How quests affect player behavior and gameplay

[Colin500]

Yup, another thread for this.

Due to the existence of the quests, people totally focus on improving their characters and forget about the village.
We can't do much to any person that we would want to help us expand, but rather does quests.

The whole idea of creating a village goes to hell once people learn that quests are a great way to improve your character. Greed and the desire to be better than anyone else takes over that player's mind.
The game loses its charm a lot once you understand that half of your gameplay will be just walking from a tree to tree over the whole map.

Due to everything mentioned above, the more alts you have, the better it will be for you, thus rewarding people with better PCs than can handle more game clients, more monitors etc.
If you're able to play on only one game client, and want to stay competitive, you'll become more of a parasite rather than a villager, as the early game requires a lot of input into the village.
All the LP rewards also affect the hermits a lot, people that are able to gain rage in few hours of the world start are successfully destroying anyone that is unable to defend, leaving lots of hermits and new players stranded in the world for the first few days.
Also quests are forcing the players to move further away from their village, and due to the distance travelled people often refuse to port back to help with something urgent.
Also travelling so far from the village at the early world meant more people being griefed.
It was highly noticeable by the fact that the only way to actually protect your claim from being destroyed, was to body block with 5-6 alts, which was nerfed now due to the push ability (meaning that the next world it will be even harder to protect your claim from being destroyed in the first 8 hours, like hell why does it take so long to maintain security somewhere!)

The game took a huge turn into a "Walking simulator", whereas DayZ had showed us that it's a way to discourage the players rather than attract them.
Trust me on this one, but the game was in a much better shape it was before the Quests than it is right now, the whole character progress is just too quick, you Jorb and Loftar, tried several times to slow down the progress of players, mostly noticable by mining changes.
Yet still the quests system completely crushes your idea of slow progression and turns it into a rat race.

I hereby announce the current quest system unsuitable, just the way it is present now, in a game genre like this.

TL;DR remove quest system (or at least LP and Hunger rewards, so that people focus more on doing credo > village > quests for xp and local area growth)

[Nexit]

Time to commence the quest giver genocide

[Nek]

This. I agree with everything said. Even the thing about villagers not wanting to TP back to help with things due to them being far away heading to more trees which they don't want to re-travel to is completely true.
Honestly at this point it doesn't even matter that a lot of threads are popping up talking about this, it is the primary issue in the game currently from my point of view and i can think of no better way for it to be heard.

[shubla]

I agree, I have been saying that quests are op and boring.
They should be nerfed or removed 100%

[Aceb]

On the other hand, You collect stuff while traveling. If people from my village aren't collecting shit and use this as an excuse to not do stuff when they have to, I just kick them off. No use from people who develop but not use that development.

[VDZ]

Quests aren't fundamentally a problem. It's just the way they are balanced. Nerf quests so they're no longer vital for competitive character progression but rather something you do on the side (as was originally intended), and the problem no longer exists.

[shubla]

Quests aren't fundamentally a problem. It's just the way they are balanced. Nerf quests so they're no longer vital for competitive character progression but rather something you do on the side (as was originally intended), and the problem no longer exists.

Satiations for quests?

Its hilarious to see how devs think that food is an issue and it must be nerfed while they do nothing to the quests

[VDZ]

Quests aren't fundamentally a problem. It's just the way they are balanced. Nerf quests so they're no longer vital for competitive character progression but rather something you do on the side (as was originally intended), and the problem no longer exists.

Satiations for quests?

Would still make quests on empty satiations the optimal way to progress. Quests simply shouldn't be the optimal way to progress but rather a bonus you can get while you're traveling/doing whatever quests want you to do.

[Sevenless]

I fully agree that the quest system needs some sort of rework, but there's a premise in your post that's very much deja vu for me. In fact I've heard this argument about many game activities for years now.

"People won't help the village, they're busy bucketing".

"People won't help the village, they're busy hunting".

"People won't help the village, they're foraging eibelweisse for themselves"

"People won't help the village, they're questing"


There's problems with the quest system, but the argument you're using against it is that there should basically be no way to progress your character outside village growth. Any time that exists, there will be bad villagers that are doing more for themselves than for the village. But removing any form of self improvement to force people to play better together... that's not the game's job. Cohesive groups should be rewarded for skillfully organizing themselves and working hard as a team instead of just for the individual. And I say this knowing I'll never be on that team too.

[Colin500]

You must understand that there will be that day, where a villager will say "i'm full with food and curios" and will be able to sit idle in village, whilst quests are a never ending story.