If you are one of the MMORPG players like me who grew old and bored of the light questing [mod edit]  MMORPGs then you know how fun it is to mouse veggie and kill monsters hordes after hordes either by yourself or with a party.  It just isn't the same.  Hard core questing's example would be like kill a kind of monster in units of let us say 50 or 100s.  Giving players enough time to test out his character, skills, equipments against PVE foes enough.  I myself only played Ultima Online which had NO QUEST and skipped the everquest generation and played hard core MMORPGs starting Final Fantasy Online XI and Lineage 2 know that feeling of butchering field after fields of mobs.  I mean even today I started to play AION 3.0 Ascension Truly Free and feel the same way about AION that light questing makes it [mod edit]  although I play and like the game since there are no other free gaming other then TERA open beta coming on 19th.  Why is it that the industry is concentrating only attention to light casual players and not giving thought to heavy hard core gamers?  Mouse veggie-ing I mentioned thus I mean games that you play with mouse that you point and click and point and click your time-dom.  THAT is the romance of online gaming.  Not walk around looking[mod edit]   and then killing 3 monsters, I mean 3 monsters and then run around and this and that.  It is just my wish perhaps but I think some of the players would agree with me on this subject.  Well until the industry pleases all not just the mass thus the majority of the money flow, good gaming people~!

I have no idea what you're trying to say there, but I'd like for "questing" to actually go back to being proper questing. You know, momentous events actually worth doing with major ramifications and rewards? Questing as a term and gameplay mechanic has become so misused over the years for things that are generally just tasks at best and trivial busywork at their worst.

I am just saying that late light questing based MMORPGs do not have the hefty under punch as the older heavy hard core MMORPGs did.  I mean if they would go with the heavy questing model the games might feel quite a bit more mature and perhaps to many players, 'FUN'.

So your idea of a hard-core quest is basically to take a normal WoW-clone quest and require more monster slaying before it's done?

Originally posted by Sythion

So your idea of a hard-core quest is basically to take a normal WoW-clone quest and require more monster slaying before it's done?

Not neccessarily but from what I said what you say is reasonable to come to conclude to I guess.  More hard core grinding PVE then light 3 minutes quests based games is what I had in mind more like.

You already have a game like that. It is called Vanguard. Instead of "kill 5 of these" it is more like 50. It got old for me really fast.

Having excessive amounts of kills needed to complete quests, optional or not, isn't 'hardcore' at all, but instead grindy and boring. I remember a long questline in MapleStory that required killing 999 of each mob in an area (About 15 total mobs) and then having to hunt for extremely rare drops from three of those monsters per attempt at one raid. Needless to say, it was not fun at all and many people neglected an entire boss just to avoid doing that questline.

 I think somewhere along the line "quests" got confused with "tasks".  Killing bears for 10 pieces of meat to feed 50 soldiers then being done is a task.  Adding 10-15 steps to it with an interesting story and a few interactive environments and you have a quest.  I don't want any more that 4 quests in my journal at any one time.

Originally posted by Deron_Barak

 I think somewhere along the line "quests" got confused with "tasks".  Killing bears for 10 pieces of meat to feed 50 soldiers then being done is a task.  Adding 10-15 steps to it with an interesting story and a few interactive environments and you have a quest.  I don't want any more that 4 quests in my journal at any one time.

i like this.  i tend to enjoy longer quest liines.   "tasks" are what are boring.  even if the "tasks" hook up in a chain of 10 or so with a story behing it all, it makes it that much better.  imo.

Originally posted by joonkp1976

Wall O' Text

What you described isn't "hardcore."  What you described is mindless.  Btw, congrats on being the first person in history to use the terms "hardcore" and "questing" in the same sentence.  

Originally posted by joonkp1976

If you are one of the MMORPG players like me who grew old and bored of the light questing [mod edit]  MMORPGs then you know how fun it is to mouse veggie and kill monsters hordes after hordes either by yourself or with a party.  It just isn't the same.  Hard core questing's example would be like kill a kind of monster in units of let us say 50 or 100s.  Giving players enough time to test out his character, skills, equipments against PVE foes enough.  I myself only played Ultima Online which had NO QUEST and skipped the everquest generation and played hard core MMORPGs starting Final Fantasy Online XI and Lineage 2 know that feeling of butchering field after fields of mobs.  I mean even today I started to play AION 3.0 Ascension Truly Free and feel the same way about AION that light questing makes it [mod edit]  although I play and like the game since there are no other free gaming other then TERA open beta coming on 19th.  Why is it that the industry is concentrating only attention to light casual players and not giving thought to heavy hard core gamers?  Mouse veggie-ing I mentioned thus I mean games that you play with mouse that you point and click and point and click your time-dom.  THAT is the romance of online gaming.  Not walk around looking[mod edit]   and then killing 3 monsters, I mean 3 monsters and then run around and this and that.  It is just my wish perhaps but I think some of the players would agree with me on this subject.  Well until the industry pleases all not just the mass thus the majority of the money flow, good gaming people~!

One of the biggest reasons is that the kind of grinding you put forth is just as [mod edit]  to the majority of the gamers that play mmos, as it is to you to do the kind of light questing they prefer, but the fact is that your generation that enjoyed the grind of sitting around killing mobs for hours is a dead market largely to tthe people that make games. Having to kill large groups f mobs is not hardcore in the least, hardcore would be actually having to figure out a quest that gives you little to know info about what to do, and so you have to go into the world and use your brain to figure it out. I would think that their should be a divide between what is a true quest in the games, and what is basically a task, and determine what kind of exp you gain by what you arre doing. Quests would be things like having to figure out what is happening in a area, how to stop it, and learning about what is going on, while tasks are more just thigns like mundane activies like killing or collecting thigns in areas.  An example of a quest would be to delve into a cavern or temple after a researcher or traveler that sought to find somethign withing most likeely this would branch into several moves uests as you went as well.), while an example of a task would be killing 70 boars or collecting 150 apples from the field.

i have a different understanding of hardcore questing vs light-questing. every quest is last but not least grinding mobs, even if its gladly hidden like in SWTOR. so it all comes to mobs and how challenging mobs are.

i remember good old EQ1. take the soloing game for example, because its easier to describe, what i mean. in a zone you had mobs of different color: green (easy), blue (normal, equal to your level), yellow (hard), red (very hard). most people, especially the ones who complained about grind, went out and killed tons of green or blue mobs. not me, because i looked for the challenge and as a necromancer i was able to do more, if just skilled correctly and able to play my class. so i attacked the yellow or red ones. this took longer but gave me more xp and the fights have been much more challenging and interesting, because i had to switch tactics situationally and use my entire arsenal of abilities in order to survive.

nowadays, there are no red mobs anymore. i just testet AION F2P, i tried to do just the story quest to level not too fast, and so i ended with quests 2-3 levels above me. but still no challenge. we lost the challenge in modern MMO, at least during levelling process. 

just to not forget: the mistake of EQ1 was not the grind, there was no uninteresting grind for a good necromancer (except these few damn artificial hell levels). unfortunately, there have been not many classes able to play  as versatile as a nec. so one big mistake of WoW and EQ2 in 2004, when they changed the genre was to dumb down all classes, skills and quests, so that my little sister and my dog can do it. instead of making them all as flexible an versatile like e.g. the EQ-Necromancer was and give all classes the option to face the challenge, if they like to.  this example was about sologame, but the same counts for groups and raids.

so what does this mean for the quest system? hardcore does not mean, more kills. it means less kills, but more risky, challenging and rewarding.

1. we need more challenging mobs and a skillset which allows versatile and high tactical flexible combat

2. we have to get rid of kill 10 rats. we have to say: just kill rats! now a bar fills up. if you killed enough rats, the bar is full and its done. a few red rats (old bad rat) or tons of green rats (young ratling). its up to you, your personal preferences and your abilities and player skills.

GW2 does something like that during their dynamic events. DEs are technically questchains very well hidden and presented differently. in the background you have just such a counter, measuring your success. and you see this bar afaik. that does not mean, that GW2 does it fully right. i dont know, because i wasnt in beta so far. i am a bit scared about scaling content, because scaling means, everything is scaled according to a certain number of average players. that means a superior player or group of well coordinated players looking for a challenge might have hard times to find them. i know, there are dungeons on very hard mode, but i am talking about open world events, which replaced the quests in GW2.

[mod edit]