I meant no insult. Lusternia's got the best questing of any MUD I've ever played, and I've played quite a few. That being said, you can only do so much with text. Unless you can put in active AI into the mud (major lag?), there's no way you can make the quests any more difficult, varied, or replayable then has already been accomplished. Lusternia also has a wide variety of quests, but if you are an experienced quester you can still easily break down any quest in Lusternia into components, and from those components quickly find a way to resolve them.

That's why difficulty is mostly be based off how difficult creatures are to kill if you have to kill something. In order to make quests accessible to most people, you'll have to limit how intricate the puzzles are. I feel Lusternia maintains the balance between difficulty and accessibility rather well.

I'm just in a bad mood of late, so I may come off as harsh lately. Lusternia is still my favoirte IRE game, even if I don't play much, and a lot of it has to do with the unique questing! (And new areas, though woe on lack of commodities.)

Only if you have an IQ of 200.

I would not say that Sudoku, MindTrap, Matrices, Clue ect, are all puzzles or games of equal dificulty.

The mindtrap like part of Spectre isle, is much easier to 'run through' then the stewarts 'Clue' like aspects. i.e. you can finish spectre Isle with trial and error, but if you do Stewarts with trial and error, you die.

You can actually outrun the shadowy figure to kill it, or just outright kill it.

I would disagree with that help file. Heh. Anyways-- shadows are very easy because there's nothing involved. However, the basic aspect of village (and most other quests) is that there ARE "hidden things" in the rooms for you to probe and interact with. It's not something that has to be learned for one quest, but it is the basic system of pretty much all the quests. Put something about this in the Collegiums, and you're golden. The "how-to" part is more difficult, and differs from one place to another-- you still need to know this one basic part, however, for each of them.

I used to run all the way northeast and close the door-- or wait for the figure to come to me, leave, and close the door. Then I'd sit there and listen to it bang on the door for a while until it went away. I think it broke through one, one time-- so I ran and closed another door. Heh.

That was before I figured out how to make it so that I didn't have to guess on that one, but would know the correct one each time-- but still, when I was a little newbie, figuring out how to trick that evil shadowy figure was a grand achievement.

Some of those quests are hard to get started. Like Delport. I can't do that quest. I can't touch that quest. I can get all the clues in the world, but I can't figure out how to get people to interact. Or Xion. I had no idea that place had a quest until this thread. Stewartsville is a very standard-issue quest. I think. From what Xenthos is saying, I must be missing a step between gathering all the stuff that falls and getting a result. He always says that the evidence is bad.

I suppose you could improve questing in Lusternia if you appointed Divine as Quest-only Divine that their sole task would be to periodically update and change quests on a regular basis.

I've posted similar examples of this quest scheme before in either here or Aetolia's forums, maybe both, but here are examples of changing quests:

Establishing factions between Mobile nations, both controlled and uncontrolled by Organizations. Politics between factions would shift and change as more tasks are completed, or goals are betrayed.

- Example: Become a messenger for the Kepheran Queen to establish communications with the Igasho in Snow Valley.
- Applying to above: Become a spy in service of the Illithoids to sabotage a treaty drawn by the Igasho to declare the two at war.

Effects of wars/peace between factions? In the case of the racial war situation as stated above, Kephera may gain a bonus to attacking any Igasho, Igasho to any Kephera and may be aggressive depending on how serious the war is.

Think of it as maintaining a balance. You've got -100% | XXXXXXXX |0| +++++++++ | 100%, where factions become allied/enemied depending on the balance is maintained.

Another example of active change is incorporating events that may change the personality of a person. Maybe the orcs of Acknor could convince a furrikin or tae'dae to give a chokeberry elixir to Yojimbo that causes him to become loyal to the orcs.

-------------------------------------

Anyway, a basic quest guide:

* Most important, PAY ATTENTION to everything. Even what might seem really trivial could be intrinsic to completing the quest.
* Greet mobiles. They likely will let you know if they have a task for you.
* Gather raw commodities and turn them in. You might inadvertently find something out.
* If you see something, pick it up. Give it to anyone you can find. Mention the object around all NPCs, even unnamed ones. You might find something out.
* Items/mobiles can be pushed, pulled, turned, probed, touched, and store items.
* It's better to probe then look.
* Read descriptions and probe anything suspicious about them. Then probe anything suspicious about the suspicious items. Example:


* Act randomly. Who knows what event you might trigger?
* Look for hidden exits (look at descriptions, walk randomly, pull levers, et cetera). An annoyance about lots of quests is that the important places tend to be hidden.

See, that's a 'can you subdue the assassin' difficulty. If you're level 50, it doesn't pose a problem.

Well-- pretty much every place released has a quest. That's standard issue with areas, and the general reason for new areas being "slower" to release than they might otherwise be.

Well, as I just said-- you don't even have to be able to subdue it. You can trap it, or just run away.

I feel so dumb after reading this thread.

I agree.

I have been playing since open beta, and haven't ever done a single one of Lusty's honours quests. I usually keep myself busy with RP stuff/bashing/guild and city stuff/events/etc. and never got around to it. From what I've seen of them, though, they do seem more difficult than people are rating them here. Of course, that's simply because I haven't done them, so obviously they will seem more difficult.

Me too. The only honours quests I've managed to finish so far are likely the ones with the highest ratio of killing things versus messing with objects and looking for hidden things (Tosha and gorgogs). With everything else I tend to get distracted and move on before figuring it out.

What about the mini game ones like Dairuchi, Cankermore or Angkrag? Doesn't involve killing things or much figuring out. There's lots of different kinds of quests in Lusternia and I find alot of them are fun to do even after getting the honours line. I got up to level 60+ with just quests because I find bashing to be extremely boring.

I'm not sure if this already is in the HELP files, but maybe a list of actions that you CAN do with things? Like USE, TWIST, PUSH, etc.

A file like THE ENVIRONMENT, and suggesting that you can interact in different ways.

There's an earlier post that pretty well describes how to do things.

For our quests, turn on VERBOSE or make frequent use of LOOK, look for items in the room, then PROBE random stuff. Everything you can interact with can be probed. Then, once you find something, interact with it. TURN, PUSH, PULL, and OPEN are the standard-issue ones.

...but yeah. Some of the "easy" ones aren't so easy without knowing where to start. Generally, once you do the first step or two of the quest, the process becomes much more straightforward.

There's not going to be a definitive list because every emote out there could be used, and a few are. USE is an emote, for instance. That said, the builders almost always stick to the non-emote commands listed previously (touch, pull, push, turn, open, close) plus USE, simply because other emotes are rarely appropriate.

I feel ashamed too. I cut my teeth on Infocom games decades ago. I guess I like playing with real people more than Mobiles.

But I did try to do the Stewartsville one this morning.

Damn cloaked figure got me twice!

Since this topic started, I've been trying to do the quests on the list.

The only one I've managed to do since then is the Paavik one, although I've nearly figured out Toronada, Tolborolla, Estelbar, and Shanthmark.

The Estelbar one is making me very frustrated. It all seems like guesswork at a certain point.

Don't forget TOUCH, and USE is (occasionally) important.