Something I miss in RPGs is the collection of items to use in multiple quests. For example, some creature drops a foo. Three denizens need a foo for various reasons. As a reward, you might get gold, you might get less gold and a foo2, or you might get a bar7.

These other objects would, in turn, be of use to other denizens.

Now, the way this differs from existing Item-to-Denizen quests is that the aforementioned foo might be used along with the foo2, 3 gem commodities and the shamrock by some process or yet another denizen. You might hold onto these items for a while, deciding what to do with them. Hence, rather than the quest objects poofing after a set period of time or on a timer, give them a few months of decay time. Have them generated, rather than reused. Of course, ensure that shops do not freeze decay times on these items so they aren't hoarded indefinitely.

This opens up opportunity for item trading and selling. They might also serve as an interesting twist to commodities. Some commodities are needed by certain denizens (along with any foos or bars), and some denizens may give you other commodities. It could even develop into 'epic' quests along the scale or greater even than the Undervault quests, but since the items remain longer, it becomes something you can work on a bit at a time with room for breaks or interruptions.

This is something that occurred to me as missing in Lusternia. Though I do like the short and simple quests, I also enjoyed the longer multi-part and multi-ending quests of certain other games. Just avoid having the various quest items be of a single class. That is, don't make all the quest items crystals, but instead you might have Sweetpeas looking for a rare silver baking pan (foo), or Meleris looking for a rare wand of magical ice (foo2). The 'rare' in the name might be the tipoff. And yes, make the various quest-takers be in all sorts of locations. Not every quest needs to be equally available. You could even overlap and have one quest giver/taker take on different items and give different rewards. Or even select ones giving random rewards from a list.

Eventually, most of these should pan out into gold and small numbers of commodities. Larger ones might result in a large karma/xp boost along with a large-ish number of one commodity. The largest should result in an honours title and perhaps a temporary stat boost.

Note that the beginning of these quests should probably come from an item dropping (again, emphasis on rare) from a creature. Alternatively, as a rare byproduct of certain other activities. Herbalists might find a rare five leaf clover while harvesting chervil. Enchanters might spark off a rare mote of cyclical energies. For example, the aforementioned silver baking pan, might drop rarely from rockeaters, more commonly from undervault rockeaters, and more commonly still from brownies. This latter helps promote, in some small way, conflict. If we really wanted to get into epic style quests with larger rewards, you might need to slay Raziela for distilled innocence - thus making that particular item hotly contested.

Make certain quest items available only to those with a particular skill. Even guild skills. Whether or not those quest items are particularly of use to that guild. Encourage the items to trade hands.

Of course, a careful eye must look over the available quests to ensure they're of similar availability to every org and class.

If this works out well, perhaps consider existing quest items generating with brief (1 month?) decay times, rather than how they currently operate. Or in some cases longer, if they get intertwined with these new quests.

interesting...

For every moment that a quest item doesn't decay, it is a moment that the quest cannot be done by anyone else.

I disagree.

That is the case when quest items are reused, as in the current system. With this proposal, quest items are not unique so much as rare, with that rarity being tweakable. As these quest items are instead generated rather than planted on mobs to be reused, there could very well be 3 'rare silver baking pan' in existence at one time. Again, just as an example.

I think one of the reasons why anything decays at all is that if they didn't, we'd be left with a considerable amount of lag. May be wrong though.

Sorry, we specifically do not want to generate quest items like that for both coding and implementation reasons.

Just as a guess, this would mean... what... 100 more items in game at any given time? 200? 500? That's all up in the air based on whatever is the defined drop rate of these rare items. All other factors remaining or changing as they may, the drop rates can be altered. Maybe it will be too much server load, but it wouldn't seem so to me.

Eldanien carries over a 100 items on him. So this would be like having a few more of him in the game, only without the connection load (which is significant) and parsing actions. A few more quest denizens, maybe.

Yeah, I would imagine more items means more server lag. If nothing else, indexing and item search for the firing of various actions. I don't think this would be a large hit, though.

By comparison, increasing village commodities production by 10% would see a lot more items in game than this change. The cheaper things are relative to the work obtaining them, the more people will go beyond necessity and wear more clothing or carry more oddments with them. Shops will see larger inventories.

At least, that's what seems the case to me. There may be other technology limits that I'm not anticipating.

Ah, was writing all that out and missed Estarra's post. That would seem to end this idea cold, unless there were some other way to maintain state in quests set up. But as well, that would likely cut out the ability to cooperate on quests, trade off items/quest accomplishments to get what you yourself are unable, so on.

You don't understand how items are coded in the game. I don't either. However, remember, that will play into it.


And isn't coding and implementation the same thing?

Eh, sort of. Coding is the actual doing it, implementation is the more of how it's done. Or you might write a lot of code, and then implement it into the game. It might be one thing to code the quest, another to implement it into Lusternia as a whole.

I kind of like the idea questions boosting trading and selling. Just some random idea from my brainstorming:

Could denizens accept player made things for quests? I can see people just churning out products to give to the quest giver. But what about limiting the amount of times the player can complete the quest?

There we go -- hobos in Snow Valley and throughout the mountains who are hanging on to life by a thread and need clothed and fed

Then theres the evil side...

Put the things out of their misery, before raising them as undead to serve in the city as servants.