by Potjeh » Fri May 09, 2014 11:36 am
Yeah, borka, village management tools are a must, but I was thinking more about a sort of a quest system where players script the quests to serve their own needs. We can sort of already make fetch item quests using barter stands, but it never really worked out because you can't make a stand both open to public and secure. But to really facilitate complex relations between players we need to be able to request any sort of actions to be performed and to automatically dispense quest rewards or at least some sort of a quest completion tokens so we know who to reward manually. The idea is to remove the administrative manhour costs from procuring services from other players, so it's not more efficient to just do it yourself. These services could range from things like paving tiles in a specific area or filling specific troughs to killing a specific character. Pretty much any action that a player could perform should be selectable as a trigger for quest completion. Of course, with services performed on your own property, you'd need to be able to set permissions so people can perform the quest action and nothing else (so someone who took your fill troughs quest could harvest a specified field and throw stuff into the throughs, but lifting a through or trying to take the produce outside in inventory would be treated as a crime by the game.
But getting people to do useful work for you is just the tip of the iceberg here. I think a quest scripting system would see far awesomer uses by creative people who use it for fun stuff. I can already see it being used for all sorts of competitions, for mindfucking other players, or for making a full blown "single player" RPG.

Bottleneck