Double-posting, because I'm a Wordy McWorderson.

Quote Originally Posted by RitsukoSonoda View Post
The game literally tells you exactly where to go for every quest objective outside of a handful of quests they intentionally designed to not fully track in the quest tracker.
To counter-argue, I will point to investigation missions in The Secret World.

Now, I loved those. When you figured out the answer to a riddle and translated it into Latin to be able to unlock a passage? Or you successfully figured out a chemistry-based cipher and turned molecular formulas back into readable text that told you where to find the thing you were looking for? Or you went onto a real website for a fake in-game company, downloaded the service manual for the particular model of radio receiver you were trying to use that was broken, read the section on improvised repairs, went to collect materials, and then repaired the radio just to be able to hear a Morse Code transmission you then had to translate to be able to know where to go next?

When you figured one out, the rush of "I solved the damn thing!" was incredible. Every time I saw the investigation icon for an available mission, I had both a sense of dread—how much time was I going to lose to solving it this time?—and excitement, because YAY PUZZLE TIME! And oh, that heady rush of victory.

But a huge number of players hated them. Quests that just said something like "Decipher the code and retrieve the artifact." as the 'goal' text from the moment you accepted the mission until the moment you concluded it drove many people batty, and no few of them said those quests were "too time-consuming to solve" and would just go read solutions out on the web.

What I take from that is that many players want to 'optimize' the time it takes to do content, and prefer things to be ones where you don't have to spend 45 minutes to do something (solve a cipher and then interpret the resulting deciphered clue, go to a place, and fight your way through monsters to get a thing) when it could be just 5 minutes (go to a place and fight your way through monsters to get a thing).