Where, O Where have the questors gone?

[Griffon]

You know, I put in an application for advancement in the IMM world for 1 main reason... to run quests. I would like to be able to run them on my own, w/out having to get approval from some higher being. Not that i don't mind doing that, but sometimes they're busy, or not on.

Tonight, I found Ching, the poor soul that decided to sponsor me (Thanks, btw) in a little 'Find the Griffon' quest. Here are the rules, for those that don't know...
1) I teleport to a random mob
2) I give the discription of some sort of the mob
3) You run to that mob...
4) First one gets gold
5) Possible bonus prize involved

Normally, I have seen this game draw tons and tons of people to race... I've seen 10-15 questors. Tonight, I had .5, because he was doing a corpse retrival.


People meanie all the time about there never being any 'good' quests. Here's a possiblity why not... I have what most of you would consider to be a 'good' quest ready to go... and so do a few other IMM's that I know. However, the higher up peeps want us to get some more experience running smaller quests in order to prepare ourselves for the big ones. So here I am, trying to fill my quota, when about 10 people were interested in the quest... untill they found out there wasn't a phaser involved as a prize. How the hell are you ever suppossed to win the big prizes when all the questors are stuck giving away small ones?

I think that I will quote Ching to finish this...

Ching has forced you to save from those who beg for quests, but won't run in them unless they are 'just right'.
Saving Griffon.

Oh, and I'm done running quests for a while.

Nic

[Dank]

sorry nic, i hate to say this because i know that you have the best of intentions, as ching and the rest of the mud admin have, but you're all either in denial or a tad naieve when it concerns the overall appeal of mud entertainment today.

the emperor has no clothes.

look guys, it's not 1992 anymore. text games offering ansi color support just don't have the same appeal in today's dynamic media market.

when MUDs first appeared, most of the players were college students, a captive campus audience, looking for an intellectual outlet and finding it on the old ARPANET. the playerbase wasn't mainstream by any means, and proud of that fact. the novelty drew attention and popularity through word-of-mouth caused attendance to soar.

in fact, by 1994, it was not uncommon to see over 100 players logged in at stimpy, putting up with tremendous lag, imminent crash danger and standing room only eq running. you built it, they came.

with the advent of better desktop/laptop/palmtop games, the explosion of dedicated console games, and, god-forbid, the emergence of cell-phone wi/fi games, the market has changed. no longer are muds the only show in town. massive fiber-optic bandwidth, incomprehensible in the early 90's now allows us to watch first-run movies on our computers, home theatres, or flip-phones.

so when you offer a quicky id quest or trivia quest with little or no reward, you shouldn't be surprised by a light response from an already light login base.

if you're gonna offer a quest, make it an event, make it different, make it entertaining and offer a unique item.

offer prizes to those players who sign up the most new players for a weekly/monthly newbie quest night.

create _big_ quest items and give them a life span. %20 mana_regen about body that dissolves in 7 days -- when there'll be another opportunity to pick up a powerful item in another set of quests.

offer extravagant rewards. and you'll start to attract attention with the same word of mouth that promoted jediMud to the top ten years ago. don't be stingy. make it big. make it splashy. don't micro-manage your questor's creativity.

after all, you've got alot of competition.

[ProtoClown]

I was rather furious at you for rudely saying "up yours" to the people who were trying to run your quest by calling it off 3 mobs in. There were at least two people questing, one of whom died and would even have continued trying to find you in spite of that (I assume, and this assumption is based only on the things this questor was saying over public channels).

But to tell the people running your quest that their time and effort is not valuable enough to you to continue running the quest was just an insult that should never happen again.

Think of how they must have felt. Very few people were participating, so this was *their* chance to win a quest on JediMUD -- something they may have *never* done before. And, sure, it wasn't worth a lot of cash, apparently, but they would have had their name on the board. They would have gotten the glory. Screw everyone not running.

But apparently their participation counted for nothing, because you took your quest and ran off in a huff complaining about how nobody quests and posting to the board and here about it. BUT YOU HAD PARTICIPATION. Sure, it wasn't great, but you had some.

[pixie]

I gotta say that i agree with PC, how rude is it to snuff off on the questors you HAD just because you didnt feel you had enough? I would be incredibly upset if someone cout a quest i was running out just because they were in a pissy mood. You know Tam ran a quest to kill general quagar switched, in the matrix, while he had a +2 consular... there were probably 100 deaths, only 1 group of 5 would run in it, we all died dozens of times, and I think it was unwinnable, but i didnt KNOW it was unwinnable, so i kept racking up deaths, because i wanted to participate!

A good number of quest participants run to participate, not because they think they will win. They run for the reason you run them, they need to learn how to do one of those big hard quests!

second dank also has a point. If you had questors die, and if you were behind mounds of aggros, you really should take that in to account, again think of big quests, Uncle rules apply! you have all the time in the world, until you choose to give up.

Now on your quest, i know giving people an hour to find bigbird would be tarded, giveing them 5 min to get to narre would also be....

not saying you used these mobs, just using to make a point...

try running to the mobs mort, examine your skill vs your hopeful questors, and base time on that, try to do the run ! pfe !pfg, because not everyone running has the spells!

I know I wasnt in the quest, so i will not say specifics about it, but you have to take in to account some things on a spontaneous quest!

that is all...

[Tam]

*DING DING* Break!

THE GAME:

Once upon a time I happily played my Atari 2600. It enveloped most of my free time as a kid. Then I got my mighty Commodore 64! I could pirate as many games as I could get my grubby paws onto without paying a dime and the graphics were piles ahead of my little Atari. Then I graduated to my "UBER" 286 *flex*. Not only could I pirate piles of games, but I didnt need disks or cartridges and the graphics rocked! Eventually I find myself sitting behind my 1.2ghz machine, playing Neverwinter Nights with the graphics jacked up.

Then this Christmas rolls around. People plague me every year and ask me what I want cause they don't know what to get. So I run across this little Atari-looking joystick that has a pile of old-school Atari games on it. I ask for it, and I actually got it. I don't know how many hours I've "logged" playing my mighty hero (a block) trying to find the magic cup (a blocky u-shapped object) and take it to the yellow castle, while fighting off not 1 but 3 evil dragons (blockly platypus-looking things)!

The point is this... while some games enterain you from a technological angle, others entertain you in different ways. When I see "Antitheton" appear on my screen, I imagine a huge dragon that wouldn't even fit on my monitor if it appeared in Neverwinter Nights. When I see Drakken Ru (who's shrunken form appears on the web site) I picture a really built dude who stands glaring and taunting you. No game today can accomplish what I see when I see those names - none. So the game may be somewhat "old school" (like my Atari 2600 games) but that doesn't mean that it's not entertaining and doesn't mean that we can't make it the best game we can make it.

QUESTS:

Today I played in a small music trivia quest. I got 1 token out of a pile. I knew most of the songs but for some reason couldn't think of the words. It annoyed me to death. What did I get for dying 2x because I was playing in the quest and answering 1 lousy question? 10k. Does 10k dent my mortal wallet in any way (not that us admin play) ? No, not really. I wasn't looking for power or glory out of that quest though. I was looking for something to entertain me for a little while and take me out of the normal, boring routine of exp/gold/eq running.

So many people have become so enamerd by this ficticious concept of power that they forget that the real purpose of the game is to have fun and experience enjoyment. So what are these Imms trying to do by providing small quests? Simply, trying to provide everyone with a form of entertainment besides the blessed exp/gold/eq running.

As a matter of fact, I kinda chuckled at how people drop what they're doing to hunt lag monsters but they can't type in answers to trivia as they're walking along or can't take a time out from the exp/gold to hunt down hidden Imms. Now granted, I don't think Griffon should have stopped his quest midstream, but I also find it sad that people wouldn't take the time to have some fun.

Here's a little secret. Don't tell anyone! A wise person once told me "gold always loads". Guess what.. "exp always loads too". Ubersecret secret so shhhh....


-Tam

[ching]

Well, so it is only power and graphics that Dank likes?
Not me. I see Jedi and other text based online games
like books. When I read a book my mind is creating
the visual images of what it is I am reading about.
I have to agree with Tam, in that when I go do Drake
I have a mental image of a tropical volcanic island in
say the south pacific. Going inside things get 'fantastic'
with drakes and old big red.

This game is just to have fun. Heck I am currently
running a new (young) mage with 'only' regen I can get
solo just to see how easy/hard it is to do so. I have
mage gloves and arcanes, but I am leavning them in
cyro on other chars just to see what life is like for a
'new' player.

But then, I have plenty of power, fulfilment, love,
rewards, and what have you in real life. For me Jedimud
is a nice game and escape, which I like and work to
help others have the same good place that they can
visit.

Enjoy the trip, come on back if you like it.
Contribute if you have a giving spirit.

Ching

[Dank]

i've been a text-based enthusiast since ADVENTURE was running under a FORTRAN IV compiler and ZORK@MITAI was available through my buddy's SOL computer and a 300 baud accoustic coupler.

nah, i'm not bashing text-based games. i'm a game proponent, like tam evidently is, and whether i'm seeing 50 million polys on screen real-time with halation, fog and lens flare or i'm trying to decipher my own 7 bit color graphics in Might & Magic I, i'm enjoying myself.

just the other day i ran around like a sugar-swamped grade-schooler attempting to solve a Where am I? quest. Woot! 10k baby!

i'm trying to address a larger, more over-arching issue of entertainment and entertainment competition... again giving a nod to my favorite explorer and scientist, chuck darwin, who points out that only the strongest survive to spread their seed to the next generation.

though apparently my good friend tammie will do anything for a coin, i'm thinking that most of the busy mudizens out there would jump at a chance to pick up a unique quest item, a quest point, or a good spanking.