144898-shades-eve-event-quest-design-feedback

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Firstly I want to say that I think the Shade's Eve event looks wonderful, I love what has been done visually. And the Quiet Downs instance is fantastic, really well designed and enjoyable to re-run. I also like the Trick Or Treat quest that encourages players to explore the housing zone.
 
But I feel that many of the daily quests associated with the event are rather unimaginative and actually rather frustrating because of the design ethos. There are two main problems:
 
1) The Lag. Honey potting so many players to Thayd and Ilium where all the quests are focused just creates enormous lag. The game already suffers from bad lag problems during normal periods anyway,  this just makes it worse. More effort should have been made to spread the event out a bit.
 
2) Many quests are competitive rather than co-operative and involve competing with other players to click on items or interact with npcs. These despawn when another player uses them first and don't respawn very fast. So you find yourself rushing around trying to beat other players to the click. At peak times you're not only competing with masses of other players but also the lag. This is a MMO, it should make you feel glad to have the company of other players, not resentful that they are 'stealing' your quest items and lagging the game. The whole ethos of these quests is wrong. They need to be about co-operation, not greedily racing each other to see who can click first.
 
Holiday events have a huge potential for player-player interaction and fun. But lazy and unimaginative quest design wastes this potential by making it all about beating another player to the click. 
 
The solution? Public quests. The game already has these in the zone events like Star Comm where everyone contributes. Obviously it can't be a timer event like Star Comm, but there's no reason these quests can't be on some kind of rolling progress system where everyone joins in and contributes collectively rather than competitively.
 
Please consider these issues when designing future holiday events.	
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			I think you nailed, that's the same thing I was thinking while doing the damn burn Effigy quest. This is a old problem for mmos (players racing to objective) and after all these years seems like devs didn't learn anything. While my overral expirience with the event has been positive, little things like that are really annoying.	
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2) Many quests are competitive rather than co-operative and involve competing with other players to click on items or interact with npcs. These despawn when another player uses them first and don't respawn very fast. So you find yourself rushing around trying to beat other players to the click. At peak times you're not only competing with masses of other players but also the lag. This is a MMO, it should make you feel glad to have the company of other players, not resentful that they are 'stealing' your quest items and lagging the game. The whole ethos of these quests is wrong. They need to be about co-operation, not greedily racing each other to see who can click first.
 
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Hey, let's talk a little bit about quest design and why public events aren't really the best fit for all the content we offer during a holiday.
 
Public events look at a given space and can affect anyone within that space. We obviously want people to do something in order to get their reward, right, which requires contribution of some sort. Giving people credit for being in the right place but not contributing would only encourage people to go AFK in that space while a couple of saps did all the work. But what happens when you're earnestly trying but didn't get contribution? What happens when you luck out and do practically all the work yourself? Shouldn't you get more for your work? Where do the rest of the people stand?
 
For this particular style of content, daily quests are preferable, and I'll explain why:
 
You can do them at your own pace. Unlike public events, which have to function on some sort of timer or trigger, you pick up a quest and complete a quest when you're able to do so. Need to run AFK? No problem; you're not missing anything.
The reward will be the same. In limited-time content, it's very important that you're able to hand out a standard reward for what's considered average participation in a reasonable space of time. For Shade's Eve, rewards and prices are balanced around the time invested and daily amount we expect you to get, which means finishing all the dailies and doing the instance at least once. Public events, with their variable contributions and rewards, skew this and contain the possibility of failing to reward people who are trying to get the daily reward within the same basic time window.
The very structure of public events further complicates things. They would have to be endlessly repeating to allow everyone to do them at all hours. We could tie the actual reward to a daily quest to do the public event, but then people wouldn't get rewarded for their actual time or contribution in the event itself. This isn't even covering the concept of repetition within the same day. You inevitably end up with a situation where players are rewarded either too much or too little for their time, and balancing rewards becomes a serious issue.
Communication is simpler. Think about how our public events are messaged: we generally let people know they're starting if they're not in the immediate area. We explain what objectives are coming up when they begin. Unlike quests, where you have the time to peruse instructions at your leisure, public events tend to put information in your face quite a lot to make sure you understand as soon as possible. The end result would have a heck of a lot of spam wherever you were. (And later I'll go into why the cities are used.)
It's worth noting that we put in a public event as well -- it takes place in Luminous Gardens or Arborian Gardens, depending on your faction, and is called Gotta Getta Geist. It happens every couple hours, and is designed to take advantage of the public event format. Folks have been enjoying it, and depending on feedback we may take a look at its frequency and rewards and see if we can't make it more visible. :) Public events are fantastic and we definitely make use of them in holiday content, but they fit a specific niche. Daily quests still have their place in the grand scheme.
 
Something else that was raised up was the decision to put these events in the cities. I'll gladly explain the decision. By having these in the cities, we ensure that everyone we're catering to, levels 10-50, can have a similar experience that is not interrupted by combat or other factors. Were we to spread it out, it would likely be much more disruptive to content (even in the lower level zones like Algoroc or Deradune.) This isn't to say we wouldn't consider having events elsewhere -- obviously the Hoverboard zPrix event is a good example of content we can send out there -- but for a solid chunk of the content, it's important that it be accessible to as many people as possible at all times without being overly disruptive to existing content.
 
All that said, that isn't to say there's no room for improvement. I know folks have been frustrated about people stealing targets or collectibles and there are a number of things we can do to alleviate that (Lowering quest count, looking at spawns, making the results less flashy so they respawn faster, etc.) We're soaking up all your feedback and plan to use it to make Shade's Eve even better next time around!	
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Hey, let's talk a little bit about quest design and why public events aren't really the best fit for all the content we offer during a holiday.
 
[rest snipped for brevity]
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2) Many quests are competitive rather than co-operative and involve competing with other players to click on items or interact with npcs. These despawn when another player uses them first and don't respawn very fast. So you find yourself rushing around trying to beat other players to the click. At peak times you're not only competing with masses of other players but also the lag. This is a MMO, it should make you feel glad to have the company of other players, not resentful that they are 'stealing' your quest items and lagging the game. The whole ethos of these quests is wrong. They need to be about co-operation, not greedily racing each other to see who can click first.
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I didn't even know there WAS a "Gotta Getta Geist" quest!
 
I don't spend any more time than necessary in town. I do the dailies, zone into the instance a couple of times for shiggles and then if I still have game time left, I head out into the world.	
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			The thing I dislike is Carbine is making some of the same old mistakes about quests sharing credit in a group that have been bugging me since beta. Plenty of the quests share credit, and some don't which means you not only end up competing against everyone in the area, but against your partner.I get that in a certain way the Mixing the formula quest makes sense to be individual, but there are already plenty of quests like that (where your job is to gather something for someone) that do share credit. So having one that doesn't in an especially tight area is even more frustrating than usual.Basically, everything should share in a group, and the 'leash' area for shared credit should be larger than it is. As long as everyone is moving around and trying to contribute, they should be getting credit.
			
				
	Edited October 22, 2015 by Lemurian	
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Public quests can work. Obviously there's an issue with not rewarding afk'ers and making sure genuine contributors get rewarded, but those problems are not intractable. Certain other MMOs have got this right. It just needs the public quests to be made suitable for frequent repeats (rather than hourly), scale with numbers involved and have rewards tiered based on contribution. There will still be some competition to contribute the most, but that's generally a lot more healthy than 'objective stealing'.
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The thing I dislike is Carbine is making some of the same old mistakes about quests sharing credit in a group that have been bugging me since beta. Plenty of the quests share credit, and some don't which means you not only end up competing against everyone in the area, but against your partner.
 
I get that in a certain way the Mixing the formula quest makes sense to be individual, but there are already plenty of quests like that (where your job is to gather something for someone) that do share credit. So having one that doesn't in an especially tight area is even more frustrating than usual.
 
Basically, everything should share in a group, and the 'leash' area for shared credit should be larger than it is. As long as everyone is moving around and trying to contribute, they should be getting credit.
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... It's worth noting that we put in a public event as well -- it takes place in Luminous Gardens or Arborian Gardens, depending on your faction, and is called Gotta Getta Geist. It happens every couple hours, ...
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This is a MMO, it should make you feel glad to have the company of other players, not resentful that they are 'stealing' your quest items and lagging the game. The whole ethos of these quests is wrong. They need to be about co-operation, not greedily racing each other to see who can click first.
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			 I didn't even know there was an event called gotta get a geist.. 	
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The thing I dislike is Carbine is making some of the same old mistakes about quests sharing credit in a group that have been bugging me since beta. Plenty of the quests share credit, and some don't which means you not only end up competing against everyone in the area, but against your partner.
 
I get that in a certain way the Mixing the formula quest makes sense to be individual, but there are already plenty of quests like that (where your job is to gather something for someone) that do share credit. So having one that doesn't in an especially tight area is even more frustrating than usual.
 
Basically, everything should share in a group, and the 'leash' area for shared credit should be larger than it is. As long as everyone is moving around and trying to contribute, they should be getting credit.
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I think this is a big thing here.. I never understood why questing in group was never really consistent..
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If you could compile a list of everything that doesn't share credit, that would be very helpful! Things should share.
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The only quest I have had any trouble completing is the burn the effigy quest, for all the others there were plenty of quest objectives. People tend to congregate in a smaller area than they need to. crooked corner for instance when there is also lots of the quest objectives in black hoods lair area.
 
I'm not going to complain about having to wait for respawns occasionally after how empty I know the game can be. It is sure as heck better than the alternative	
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			Thing I didn't like most is that the event instance is harder to do in a group. At least increase the prizes if it's done in a group, because it needs more coordination...	
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If you could compile a list of everything that doesn't share credit, that would be very helpful! Things should share.
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			In regards to the effigy part, we have an official response here.	
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Hey, let's talk a little bit about quest design and why public events aren't really the best fit for all the content we offer during a holiday.
 
Public events look at a given space and can affect anyone within that space. We obviously want people to do something in order to get their reward, right, which requires contribution of some sort. Giving people credit for being in the right place but not contributing would only encourage people to go AFK in that space while a couple of saps did all the work. But what happens when you're earnestly trying but didn't get contribution? What happens when you luck out and do practically all the work yourself? Shouldn't you get more for your work? Where do the rest of the people stand?
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