Originally posted by popsideath

Yep, cool thing a bout public quests (and rifts, in theory) is that it becomes cooperative play without all the bureaucracy. Basically, in theory, you get to jump into fights and help people without having to worry about grouping or who 'owns' the mob or any of the logistical stuff that reminds us it's just a game.

Granted, the balancing and way mobs are 'claimed' etc could all use some ironing out, but the theory is sound.

I wish they'd do this for more aspects in a game. If some dude is killing a named you need for a quest, why should you have to artificially and awkwardly stand there waiting for that person to finish before you can. This reminds us it's just a game, not a world. Instead, wouldn't it be cool if you jumped in and helped, and there were no mechanics involved that the other person would need to be anything but grateful because you could both get credit and not have to panic someone will try to ks you, or worse someone will stand and watch you die so they can then have access to 'your' mob.

Like with all game mechanics it would require working things out to prevent exploits and issues, but in my opinion the style and theory is worth putting in just such effort to make such a system work (instead of just going with the tried and true, read as: easiest, way to implement a feature in a game).

The biggest argument against this would be that it promotes zerging. Shrug. Games that are over populated or suffer from content limitations that force bottlenecks are what promote zerging (of the worst, ksing sort of variety). If anything, getting more people through a quest if more people need to get through it, is a good thing. Move them on to content that isn't overpopulated.

WAR pretty much sucked, imo, but the public quest idea was good, the theory sound, and it just needs to be ironed out. I never understood why people didn't like the idea behind public quests. I think mostly it's disliked by the people who don't just find validation for themselves by completing something, but also find validation by keeping someone else FROM something they have. You know, if you have a GI Joe then it's not as special if some other kid also brings one to show and tell. Oh well, grow up and out of it.

Totally agree with your paragraph about being able to jump in on the kill. That would be most helpful, although you would see situations where two or three people would be working hard to take down a boss and someone would come along, shoot an arrow right at the end, and get the credit. This would happen constantly and that would be a real downer to my enjoyment of the game. Perhaps they could find a way to utilize WoW's phasing on a temporary basis - like if you have a boss down to 30% you and the boss phase out and another respawns so no one can get credit for doing nothing. Now that would be sweet.

On a different note - I would just like to say that I can't comprehend people's complaints about soloable games. My first mmo was CoH when the only class that could successfully solo most missions was the Scrapper (which I never played) so I was pretty much forced to group - which was great at first. But many, many evenings of logging on and finding no one at my level and shouting, "lft" for 1/2 hour before logging off - combined with many days when I would have loved to play but only had 20 to 30 minutes so didn't bother - made me change my tune a bit.

Today, my mmo time is spent duoing with friends. I am currently leveling a character in DDO with a friend. I leveled 2 characters with a friend in WoW and a 3rd solo. I am now working on a 4th with a consistent group of 5 people, which means we can enjoy content that I never was able to play before as a soloer. People are always complaining about WoW being a solo game and I just don't get it. Yes, WoW has a ton of content for the soloer, but also a ton that requires grouping and yet people complain about all the solo content. I love DDO and am completely fine with it being difficult to solo for anyone, impossible for many builds, and some content impossible altogether. I also love that I can log into WoW, LotRO, and depending on my character, DDO and solo away for a few minutes - or even a few hours if I want to play but just don't feel like dealing with other people that day.

On the topic of exp and reasons to group without grouping.

There have been a small number of games that give credit for killing creatures in an area. This credit is either faction, random drops that appear in your bags, or exp par with your individual damage output and the level of encounter/creatures or maybe even all of the above.

This gives the insentive of people helping to kill the same creature \s at the same time without any whining. The issue come with exp and how it gets devided. EQ had a good system with exp in that your exp moved slower per individual creature you killed solo compared to 2 3 and maxxed out at 6 people. Now if you could aoe kill groups of mobs quick soloing then sometimes you beat the exp curve associated with full groups but it really made all ways of playing alot of fun.

zzzZZZzz another solo mmo.... zzzZZZzzz

I find games that force grouping to be worse than games with lots of soloing. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes for example, they pushed us in to grouping and the solo content was really quite boring. Most classes couldn't even go in dungeons, because the mobs were linked together and 4dot + mobs meant that they were too strong. So you ended up with just all the overland content which is really bland.

My favourite game is still Everquest because it didn't try to do everything so perfectly. You could solo some dungeons, to some extent, or you could group. It gave great freedom to play it however you wanted. Getting a good group was the best, but with some classes (Necro etc), I could solo pretty efficiently too.