Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Silly Daily Quest Logic

One of the quirks of the Daily quest system is the need to explain why the questgiver actually wants to pay players to do the same thing every day. Case in point, the Kalu'ak rep grind raises some interesting questions about the black market for Wolvar puppies amongst other things. Sometimes the quests make sense, but sometimes you have to wonder about the people paying your quest bill. Here are a few favorites from the dailies I've been doing recently.

How to Motivate Your Troops, by Captain Rupert
The Troll Patrol dailies in Zul Drak would actually make a fair amount of sense - there are posts around the zone that are under attack, and each post may be facing different issues on any given day. The quirky part is the behavior of one of the Captains.

Captain Rupert is an officer in the Argent Crusade. Some days he needs you to inspire his recruits, who are suffering from low morale for some reason. Other days, he orders you to burn the bodies of the fallen so they don't rise again as evil undead.

Well, actually, it's not so much "burn" as "detonate". And the poor recruits are watching you swoop in demonstrate what their fate will be if anything happens to them - there won't be enough left to send home in a box.

Somehow, the Captain never seems to think the two are connected.

Who exactly is losing their minds?
Not to pick on the Argent Crusade, but their other daily quest, Slaves to Saronite, also has some logic questions. A priest, Absalan the Pious asks Alliance players to rescue slaves from the Saronite mines. Unfortunately, the mines drive people crazy. As a result, the questgiver tells you to wait a day before going to rescue more slaves to preserve your sanity. Fair enough. Only problem is, if you complete the quest again tomorrow, he will be just as shocked to hear that the mines are driving people nuts as he was the first time.

The solution would have been to have a non-repeatable first round where the priest is shocked, and then have the repeatable version remark that yep, the mines are still making people crazy. But hey, what's a little logic when it comes to nutty quest givers? Just no one tell him that we're turning the slaves loose to run into the Vrykul village, where they are likely as not to be killed or recaptured anyway, he might really lose it.

Why wipe them out when you can hurt their feelings?
The Death Knight Baron Sliver wants you to demoralize the local Vrykul. To do this, he has you slaughter 15 of them per day and plant ebon blade banners on the bodies for good measure. He hands this quest out to probably hundreds of players per day, and it's actually hard to find living Vrykul to kill for quests in the area because they're all dead with banners sticking out of them.

All of which begs the question of why we want to demoralize the enemy if we could just kill them outright. I guess those Death Knights can be mean when they set their minds to it.

4 comments:

  1. I honestly wonder if the Wolvar puppies are a source of food for the Tuskarr... something just seems... so... odd.

    Yeah, sometimes it's amusing to think about the logic (or lack thereof) behind the daily quests. For a flashback to SSO rep, I always got a kick out of needing to find the Sunfury attack plans every single day. I mean, did he keep losing them or what? :P

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  2. @D
    The Sunfury plans change every day, probably because they keep getting stolen.

    There was a post on general about someone RPing the Wolvar puppy quest. The basic scene was him handing over a bag of puppies for the purpose of preserving the race... and yet the Tuskarr who catch so little fish are so fat, and there are no puppies anywhere. He hands over the bag and accepts his payment.

    Rupert is clearly a pretty bad leader, which fits perfectly with the constant frightened crusaders.

    The rescue quest sounds like someone messed up when writing/designing the quest. A two-part quest would make a lot more sense.

    As a suggestion, if you're having trouble finding Vrykul to kill, go to the northern area where they are all fighting and AoE them down. You'll miss a lot of banners because of overlapping corpses, but it's still faster than racing for spawns elsewhere.

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  3. "As a suggestion, if you're having trouble finding Vrykul to kill, go to the northern area where they are all fighting and AoE them down. You'll miss a lot of banners because of overlapping corpses, but it's still faster than racing for spawns elsewhere."

    What Klep said =D

    First time viewer, I like...good reads

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  4. Yeah, the Sunfury plans need to change because people keep killing all the troops (but not enough troops to foil the attack outright, mind you). The better question is why Kael'thas is still allowing the footsoldiers to have paper copies of the plans. It's times like these that I think Aerothian Super Villians.

    And yes, I've gone AOE farming on the dualing Vrykul - as I commented, I actually had a hard time completing the quest that involves those mobs because people were slaughtering them to plant banners. :-/

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