of power, so xp isn't a biggie on that

Portius

Yeah. As a balance thing and keeping XP for quests to the quests that actually involve doing things, that's probably the right call. It feels kind of weird to me, but it is probably the best way to go.

Iasmos

Code-wise, I think it would be a challenge. The quests are coded in one language and the rest of the game in another. There is obviously a link between the two, but the extent of the interaction allowed here might be an issue.

Certainly, I'm all for it, though. From the recent quest threads people have started, I got interested in doing a couple of the bigger quests, and I'm enjoying them.

Dys

Could add a set of achievements for quest honours and reward it with xp.

Karlach

Dys said:

Could add a set of achievements for quest honours and reward it with xp.

In addition or as an extra? Because that'd be some serious amount of XP needed per achievement if it's still intended as a viable goal for levelling if it's the former.

Synkarin

Neither, I believe.

 She's saying use the achievement system to accomplish what you're trying to do here.

Karlach

Erk, brain meant "alternative" fingers wrote extra. Mea culpa.

Silvanus

This seems like one of those obvious things that should've been done five years ago (like GAs and GCs ability to writelog Magnagora /brokenrecord).

Iasmos

There are achievements for accepting/completing tracked quests, if I remember correctly, but I've had some difficulty in figuring out the few quests that are actually part of the IRE quest tracking system. Step one might be to link them all up properly.

Daganev

Just want to throw in my +1 here. 

Moi

Likewise. This is an excellent idea and I am all for it.