The toxicity of questing in MMORPGs today

[Seig345]

ok right of the start the subject did loose me.... older mmorpg with a complex story line? seriously? which one please? [...]

If you reread carefully, the article begins by talking about regular, singleplayer RPGs, and then moves on to MMORPGs afterwards.

I feel like it is a given that your progress will feel impersonal because these are RPGs, not fantasy world simulators, which is what would be required to have spontaneously generated content that everyone and their mom hasn't done too.

If you take Skyrim for example; you create your own persona in Tamriel and you alone are the hero/antihero the npcs talk to. There's no multiplayer so its just you running around the world. But then remember that while you cant see them, hundreds of thousands of other gamers are experiencing all the same content you are. The only unique experiences to you might be a funny combination of glitches.

It's just a little easier to pretend otherwise when you don't see other people running around killing the same legendary bad guy.

[Norleas]

Questing wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't wash and repeat so often. It's usually "go here and kill 10 of this monster for whatever reason" or "talk to this guy all the way over here, then come all the way back over here" etc. I don't even do quests anymore in this game, despite there being sooo many, I usually just level off of dungeons. Even that after a certain amount of time can be pretty repetitive too.

[silentwindfr]

that a debat we had recently on the french forum, the Warrior of Light is not only one person, it was told to us that we are a lot to have receive the echos. we are ONE of the warrior of light. indeed some question will make it quite inpersonal to have the same quest... but depending of the job you play the first time you do the quest you will not have the same feeling in the end. let's take the exemple of the msq that make you do trial, if you are a healer or a tank or a dps, your feeling about this trial will change, indeed the end of the story will be the same for everyone, but it can't be helped.

but like i said, why care? i do my stuff, if someone do it too why i care? we can discuss and maybe we will not have the same understanding, allowing us to discuss how it did evolve.

but in all honesty, the quest system is only a cover for the bashing of monster. do you want to come back in the time you had no quest and was only killing monster? no because it was the system of the V1.... in the V1 you had 1 story quest every 5 level and most of your exp was done with monster party, do it was more funnier? less grindy? more....real? no because tons of people was killing the same monster spawning at the same point at the same given time.

when you play a multiplayer game you can't expect to have a solo experience. some stuff will be generic whatever they do. an example that seems quite nice, from yoshida while the fanfest, when someone have said why my character can't heal when i'm scolar/white mage/astrologian? the question was clever, and yoshida have said they will try to take this in account in the futur, but he did say too that if a character needed to die, they will die! because in the end, the story must go in the sense they want.
even in solo game in the end we go where the dev choose we go... it's always artificial and inpersonal, tons of tons of people will do it too.

do i feel the quest system is perfect, hell no, but it's far better than some alternative we have for now.

[Atoli]

• 1. Other players do the same quests: Does not bother me one bit. I'm the hero of my own story, if you are overly obsessed with what others do, well, that's your problem.
• 2. You have to complete several quests to level up: So..? I take "doing 15 quests that give me a reason to slay 40 monsters to level up" over "slaying 40 monsters without purpose (just for the exp)" everyday.. And don't even start acting as if grinding mindlessly was not a part of old-time RPGs. Because it absolutely was.
• 3. You can't leave the area without finishing all quests first: This might be the one I can get behind the most out of everything he said. I always loved the thrill of sneaking through high-level areas as a lowbie, and FFXIV gives you several roadblocks here (lvl 15 airship needed to even be allowed off Vylbrand, all of 2.x to enter Ishgard (although I can get behind this decision because it is heavily story-related, and old single-player locked certain areas behind story progression too)..
• 4. Quests are boring anyway so me and my friends don't read them. They can't make sense anyway because I'm a hero and a hero shears no sheep: Most gamers I know read the text. I read the text. THe stories that unfold are often interesting, fun, expand on the world's lore or have a lot of togue-in-cheek humour about how exactly the great hero of the land ended up shearing sheep. But I guess he did not know that since he skips all the text..
• 5. There is no reason to revisit older areas: FATEs, hunts, maps, main story, etc. all lead players back to the low level areas in FFXIV. While I do agree that there is absolutely not enough reason to really explore areas except for maybe the sightseeing log, his complaint completely misses the point.

This entire article sounds to me as if someone forgot he put on his nostalgia glasses when he went outside and now he is back home but the shades are still on..
He even mentions all the dynamic content and alternatives to questing in today's MMOs but quickly dismisses them as being "the same mechanics under a different name", acting as if mindlessly slaying monsters wasn't a part of the games of old where he talks about "natural story progression". Well, guess how many rats and goblins and slimes I slayed in the old days to just get from point A to point B in older RPGs >.>

But hey, that's like, just his opinion so who am I to judge? If he doesn't enjoy today's MMOs anymore, well, too bad. I still do, many others still do, and all the things that frustrate him make me and many others happy.

[Sandpark]

Questing in concept is not toxic, open world grinding in concept is not toxic. A repeated formula omitting player input and removing variables input is the toxic part that questing entails.

For event/method of questing: The Action Process(The mechanics)
I see quests as jobs. We have 100s of professions in the real world. Most real life professions require different methods of getting the job done. A hunter's quest involves far more than traveling to said location and killing something. There are methods of tracking, using right bait or trap, choice of weapon, approach, and various other things. While tracking a small creature, you could stumble into a bear or whatever and your hunting trip changes. In most online worlds, it is just travel here, kill that, RNG drop rates. The same UI, same flavor, most is achieved the same way regardless of the type of job.

The Action Process Fix:
The fix is situation dependent mechanics and each profession/quest to require different mechanics from another.It is expensive to a developer because it requires a larger cost and more time since assets cannot be reused as much. One example of the quest action process fix is the recent Haunted Manor event. It is relatively simple, and could be annoying to some. But as far as difference? It feels night and day different from traveling from one npc to the next for dialogue that does not change.

The Variable Process
No job or hobby or quest is worthwhile or begs your attention if there is no chance of different outcomes. The bad example of this is RNG when talking about rewards. I am speaking of the actual quest having a chance to be different. This can be applied as flavor or actual permanence in dialogue. Or a variable can be applied to the route you take in accomplishing a task. Take x route may be safer but will take longer, where as taking Y route that passes through area could be faster but you may run into trouble. A shape-able or changing world can alter those variables even further but that goes into the realm of if it is fair or not to the majority in a massive multiplayer game.

I see some talk down to open world monster slaying. To me that is less tedious than quest zerging. I consider crafting, harvesting, and questing all busy work when I am trying to play a battle class. That is one thing I loathed in Dragon Age Inquisition. It is especially less tedious when world enemies have unique traits and mechanics that make them behave differently from the other world species. Which results in emergent gameplay, as in being clever with pulls to party, being sneaky, learning surrounds so as you don't need a map to know where key locations are. Another addition to slaying is an actual group skill synergy system like Renkei, GW2 combos, ESO synergy, Lotoro Fellowship Manevuer, etc. All this adds up to the world being more immersive

Ending thought:
I think regardless of what happens with questing. The focus of the game should be adaptive scaling. You have to either group or solo MSQ. You either group or solo alot of things. Most combat stuff is solo meaning you master your rotation and dodge your mechanics. With no synergy between jobs or ways of dealing with difficult obstacles. Yes, you are in a party but you don't really synergize to a great extent.Most content imo, should be adaptive to allow a solo and scale according to group members. There should be party quest which is what guildleves was trying to be originally but they stopped developing it.

[Avenger]

It does seem like the quests are formulaic in single-player as well as multiplayer CRPGs, with probably less than a dozen basic varieties: fetch quests, delivery quests, hidden object quests, stealth quests, escort missions, kill X monster quests, puzzle/riddle quests, etc.. After doing something like 50 hours of sidequests in Nier I didn't even bother with the rest of them for the trophy, simply because they seemed so tedious.

MMOs (and probably some offline games) add repeatable dungeons, boss battles, and quests, which are a two-edged sword: it's nice to be able to revisit particularly cool battles or areas more than once, but if you do it too many times it can become tedious and boring. Offline games also recycle the same areas using New Game+, much as FFXIV reuses areas and enemies for hard/expert/savage modes.

That being said, I think the original article nails it by referring to the 36 dramatic situations. Movies, plays, books, TV shows, comics, etc. all repeat these scenarios ad nauseam, but we keep coming back for more for some reason. Presumably RPG (both online and offline) stories could (and should) be just as engaging. Popular music tends to reuse the same chord progressions, rhythms, melodies, lyrics, rhymes, themes, etc. but people keep listening to it!

At the end of the day I think it may largely be an issue of whether the RPG is well-written and whether each quest adds something interesting to the story or lore of the world. I tend to read all of the flavor text in FFXIV, and watch all cutscenes, simply because I enjoy the Final Fantasy-style story and I always want to find out more about the world and its inhabitants. I particularly enjoy when you have a series of quests that tell the story (or backstory) of a particular NPC that you happen to encounter or interact with regularly in the normal course of the game. The postmoogle quests were nice in this regard.

The key advantage of MMOs (and offline multiplayer RPGs) vs. offline RPGs isn't really quests; rather, it is that battles (and the game in general) can be much more challenging and unpredictable when you have multiple players involved. MMOs add all kinds of multiplayer interaction (cooperation, competition, economy, social interaction, etc.) which make repetitions of the same content more interesting. Players can even come up with ways to use the game content in creative ways (like the people on our server who made their own haunted house event this week for Halloween.) Online games are also constantly evolving in a way that offline games usually aren't - adding and refining content over years, often adding up to an amazing amount of it. Long-term grinds and progression limits can be annoying - I'm not entirely sure what I think of them. They're mostly a gimmick to keep you playing, delay completion of the content, and maximize subcription revenue. But there is a slightly appealing aspect to having long-term goals that people (with more time than you) can't simply blast through in a week. And I definitely like well-designed, long-lived battles that take a while to master and you can't simply phone in even when you have beaten them a number of times. The ongoing metagame of "every player in the game vs. the game developers" is something I greatly appreciate.

p.s. Regarding grinds: largely for completionist reasons I expect, I finished Yo-Kai, but I think it diminished my appreciation of the game somewhat. Perhaps it was a trick by the developers to prevent people from complaining about the next relic grind or something.

p.p.s. Good construction systems tend to increase longevity of any game. In FFXIV we see this in glamours/dying and house design.

[Dzian]

why care about what the other did do? that the real trouble of the mmorpg world now... people are always looking at what the other do. they check what raid they did complete, if they was the first and such... if they do the story and such... who care, the point is to do your stuff,.

Traditionally speaking one of the most appealing things about rpgs for many players is the way there characters grow and become more powerful as they play. everything you do makes you stronger or a bigger "hero" within the game world.

as a result of this what other players do does factor into it. clearing xelphatol for example in the latest patch doesn't make you feel particularly heroic because its something within the game that virtually everyone has done. and the point of being a hero is doing things others could not...

you could look at any old story for example. david and goliath. would david be a hero to the people if every single one of the people was also a giant slayer? no he wouldn't he'd just be another one of the people. probably wouldn't even know his name.

so in that same fashion, its easy to see why players do look at what others have done, it's why you see people afk in iddyllshire swinging there new axe or wearing that new armor, having something others don't have adds to the hero element. it's something that sets you apart from the world and helps you feel a hero.

being "bob the ifrit crusher" for example isn't anywhere near as heroic or as being "bob the vanquisher of alexander" mostly because everyone has killed ifrit so theres nothing special or heroic about it. and many would say the main draw of RPG is the heroic feeling your character gains as you play.

[Atoli]

it's something that sets you apart from the world and helps you feel a hero.

Nothing ever will set you apart from everyone else unless the entire game was made entirely only for you.

Currently, most of my friends are playing the 20 year edition of Rise of the Tomb Raider. It's a single player game, but of course we talk about it.
Going by your logic, going up against Trinity, uncovering all these secrets, etc. is not worth anything, because the others are doing the same.
But you might argue that it doesn't count because Lara is a properly established character, not a blank slate like the WoL.

Well, then let's look at other games that have fairly blank slates; since the article has nostalgia written all over it, how about Pokemon Red/Blue?
As a child/teenager, when you finally beat the Pokemon League, or completed the Pokedex and exitedly told your friends in school,
did it also take away from your enjoyment that they had also beaten the PL or saved the world from Team Rocket?
I assume not. Why should that be different in MMOs? You know the other players are real people too, so why does it bother you that other real players go through the same story and finish the same achievements?

In YOUR version of the story, YOU are the hero.
The game might aknowledge that others are there and helped you, but you are the only one in YOUR perspective who is special.
Just how YOU were the new champ in your copy of Red/Blue and your friend was in his
I do not see any reason why others having the same story is detrimental to your own experience other than robbing you of a fake sense of being better than others in real life, which is just sad, if you actually need that feeling to enjoy a game.
If you want to be proud of actual non-made up achievements, then beat extra hard fights that are not part of the story but show your actual superior ability to play the game well (in this case, savage mode, I guess?).

[Felis]

as a result of this what other players do does factor into it. clearing xelphatol for example in the latest patch doesn't make you feel particularly heroic because its something within the game that virtually everyone has done. and the point of being a hero is doing things others could not...
.

Back in the time, nobody complained about that they were not the only one who defeated Sephiroth in FF VII, but millions of players around the world did the same.

Within the story the other players are irrelevant. They are just adventurers who help you.
Those who complain about it have not mastered the "see the world through the eyes of the character and ignore what you know as a player" thing.

[Grant_Wilshire]

To make something cheap and available to the masses there are not a lot of different formulas. Developers can't make a unique experience for all users and at the same time make it quick and cost effective.

The very nature of it being an RPG also limits how the character needs to level up and develop skills. Otherwise a game could be completely skill based and still a MMO, but each user would tackle dungeons or events by how good they actually play instead of leveling up. Like playing a Legend of Zelda game but online, or a platformer.