Idea to improve yellow side quests: doing them should give gemstones/shared fate lvls

There was a discussion about side quests on r/ffxivdiscussion about how to improve sidequests and in the course of that this idea hit me. It feels like an obvious change that should be made the more I think about it.

So the shared fate system was a great addition but it is still very tedious to grind fates for a lot of people. Then you have a separate issue where each zone in a new expansion is littered with side quests that the majority of players ignore. These side quests are generally uninteresting and over not a lot of EXP or rewards to make people go out of there way to do.

So what if completing a side quest awarded some bicolor gemstones and leveled up the zone’s shared fate progress? Now these yellow quests have a purpose and will help you work towards rewards and zone completion. Even if they don’t address the problem of the quests themselves being boring this would go a long way to making all of these quests littering the area actually purposeful. Now you’d have two avenues to get the shared fate rewards: those with a party or in the mood for combat can do fates while solo players who maybe want story content can opt to do sidequests. This reminds of what Guild Wars two does where doing quests and events in each zone ups your completion percentage. This is a step in addressing the common complaint that zones need more to do after MSQ to feel more alive

Thoughts?

Also here are some ideas to improve side quests in general:

- quality over quantity

- more interesting story quest chains with a emote or minion rewards at the end

- more EXP (if this is unbalanced somehow the bicolor/shared fate rewards should be sufficient, you could also have daily allowances for side quest max EXP gain)

- More solo duties. These have become some of the best singe player content in the game and some of these could really inject life into sidequests if feasible (they don’t have to on the level of in the cold or anything).

If they did this, and amped the EXP reward from them, I'd likely bother to do sidequests. There's still the issue for me of quest pacing in general being so mind-numbingly slow that I can't stand to do them for long, but even just implementing this elevates sidequests up to the status of being relevant at all, so it's a yes from me.

Honestly just the EXP would motivate a lot of people.
Alternatively, make them actually interesting. There're some side quests that are in fact absolute bangers... and I nearly skipped them, because 90% of the other sidequests I did before that were just boring fetch quests. So you have something that's likely to be dull af, and unrewarding af. Of course no one is gonna do it.
Sick of every cutscene having stilted cardboard looking dudes standing around spamming /handover at each other, man. I know it's a tall order (apparently) but if all the side quests were expressive like hildibrand or engaging like sui no sato/the steppe quests, I'd do literally every single one.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mayhemmer

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Your glamour and avatar are S-tier awesome. :)

I did the quest The Greatest Story Never Told, without online help (my husband was also doing the same quest, even though our riddles were different sometimes).

All I got was 10 Gil and an Achievement, but I would loved something additional. (Almost tempted to make a tee-shirt out of it IRL)

A suggestion I made previously was that side quests would use the armoury bonus (which is a 50% exp bonus), although even then some side quests might need a further boost lol. FATE exp makes a lot of the side quest rewards look bad. I certainly would take the bicolor gem idea too though (and the level of the zone)!

Side quests should give 5-7% xp towards the next level if you're level appropriate for the level/expansion. It's ridiculous to have to do like 50 side quests for a single level on a single job.