Consider this quest: Aspiring warrior character gets simple quest from NPC: procure a sword so that i can train you in ways of swordsmanship.
Because NPC did not specify exact sword source, player is free to obtain weapon in any way he seems is best: Kill stuff until he gets sword weapon drop, Buy it from NPC or player, craft it himself, retrieve it from bank, etc …
Moreover, player is free to come back with plainest of plain weapons or with artifact so powerful that he barely has statistics to wield it.
This is self scaling quest: Player can simply go to NPC and buy cheapest word available. Or he can venture to deepest dungeon and baddest boss and return back with sword made of wondefonium. But this will affect reward:
Both players will receive skills they want, but the one that took harder way might receive bonus bonus. For example player that chose to craft his sword himself would get small experience boost for Agility or for Weapon Crafting, and this reward would be substantially better should he decide to craft costly masterpiece.
Goal is to enable low cost, and quick quest competition while encouraging players to find harder and harder ways to complete said quest because it would give them better rewards.
Non comprehensive list of “Item Sources” in list roughly ordered by their “Quest Value”:
* Chest loot / picked up unassigned item. * NPC Vendor * NPC Corpse * NPC Pocket * Bank (items owned by player for more than X days) * Auction * Direct player trade * Crafted * Boss corpse * “Unique” Boss corpse
Hi there,
First comment here on what, I hope, will be a long-lasting blog ;)
Great idea, but I’d argue that it’s geared towards experienced players, which know the various ways to get the item and have access to a well-populated storage.
You need to provide hints to the different ways that a new player could satisfy the requirements: maybe have a special marker on top of NPCs, but rather than on the head you’d put it as a yellow “badge”, only visible when you come close to the NPC or a yellow blinking sign the auction house (if there’s one). Even filter the trade chat for interesting words “sword” and highlight them in yellow. Stuff like that.
Talk to you soon!
— Fril Estelin · 18 September 2008, 15:17 · #