Medievia Mudslinger

July 14th, 2001

Lorinda's Online Poll - Autoquests

On the 15th of February the autoquest module was introduced to the realm of Medievia for the first time. What are autoquests? If you are unaware of the nature of autoquests you are either a very new player, or retired! One of our players describes them as being "...sent to random corners of the map to have various body parts removed." This is not entirely accurate, although one must often travel to several locations to complete the quest.

An autoquest is very basically a series of objectives that must be completed, sometimes with certain restrictions. The objectives usually involve finding particular rooms, mobs or objects in the game, and the restrictions include such things as a time limit, having to find an original item (rather than buying it on auction), and having to complete the objective solo. Eventually, autoquests will become a part of multi-level requirements, meaning players must learn more about Medievia and perform a wider variety of tasks than ever before to reach the goal of becoming a hero. A detailed description of autoquests can be found in-game by typing "help autoquest", and the basic commands are listed under "help aq_commands".

A little while back I ran a poll to see how many people have tried autoquests, and what the general opinion of them is. The response was overwhelming, and a lot of people raised questions and issues along with their opinions. I compiled a list of these questions and started my own quest for the answers. I would like to thank Elorei for his time with answering some of these queries. I could not have completed all the objectives without his input!



Q. We are getting the same quests over and over.

A. The Autoquest Writing Assistants (AWAs) are writing new quests all the time, and as time goes on there will be a much greater variety of quests in the game.



Q. Some quests have objectives that I can't complete because of my alignment/class/level.

A. If any bugs of this nature are found they should be reported by emailing lebrun@medievia.com



Q. Autoquests are hard and time-consuming.

A. There wouldn't be much point if they were totally easy! All MLR requirements are supposed to be a challenge, and teach you more about the game.



Q. What if the zone doesn't repop fast enough, or someone kills the mob I needed?

A. There is now a system in place to deal with this. If the mob you need is dead when you enter the zone, a new one will pop that is bonded to you - only you can kill it.



Q. Why don't autoquests rent?

A. If they did, players would be able to abuse the system and autoquests would no longer be challenging.



Q. The quests are too hard/are not soloable/are insane for low level or single class characters.

A. All the necessary information for determining if a quest is too hard is kept by the game per quest. If you are an experienced player and feel that a particular autoquest is too hard please feel free to write to the Autoquest Manager (at the present time this is Lebrun.) He will be able to look at the quest data to see if it is being failed too much and make adjustments accordingly.



Q. Will there always be new quests added?

A. Lebrun hired a larger set of AWAs in March and they are currently still working on new quests. If the autoquest module is to be successful it must be continually added to, just as we add new zones in the zone building campaign.



Q. Will the autoquest module tie in with the new mob faction module when it is implemented?

A. There is currently no intention for the two to meet, though autoquest writers may afterwards take it upon themselves to include quests about battling with mob factions."



Q. When will autoquests become part of MLR?

A. The only thing holding us back is our lack of quests. I personally would like to see 1000 quests in the game before they are linked to MLR, however we may make attempts once we reach 500. This could be as early as this summer. (That's winter for all my fellow Aussies -L).



Q. When this happens will autoquests still be rewarded with cash, or just MLR points?

A. The cash bonus will probably disappear. I've provided for more versatile ways for the quest writers to reward players themselves and I would hope they would simply use this method to reward players more.



Q. When autoquests become a part of MLR will a player lose points for forfeiting quests? And if so will there be some sort of warning on quests that involve CPK before the penalty stage is reached?

A. They will probably lose points if they abandon the quest before completing the first objective. If the first objective takes place in CPK the player may be allowed to abort with no penalty.



Q. Will there ever be autoquests that are long and involved, perhaps running over several levels, or have a detailed plot to uncover, or that give points for each objective rather than completion of the whole quest?

A. There is already extensive code to allow for much longer and more detailed autoquests that involve more intricate player interaction. I won't give away any of these features yet, but new quests that are written based on these features will make our original aq's seem a bit 'primitive'.



Q. Any hints as to when and what we can expect regarding hero autoquests?

A. The code to reward heroes for autoquest activity is virtually done. The biggest hindrance to releasing it is our lack of quests. Hopefully once they get their feet wet in lower level quests, some of our more experienced AWA's will be allowed to venture into creating hero quests. We won't need as many autoquests to turn the hero code on as we will to turn MLR on, but we still need a lot more than we have.



And the most important questions of all were the questions I asked Medievia. "Have you done an autoquest yet and do you think they are a good idea?"

A total of 89 people responded to the poll, and from that total only 11 people had not actually done an autoquest. As for the players opinions of autoquests, the results were overwhelmingly in favor! Five people did not offer an opinion, eight people dislike autoquests, and 76 people think they're a good idea. Comments included "pretty cool", "GREAT!", "wonderful idea", "welcome addition to this game", "very fun", and "awesome".

On that note, I'd like to send out a great big congrats and thank-you to all the people who have worked and are still working so hard on autoquests. You are all evidently doing a great job!

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