There was one quest chain in WoW that I really enjoyed. It was very long and required you to travel to about four or five different zones all over the frigging globe, But it was worth it. It was the Linken chain in Un'Goro crater. I almost stopped playing WoW right then and there because they took out a really fun quest, but left all the boring "go kill ten of this", "go fetch twenty of that", and "escort this suicidal sociopath to the other end of the @#$%ing zone" quests.

Although, sometimes the fetch quests can be worse than the escort ones when the drop rate is so low that you have to kill off eighty mobs just to collect five of their eyeballs, or what have you.

I have never experienced any unique quests since my MUD days. Discworld MUD hands down has the most original quests and lots of them. If you don't have the patience to play do a quick search for the quest list just for a laugh. If you are familiar with the series you will love it.

Despite being text based more effort and thought has been put into this world than 90% of the games on this site! Sorry for being a fanboy but be honest, how many MMO's on here aren't shockingly shite? Exactly, didnt need to take our socks off to count them. All jokes aside there is more depth in this 1 dimensional world than the tosh churned out of late.

Bearing in mind you are just an unskilled peasant (to start) and not the saviour of the world doing the 2 (and only 2) delivery quests for the post office fits in well with the setting and is there mainly to help you learn your way around.

They mostly all fit in with the humour, style and settings of the books. One includes starting (and finishing) a bar brawl and others make use of the many crafting skills available. And if you think you're hard enough you can just kill the NPC (although sometimes this is frowned upon) and parade around with his/her underpants on your head (not so frowned upon).

Quick spoiler of a quest. In one house you may or may not discover on your journey, a stern, bossy looking woman is looming over her husband who is cowering in a corner... Go downstairs and you will see a mean looking poodle. Kill it and drag the corpse upstairs and give it to her... She gets upset and runs off I think and her long suffering fella is very grateful.

Fanboying and shameless plugging over.

I like quests that matters, and not pointless ones.

Pointless: Hail adventurer, Kill me 10 rats. There is no particular reason you should do this, other than that is what I am programmed to say. Reward, an item just like the 100 billion others you get from dull quests or from drops.

Matters: Hail adventurer, before I will let you in to my castle, you must proove that you are on a noble cause. Find out what is causing the rats to become aggressive and return to me.

Reward: a key to the castle and reputation increase (which may lead to other npc wanting to deal with you).

THAT is feeling of accomplisment, I took on the task and won the sympathy of Whoever, and I can now enter the castle. (People who arent mmorpg players will leave this game quickly and you will have even minded players to play with) .. Yes I said what you were thinking.

I personally don't really mind gathering quests or "kill X number if this specific creature" quests as long as the number is low. Want me to pick 5-7 flowers? Sure, no problem. Need me to go slay 4-8 of this certain kind of (insert creature name here)? Be back in a jiffy. It's when they ask me to collect/kill upwards of 10-20 that I start to question the reward's worth vs. the task at hand.

Quests I actually liked:

The Rift quest where you are supposed to investigate why townsfolk were acting strangely and you slowly figure out that the entire town has been replaced by shapeshifters - that was fun.

Something fairly open-ended, where you actually have to figure something out - that can be interesting.

Kill x, escort this idiot, deliver x, go talk to x - all that crap bores anyone to tears who's spent any time at all playing MMO's.

This type of article is exactly why I love reading Coyote's stuff more than others.  Humor + Truth = Win.

Paragus you could have made your point better without using nasty language.

Adding to that, I hate quests that take a long time to do, sometimes you only have 30 minutes to play..   

In LotRO there's a quest where you go from one side of a field to the other to deliver messages from one hobbit to her neighbour who wants to date her. Back and forth you go. I think at one point they both send you off to do a little flower gathering... maybe not.

Either way, they are a total of 27 steps apart (I counted them.. trust me). You could fricking THROW a hobbit that far. Can they walk across to the edge of teh field next to tehir house to say hulllo? No, they have to stand there like a pair of mutes, waiting on some passing idiot who'll run back and forth like a carrier pigeon on speed...

At least in games like Red Dead Redemtion you'd have the chance to shoot both of them in the face and loot their stumpy little corpses...

LOL holy shit that was funny. Thanks for the laugh man

OMG Coyote is so right.  i love this guy I couldn't had vented any better.  Thanks for gettng it out for me bub :D

I only play Eve Online or Perpetuum now because after a while all quests get boring (unless the plot is good - which is exceptionally rare).

An example of a good plot is the Defias Brotherhood storyline in WoW - I think this was one reason why WoW appealed to so many people so quickly.

quests (as we know them in the mmo space) are inherently boring because its just a todo list of mundane chores.  they are pretty much all easily achievable, and just a matter of time spent completing the mundane steps.

MMOs should be channeling "adventure games", where the things you are asked to do (and things you CAN do that nobody ASKS you to do, but are setup for you to discover and do all on your own *gasp*) are things you have to figure out.  a solution has to be figured out.  like an "adventure game" puzzle.  yes, something that actually takes thinking, real life mental skills.

you can find different inventory items (independent of a quest dialog box) that can be used on other interactive objects or stationary points in the game to open up new areas, or solve "quests".

"adventure games" are all about these kind of cool interactions and yet they don't keep throwing up quest boxes in your face that you have to page through and click through, and that destroy the feeling of interacting with a game world, with game controls (instead you're interacting with a 2D GUI in a totally different immersion breaking manner).   

yeah, get rid of the quest dialogs while you're at it.

WoW did the escort thing right with Old Hillsbrad dungeon..where Thrall actually stops off to get an axe and shield then steals a horse to move things along faster.

I never understand though why if you are some powerful archmage and usually can teleport entire groups of people across the world, you are unable to teleport yourself and <-insert random prisoner here-> to the nearest village.

With every village having a magical mailbox why the hell do you need the fed-ex style quests for anything less than a secret missive for the king??

Quests that Suck

I'm not a huge fan of quests, but I have to say that they have been getting better over the years.  Blizzard focused on better quests with its most recent expansions to WoW, and I have to say that they are an improvement, if only marginally; they have more interesting stories, some interesting scripted events, and so forth.

And Blizzard owes us some good quests, because they made what is beyond all doubt the worst quest ever:  Nothing But the Truth.  Long will that quest stand as the worst quest designed in any MMORPG, ever.  It wasn't the "collect 10 of this" (although it had that), or the "run somewhere on the other side of the world for no real reason" (although it also had that), or the insultingly weak reward item for an insanely hard quest (although it also had that).  No, it was the collecting of an item with a 3% [sic] drop rate off a rare spawning high-level elite which virtually required a group to take down, of which there was only but one in existence at any one time, and which ranged across the entirety of a zone on the other side of the world from the questgiver.  I would be very surprised if more than two or three people ever completed that quest.

There are too many "worst quest design" candidates to mention, but other than the "stupidly low drop rate off elite mobs" design, I would also nominate the "kill x mobs in the part of the dungeon that no other players ever want to go into because the loot stinks" (e.g., pretty much all the quests for all the level 60 dungeons in vanilla World of Warcraft).

My biggest pet peeve with Quests is those stupid find a bunch of crap on the ground the give them to me... I don't care how nobel the task is, I still feel like manuelabor that a slave, droid, or guy from out side homedepot could have done.

And then in mid quest while killing 2 mobs that were surrounding 5/90 item of supidity you need some ********* decides he needs to jack your crap.

Worst sort of quests EVER: 'Collet 500 wood for me, just so I can freakin' piss your grinding ass off.'