Story Arcs For Quester Givers in EQFollow

Hey. That guy is a genius!

One thing I'd add, is that CoH had a really really good scaling system for their missions. They were just as doable solo as in a full group. They additionally had a difficulty slider that allowed you to set your own difficulty for your missions. This just changed the level and composition of the NPCS in the missions. Difficulties actually alternated as you moved them up between increasing the level of the mobs, and adding an extra mob to a spawn. Lowest difficulty would have mostly just minions, with the occasional lieutenant (often as the "main bad" in the mission). Top level difficulty tended to have spawns with more bosses accompanied by a minion, or two lieutenant spawns (for those not aware, mobs in CoH came in three flavors, minions, which were super easy, lieutenants, which were tougher and tended to have special abilities, and bosses, which were equivalent to basic nameds in EQ). It was a great system that allowed you to adjust to your own character's capabilities and sometimes to the type of mobs you were going to encounter, since some were inherently more difficult for some character types. Additionally, having more characters in your group meant bigger spawn sizes (ie: number of mobs in a spawn spot). It worked really really well.

I would absolutely love if EQ could figure out a way to adopt something like this. The HAs are already part way there, but as configured now, provide no means to adjust difficulty, and don't actually scale much to group size. They also need to be faster. Part of the issue is the scaling thing. The number of mobs you need to kill or items to collect in each stage don't actually seem to change based on group numbers. So having a group means completing the HA faster (much much faster), than trying to solo it. Which is great if you can get a group when you want to play. But not so great if you have a shortish amount of time to play and don't have a group of people lined up to play with at that time. In CoH, you could generally complete a mission solo or grouped in about the same time (since the mob number scaled directly to the group size), and most missions could be completed in 30 minutes or less. This meant you could just log on whenever you wanted, and if you could get into a group, that was great, but if you couldn't, you could still bang out a mission or three depending on the time you had to play solo, and not ever feel like you were "stuck" waiting for something else to happen so you could play.

Dunno. I really really liked their system. It made everything from casual up to guild (super group) play fun and engaging. I'm not sure if the devs would ever have the time or inclination to implement something like this, but it does seem as though the HAs are a step in the right direction. But it's still somewhat incomplete. If they could actually develop a level/number scaling system for them, then they could much more easily create new HAs for any level range, with any type of mob, in any zone. Once that's done, then creating task givers to hand out tasks that involve them becomes a pretty simple bit of coding. This would be a much easier way to "revamp" older zones, without actually having to change the zones themselves. Just add in some task givers (or use existing NPCs for this), and use the HA system for most of the tasks (some could certainly still involve doing stuff in the normal non-instanced zone of course).

I think the biggest obstacle to changing old content and zones is, well, changing the old content and zones. My understanding is that the code that handles the older EQ zones is "funky" (yes, that's a technical term), and really really really hard to change without affecting other random stuff you probably didn't think was going to be affected. Stuff like "if we move this NPC from point A to point B, half the mobs in the zone will start pathing under the ground, and we don't know why". I think if they can first create a standard system for creating/scaling tasks/HAs, then they should be able to utilize that code for any level, mob, or zone. Theoretically, at least. And that would be much easier than trying to make manual changes to every zone in the game.