ideas for long, time-limited quests in the future

[Fusionstrike]

Being right in the middle of the fire forest elite quest, I've been thinking about what could be better in any future quest of this sort. I think this is the first time there's been a quest that's only available for a limited time, so it's a good opportunity to learn in case STS wants to do another one in the future.

First, I think the design could be made much more palatable. It requires collecting 500 items with random drop, which is a pretty tall order. But that isn't really what people are complaining about. What they gripe about far and away more than anything else is the random drops, specifically that you can get no drop many, many times in a row. That's really discouraging. But a different design would be easier to withstand psychologically without actually being any shorter.

Let's say the drop rate is 50%, so the quest will take 1000 runs on average to complete. STS could just as easily make it collect 1000 at 100% drop rate and thus require the same amount of work. In addition, everyone would know exactly what to plan for and whether it was worth it to invest time in. It's basically another level cap grind, so why not set it up the same way? After all, xp collection is not random, people can plan out their time investment, and plenty of people do it each cap raise. There's no reason not to have a quest that's this long follow the same model.

If it really must be random, then it should have good as well as bad possible outcomes. The quest could have an equal chance to drop zero, one or two items. This would mean it still takes 1000 runs on average, but sometimes the players would get two and feel good to counter-balance the times they get zero. Look at the way casino games work; they always make sure to have some small good outcomes interspersed to hold the player's attention.

The other thing that's off-putting about this quest is the timeframe. It's a time-limited quest, so people aren't sure if it's worth the substantial investment to complete. They don't even know how much time they actually have, so that makes it worse. But even if they knew exactly, the magnitude of the undertaking is still scaring a large number of players off. So I think any quest like this in the future should have tiered rewards. That is, there is one reward for collecting 100, one for 200, one for 300, etc. with each reward of course getting better. This way, players can go for an easier but less valuable reward if that's all the time they can afford to put into it. Also, if the deadline comes up on them, they can at least turn in for a lower-tier prize even if they were going for the big one. At least the effort wouldn't be a complete waste in that case.

I think the idea of a time-limited preview quest is an interesting one. I hope if you want to do it again sometime you'll take some of these ideas into consideration.