I have been playing Borderlands recently which is an FPS with RPG elements and a sort of emphasis on online play. Basically its sort of Guild Wars like in design as far as how you approach content, its just not designed to be large community oriented instead its small community oriented so there are no real persistent gathering places.

The missions themselves in the game are highly reminiscient of MMO quests go get this, go kill 5 of these, go kill this boss. The game even has a pretty signficant respawn rate. Enough that you do not want to turn back or you may have to refight your way through everything just like most MMOs (and unlike Guild Wars). As one can imagine you can get a similar feeling to some MMOs or to Diablo 2 (especially Diablo 2 as this is essentially an FPS Diablo 2 in RPG /content design, but with non-random level).

However there is an interesting difference mainly because this game is an FPS at its core. Check points. Well so what check points have been around for a long. True. But what this can mean is some quests are longer and can go in portions.

This got me thinking about games like WoW which give you many many short quests or long quests chains composed of short quests. WoW did this for a good reason, they wanted to reduce the granularity of the quests systemt so that people an do them is smaller discrete chunks so playing the game is convienent.

The natural consequence of this is that quests are therefore much less absorbing. You do not have time to get absorbed into what you are doing and therefore start to put an emphasis on quantity. You then accumulate a large number of quests, do not pay any attention to the objectives or even the setting. You are reduced to what feel like repetitive tasks and you main mental engagement is to create an efficient pathing algorithm to cover ground in the quickest possible manner which is boring and joblike for most people.

These games are escapism. There is no way around that. It is simply the truth. And is perfectly fine, even good. If you are not getting abosrbed into what you are doing you are not achieving that escapism it will appear very shallow. This is why some people are so adamant about immersion. I rarely agree with those people but their basic motivations and ideas are perfectly normal and sound, I simply do not have the same mental experience they do. I kind of think they lack imagination not that they are fundamentally wrong.

Absorbtion into something, a book/movie/game, takes time. How long will depend on how much you like the actual thing, how its presented and the quality of presentation. A presentation that gets you excited or your adrenaline pumping is more likely to be absorbing and place you there for example.

So if you think about it short quests are a problem. They do two bad things. They may not be long enough to allow you to get absorbed. And even worse they constantly change the subject.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone who is constantly changing the subject? Its extremely annoying and not engaging at all. Eventually its quite tedious. In fact it often a tactic used by people, instinctively, to get away with lying about things, mainly because people will get lost and not be paying attention.

So we are left with a large number of tasks that the player feels no connection to and is constantly drifting from one to the other eventually zoning out into robotic quest grinding whose sole motivation is rewards in optimal time.

But the original intent behind the WoW quest was a very good idea and not invalid. If someone only has 30 minutes or even 15 minutes to play they should be able. Not just "should" in the sense of its fair, but "should" as in easily possible. There is not reason this cannot be done if we do it right. It should be possible for someone to have fun and be absorbed in one dedicated task in 15 minutes and is definitely possible over 30 minutes.

In WoW they were aware of this and they separated out instance/dungeon running as the long term 1 hour + absorbing content and questing as the convienent more fine grained content.

I think the designers of WoW's quest system made a fundamental mistake in their thinking of the granularity of their system. Which is actually quite common; it is a surprisingly tricky and subtle concept, but these sorts of things tend to have extremely powerful and far reaching consequences. Doing the granularity of a database wrong, for example, can possibly make it worthless and you may not realize it until months later. Their mistake was in thinking that the basic unit should be quests. Not a fatal mistake but one with some real weighty consequences.

I suggest the basic unit should be a section of content, ie. a section of content between checkpoints. Your obejective in a game should not be a matter of 15 minutes. However your playtime can be. In many games they design quests with time limits in mind. They say things like 70% of our quests should be doable in 15 minutes or 30 minutes by the average player. I suggest this is a bad idea. They should instead say each section of a quest should be doable in 15 minutes but in general each task should feel important.

Addiationally each section of content should be viscerally enjoyable and come right at the player as soon as they engage if they are in the middle of a objective.

LOTRO has done something like this with its skirmishes, but those are basically just instances, they can last as long as an hour or so and if you need to leave in the middle you are screwed. But if we take the Tuckburrough skrimish as an example, this consists of about 5 or 6 obvious separable objectives, and you can get right into the action easily.

LOTRO skirmishes are making the same "mistake" really, the interesting things is, for some of them at least, they really do not need too. Some of the more offesnive ones, and evne the defensive ones like siege of gondamon are strucutred in such a way that you could easily turn them into checkpoint style things. Both of these have multiple stages. And both are packed with enough action that, if you like the game's basic gameply, you will be engaged within 5 minutes and if you are not you may want to reconsider playing the game anyway. This is not to say everyone should like skirmishes, but a solo Gondamon at the easiest levels will be throwing about 20 encounters or 3-4 mobs with a large number of mini-bosses. If this is not enough to engage you then you probably do not like the games combat system.

This is also true of basically all of DDO content as they are essentially similar to LOTRO skirmishes.

One of the things to realize is the vast majority of people are easily cpable of picking up where they left off a day ago and get right into things within about 5 minutes once they warm up. But one of the problems with MMO content in general is you have had to play to the end or you wasted your time. Conversely mob grind games are actually the reverse, the mob grind itself is highly granular and if you spend some times its never "wasted" (assuming you like doing it, of course many people do not).

But really there is no reason to force people into 3 hour long continuous play periods. WoW quests were meant to address this, but they have essentially trivialized a lot of content in the process.

The fact is FPSes solved this problem a long time ago, they used checkpoints. And just importantly the content itself needs to be designed with this in mind. Kill 5 rats is not good enough. If the quest says kill 5 rats it better be 5 miniboss rats in a sewer with 3 checkpoints and some interesting chellenges in navigating it. Not wander around and do what you always do when you fight a mob then turn in.

WoW has structured non-dynamic content, for the most part. Many MMOs do as well. Blizzard prides themselves on creaing well crafted content. But the fact is alot of their quests not only are quite generic but really the content as has not been tailored for the objective. Instead the objective is tailored around the general map. So of course the quests are generalized. They will always be short and genereic. It simply does not matter how much care Blizzard's guys can put in they only have so much to work with.

In Aion there are a few area where the respawn rate is well crazy fast. the level 38-40 lepharists rebels on Asmodian side are packed like sardines and respawn within minutes. There is a major quest here and it is often done in a raid. Not because raids are fun. It is so that you can just slaughter the place and get in and out with the quest done. This seems rather silly to be. But at the same time it shows you something. I have gotten through the initial part with a normal group before. Its doable. That particular quest is acutally an extremely small physical area, but is very hectic. But imagine if it was much more stretched out with alternate paths and a few different things to do. Getting anything done in there would be a gigantic pain in the ass to most people and to get in the middle and the back out.

This is an old-school EQ era type content design. And in WoW became extremely rare. And a lot of people, including many EQ vets, basically came to the conclusion that while those places had some fun they were just a huge pain in the ass. Well imagine if there were many places like that extensive areas that are not easy to travel through but which had checkpoints through it so that essentially you can make progress through these areas towards your goals in discrete increments.

Now imagine that a large portion (but not all) of the quest content was in these places. Places that are more like instances, but exist in the persistent world. And most importantly are not easy, but not a gigantic pain in the ass.

In the past these styles of areas are generally marked as "group" content. But although designers like to sell the idea that this is because they are "hard" this is in fact bullshit. They are group areas because it a pain in the ass to get through solo and progress can be made quickly in a group. The fact is in Aion I have gotten through most open world "group areas" solo unless there is an impassable choke point designed. Same is true of many areas in EQ. The only way these places are truly enforcably "group areas" is by chokepoints. Well the designers should take that to heart and use that fact to create challenging open world group and solo content for their quests. The fact is getting through some of these area has been extremely fun for me. That is a good thing, not an exploit. Its fun content use it. The whole world need not be this way of course, just tailor made areas.

One of the big differences between WoW-generation games and old school games is that group content has been relegated to dungeon crawl isntances and quest content is mostly open world. Old school games tend to have much more open world group content, but it tends to be mob grind type stuff.

Why do the old school games have this content? Well in general you fight in to a good place then camp it for a long period of time. The conseqence of this is that some areas are considered too burdensome for the purpose of a "overworld" map. In addition they are not considered absorbing enough in terms of content because you basically stall out your progress at a certain point by simply staying the same area in your "money spot". So the EQ deisgners eventually created more directed content and additions and WoW took this to its logical conclusion.

I suggest that as is normal the baby got thrown out with the bath water. The natural progression was to basically not make this kind of content anymore. Even though in some respects this style of content had elements of real fun. It was large unpredicitable and hectic. It can be a real thrill. But at the same time many players hate the idea of an easy teleport to some sweet spot. To them it cheapens things. Well I am not suggesting that. In fact I would say that for questing there these types of sweet spots should not exist and if they do you have made a mistake in your quest design. Quests should be directed but if they are open world quests and not instances they should take a lesson from those old school areas. Namely getting to the next stage is no cakewalk its takes attention and is an accomplishment and there should be multiple stages.

This is not to say that there should not also be old-school style mob grind areas for those that like them. But you should be aware that one of the things people like about those areas is they are somewhat self directed. But quest content is directed content. In WoW a quest that entails slogging through 100 mobs of mobs to get some object is considered a gigantic pain. But not because you have to 100s of things (even if that is what people say). The fact is people kill thousands of mobs a week in WoW and don't blink an eye. The reason that is considereed bad is that people naturally and intuitvely understand they would need to do that with no breaks and will most likely consists of genric setups where you constantly repeat the same tactics rather than succession of interesting set ups broken up into sections you can take at your leisure however you like. And that you need not find a safe place to log and start all over again and thereby creating a hard break in your absorption in the task.

Many EQ vets lament the "dumbing down" of the game in regards to changes in travel times and easy access to dungeon entrances. I am not advocating some kind of Plane of Knowledge mechanic. I am not saying that anyone should be able to go anywhere anytime and thereby basically destroy the improtantce of travel times. But what i am saying is that a players commitment to a goal should not be based on the playtime slot they have available. They should be able to pick up where they left off. This is important because of exactly some of the things that EQ vets actually like. Namely non-shallow tasks and and non-shallow involvement in the game.

Lets take EvE online as an example. Travel across systems in EvE is non-trivial. It can take signficant time. Let's just say for the sake of argument that EvE introduced human avatar combat with a completely separate skill and equipment system. Let's also say that along with this they introduced some kind of Space Hulk like scenario system (ie. like the Warhammer 40K genestealer space hulk type thing). Let's say these are large stationary objects and they randomly appear in a system. You could board them and fight your way through them and that doing so is designed to take roughly 3-4 hours.

Well this would entail that if you are lucky enough to find one you have also be lucky enough to have a 3-4 hour play period to take advantage of it. My solution is to have some kind of checkpoint mechanic here, that you can do what you need to then leave and come back to where you were. But not that therefore you can just go to any system in EvE whenever you want. That would destroy EvE. Literally destroy the game itself. All of the corp war stuff in EvE would be destroyed by instant travel.

However without a checkpoint mechanic these drifting hulks would have to be limited to something like 1 hour. This is not speculation on my part. You simply need look no farther than City Of Heroes Task Forces. Many of them take 4 hours or so in total. They are actually separated into discrete chunks since they consist of many CoH dynamic instances but if you your team changes in anyway all progress is destroyed. Well guess what? Task forces were widely disliked and and little used especially ones like the Shadow Shard TFs that were extremly long and included some crazy travel. As CoH has aged things that use the TF mechanics have become shorter and shorter.

But clearly long and elaborate goals and tasks are not bad In fact they are good. This should be clear, we need look no farther than many single player games.

There are currently two bad trends in MMOs. The idea that a sandbox game cannot have directed content and vice versa. This is wrong. You could easily have set piece content in a game like EvE that are randomly found and used. But you must also have a way so that people's wandering gameplay allows them to take advantage of it.

The other bad trend is the idea that "casual" players want to just find some thing to do immediately and get some people together to do just some easily available and quick goal bascially that they are brain dead morons that just want to be occupied. This is wrong. Casual players would mostly prefer deep content that is quick to get into and quick to pick back up. Not shallow stuff.

Casual players would most likely have not have an issue allocating the next week of gameplay to exploring a space hulk they randomly found in EvE. As long as they could do it in discrete chunks. And in fact would vastly prefer this to just some randomly generated thing that takes 30 minutes and do that over and over again (like EvE generic missions).

The myth is that casual players will not commit to anything and therefore should be be given fluff busy work. This is bullshit. Most casual players would love to commit to a deep and tailored experience as long as they can do that in discrete chunks they can pick up whenever they need or have time and as long as reengaging is a quick process.

You do not need to give people instant travel all over the place. You merely need to give them the ability to pick up where they left off. Theoretically for something like EvE all you would need to do is once they have signed on to exploring a space hulk and have gotten to some checkpoint if they decided to leave to some standard place like a home station for some reason, say to go help out in a corp war you allthough them to leave, and you allow them to go back to that checkpoint. However you do not allow them to use this as a relay point between systems. Eitehr they cannot leave the space hulk or you make fighting your way out of the space hulk sufficiently time consuming. Once easy way to do the latter is with respawns.

If the first checkpoint is always 15 minutes in then getting out via a quick travel to that checkpoint will take 15 minutes. So using the "free to leave, free to come back" mechanic to go from one system to the other would entail a 15 minute burden. In EvE this is something like a 15-25 system trip. So simply allow people to do this if their home system is within 20 jumps and you have preservered the time component of travel. There is still the issues of gate control this most likely could only be handled by allowing corps to destroy space hulks and simply not allowing people to lave once they enter. You could even do a hybrid system where corporations could build stations that interfered with checkpoint travel and disallowed people from leaving the hulks (but not prevent checkpoint use.) Concievably you can even make variants that had free for all PvP where anyone can enter and kill anyone else as part of the zone control mechanics. So using that space hulk as a jumping off point would entail at least 15 minutes of fighting your way and there may be people waiting to kill you at that entrance anyway and you may never make it to a ship. One way in EvE specifically to make it easy is you simply cannot leave unless you left a ship there to begin with and enemies would be allowed to destroy docked ships. Thus a corp could easily deny people system jumping via checkpoints without infringing on people ability to actually use the content.

Similarly you could add a game mechanic where any ship you leave risks destruction over time so that people cannot accumlate the ability to jump all over and leave ships all over. Something like an increasingly likely random chance that the ship is destroyed as time goes on. This would mean that a casual player who want to do this stuff would need to switch to a cheap shuttle and dock his keeper ship.

Many would think that a casual player would not do this. But I am quite certain they would take 15 minutes to swap to a throw away ship and commit to the 3 hours over the next few days if the content itself was fun enough and rewarding enough.

However I am equally certain that this mechanic would fail miserably if you had to do the same thing in one play through. I am also quite certain the mechanic would be viewed as trivial and not worth looking for, if it was simply a 30 minute somewhat more involved EvE mission type thing.

Of course implementing this mechanic would be tricky in the context of group play but I think it would be definitely doable. The main concern of course is letting people play together but without skipping to the end for easy rewards.

I think this seems very daunting to many people. But I have an easy counter to that. The CoH exemplar system. This may not seem on topic at first but it demonstrates something about people and why they will tolerate and embrace this obvious solution.

The obvious solution is to simply not give you credit for a quest until you do all checkpoints, but allow new people to travel to other group members checkpoints. However this method of travel will not unlock the checkpoint for them it simply allows them to help and have fun and experience that content. In other words you must have unlocked a nearby checkpoint to get the next and checkpoint hopping would have to be checked for. You can get help at any point and still get credit and you can help other people out from the beginning and they get credit but you can't just skip someone to the end if they never did the other checkpoints (possibly allowing for one or two checkpoints to be skipped to add some tolerance). The obvious problem here is that people will be pissed about repeating content to help out other people.

Well as long as you make sure these runs are decently rewarding in the execution (ie. the quest finish is not the only means of substantial reward) people have shown in CoH that they are quite willing to exemplar up or down just to have fun with other people or simply for reciprocation for helping to finish it previously. They will not tolerate this as regular thing, but they will do it often. If you are extremely cyncial and think people only care about the next big thing and will screw everyone else then ok you might not think this will work. But by and large fun and the idea of reciprocation are extremely reliable forms of making sure that people will group together. Most people are not complete dicks. Most people operate off of enlightened self interest and will reciprocate and play games to have fun. Not all, but most and you only need most to work this way.

Quests were put in and made major content to address people desire to play how they want. This is a powerful drive. But in the process the content generated under this system has become essentially trivialized to a large degree. This trivialization is the source of the feeling of "grind". The quest grind is a real thing even if its different than a mob grind or a craft grind. They all share the same general charactistic repetition of small tasks that have little importance on their own. The objectives themselves are trivial and often repeated. If these tasks were non-trivial they would seem like something other than a grind. I am not saying making them non-trivial suddenly makes them good per se, simply that it changes their character you need other things to also make them good/fun.

Over the past couple years people have been lead to an incorrect conclusion. They believe that because this trivial content has been successful and even demanded that therefore the large majority of players are slack jawed idiots who want trivial stuff. No, in reality the drive for people's playtime to fit into their own way of lviing is so strong that they have actually switched to lower quality stuff and will continue to do so because in the end that is their "buing decision" based upon the forces at work.

By and large most people do in fact like an absorbing and well crafted experience. Tons of people will sit through a 2 hour long movie if the movie is good. In fact they pay a lot of money to do so. Now imagine that someone came in and said all movies should be 30 minutes long because the consumers are slack jawed morons with an attention span of a gnat. This is just stupid. Most movies would be utter crap if you made them 30 minutes long and is also why most books turn into poor movies its simply an issue of length. Now lets look at that issue of books. Books are a major industry and many people read fiction. But how many people are reading the entire book in one setting? Very few. They do it in short bits. In fact many people read long books in a large number of short time periods while doing things like riding a subway or train or buss. Yet books are much more of a time commitment then reading, yet many busy people read books instead of going to movies.

The fact is you can make longer and MORE absorbing content and games if you allow people to break into managable pieces. The WoW method of quest content is like saying that since people like sitcoms all book should be 30 minutes to read because people won't sit in one place for the 8 hours it would take them to read a normal book.

Some of the sandbox people say quests are an even worse grind than Mob grind games. There is something to this. But that is only because the MMO companies have given you a marathon of "Saved by the Bell" episodes rather than giving you the ability to get one real good book and read it at your own pace in your own way.
 

Short quest add gameplay options.

Chain Quest just add to the background story.

 Long posts with too much detail to reduce the response numbers.

Very long post (haven't read it all but most), and I think you missed a simple solution . . . stop hand holding the player. Having chain quest is the perfect solution to the problem you noted the issue is the current implementation of small chaining quest came at us backwards here's what I mean.

At current most chain quest are set up such that you get get a seemingly small quest do it turn it in only to find another related quest, this arc goes on and look at that it turns out you where savign the world (well you probly dont know this as you liek most probably just spamed accepted, ran to the glowing spot on the map and ran back) but you get the idea.

Now lets look at what some stand alone games are doing with there huge over arching quests typically they tell you out right what the end goal is or at least what a mid point goal is i.e. save the world, kill the bad guy, etc etc etc but how do you get there? well the quest is broken down into steps much like your check points first you kill 10 rats in the sewer to gain some trust of the bar keep who has the info you need, while in the sewer you find 2 or 3 side quest that tie back into the main quest so on and so on until you finally have all the prerequisites done to do the thing you started out to do in the beginning i.e. completed a major section or the over arching quest as the case may be. This is what many of thous kill 5 rats quest are, you are training or proving your self to some one before they send you to some one else who will eventually lead you into some epic stuff some where the problem is the player isn't told about this epic possibility until they are there so all they see is kill 5 rats.

MMO game play structure:
1st let me say you will want to have more than 1 system at work here, you will have players that like grind, you will have quest grinders, you will have explores, etc. most of your players will be grinders one day and explores the next so the worst thing you can do is throw any of thous methodologies out what you need to do is balance them accordingly

MMO grinds:
Grinding in the usual since is a self directed play style as you noted I personally like it assuming I have a group to grind with in fact this is my usual play style (chat while grinding X mob for Y hrs to hit Z level). This is not a bad thing unless of course you are forcing it on the player; any thing forced on a player will most likely be viewed by the player as a bad thing. There is no real need to go into detail on grinding other than to say that it is not the great evil that it has been made out to be in the past 5 or so years
 

MMO quest grinds:
Again some like it some don't, this is something we have seen since WoW I think, I don't recall it before then and I think this is a side affect of breaking the larger story down into to small and to water down of a section to be more than filler and alternative to mob grinding. Having said that some do like it even love it, again looking at stand-alone RPGs I relate this quest grinding to side quests, quest that do not directly impact the main story line and are often very generic though serve as an alternative activity out side random encounters/battles (mob grinding). The most important thing to remember here I think is to not hold the players hand to much, yes the quest should be completable in just 20-30 min *if* you know the area, task, etc. throwing the golden marker over the NPCs head is bad enough if you want to have them signal the player then do it in a game since i.e. ambient conversation "Hay you, come here!", "Can I ask you a favor?", "enter other corny over used NPC chatter" further more lighting up the radar, having the target glow on the ground and in the case of EQ2 providing a wisp trail is just way to far, now you have a player running on auto pilet going brain numb completing the quest, a quest is fun for questers because it engages them intellectually mob grinders do not get the same intellectual stimulation (they are typically multi tasking) or at least this is the way I see it.
When I want to be engaged by the game, have to think about it and have fun at it like a small puzzle, I do a quest. When I want to kick back and not worry about leveling or the active game as it where I mob grind (click and hit). Each method is useful in different ways, questing lets me get a deeper game fix in a fairly short period of time while grinding lets me make active progress with minimal mental investment thus I can manage a guild, chat with friends, etc. while mob grinding or I can go off into the fantasy land with some well through out yet still short kill 5 rat quests to get the bones to make the potion to unlock the door to the dragons den quest or quest steps as it where.

MMO main quests:
Now I mentioned quest grinding but we also usually have some form of epic quest for the player i.e. a big bad guy, a test of a vet member of my class/order/etc or even the main story of the region of the game im in at the moment. As mentioned by the OP this is prolly to long for the average gamer to take in all at once, and if we break it down improperly then we run the risk of bleeding out all the glory which is the game developers story writing. The solution I do believe is to give the player a long quest one that can not be completed in 15min more like a 4 or 5+ play hrs thing, I personally hate instancing in MMOs so how are we going to do this check pointing . . . ? well most RPGs handle this just fine with steps i.e.
You walk in to a town and the guard's man ask if you could lend them a hand, now in WoW gen this would be the point that you get that kill 5 rats quest and report back to me. in most RPGs you would be told a back story and would be given a major task of some sort i.e. remove some threat, uncover some unknown, etc. something to big to be just randomly accepted something you have no idea how to complete; lets look at Dragon Age for a min, You have a quest of end the blite that's a bit request and you have no idea how to complete it but you have a set of tasks go get aid from these 4 groups . . . again to big you don't know where to start thous tasks have tasks meet this guy, find this group, travel here, etc. so as you can see we have a large or mid sized task presented to us, obviously to large to complete alone and in a reasonable time if at all but that task has sub tasks to be complete which function as the check points you mentioned and can do so without the need for instancing for the most part. Applying the above to dungeons is just as easy and with out over use of instancing, I suggest that instances should only be used for the boss walk being the stretch up to the boss and that the rest of the dungeon should be public this will serve as a meeting ground and allow groups to form and test before heading into tight spots further more this allows the check point system to be put into place you have now sub divided the dungeon into X number of sections and it doesn't have to be a star pattern i.e. 1 common area with 5 rooms (instances) off of it you could have 1 common area with 2 instance areas off of it, once you pass one of thous instanced areas "clearing the way" so to speak the portal that once took you to the instance encounter now takes you to a deeper common area and so we can see a player going in to a dungeon alone, meeting a pick up group learning to play with them cutting his/her way to a mini boss and cutting that boss down, now when the player comes back to this door or leads a group here they can pass through to the next common area without having to reengage the mini boss (unless the wanted to perhaps once completed you could select to re-play or not). Also note that this gives us the possibility to have more than 1 path through the dungeon to the main boss, you could take the right path the left path or clear them all and each option could impact the environment of the final boss instance all unique to the individual player and with minimal instancing where the mass majority of the dungeon is actually public space
 

(Now I didn't cover it all but thats getting to long for a single post as it is)

I agree that many quests in MMO are fairly analogous to side quests in games like Dragon Age. But I would go farther though. Some of the side quests in Dragon Age really are no more than a stand alone excuse to have a pre made battle on the over world travel map.

They are basically just filler. A couple of them you just get off the chantry board and hit the travel map. For example there is one you simply get off the chantry board travel to vai the world map, fight 2 waves of wolves and a boss giant bear then get some money for your trouble. This is the way many MMO quests are

This exists in MMO and stand alone RPGs. But I find them a little ... sad I guess. Its ok to put in for variety I suppose but in the end its kind of lame. This is different from (bit of a spoiler here) the dragon you can summon in the orzimar throne room as this is never told to you and involves a non obvious puzzle. The boss fight it self is kind of hard as its an orange boss level dragon (not high dragon) and you may never even realize this is in the game. That is fine. If you know what you are doing its extremely quick to get and do. Also in the Orzimmar portion of the main quest there are various interesting side quests in the areas you visit a long the way. That is also fine. some are just short little tidbits or puzzles. But in the end there is still always an "along the way". There is a earn your way there but not force you to constantly earn your way there mechanic. In addition of course stand alone RPGs allow you to save your game at any time and go do something else.

But the thing with many MMOs over past few years is they just have a bunch of filler quests. Tons of them. And many of the interesting side quests involve annoying turn offs in instances that no one ever wants to do. Like doing the Helm instance in Shan-To-Kor in DDO.

In end this boils down to trash mob killing. Why are we doing it over and over? Why can't we just do it once when what we are doing is objective and goal?

As you say when you want to mob grind you do just that. Many instances basically force you to mob grind when you do not really want to. And as you astutely point out, people will generally dislike anything they feel is forced on them.

I think this has been one of more harmful things for the mob grinding. It is forced onto people so often in areas where it is simply out of context that they have responded with pure hatred of it. I personally do not want to mob grind all the time or even most of the time. But there are times when I am fine with it or even would like to do it.

But I do not want to do it in directed content. I really do not want to clear the same trash mobs over and over just to farm some boss. I really do not want to start all over again ad nauseum like some strange nightmare.

Yet I have not said get rid of all trash mobs. This is something that was tried in WoW to some extent. Blackwing Lair had far less trash than Molten Core. But at the same time many people wiped on the trash mobs in MC at first. They are not trash until you can do it. Then they become trash. Well if you are in a guild that has wiped on trash mobs in 20 runs then continuously forcing them to kill these things is probably a grind to them. So simply let them get past that point.

The thing is the "trash mob" mechanic is perfectly fine. When done once or twice. But when you have to slog through them over and over it sucks. If you made me kill the same three darkspawn encounters over and over and over again everytime I went to Redcliff in Dragon Age my opinion of the game would plummet.

And because of this many MMOs have done what WoW did and made a large portion of the overland map sparsely populated, predictable and non-dangerous. Because people need to reliably traverse all that area rather than making dangerous but have way to get past stuff you have earned your way past.

If you have to continuously earn something by performing the same action over and over then that is basically a job by definition. This is what MMO that immitate WoW do they create a bunch of tastless filler side quests and then send you off to do what you already did over and over. No real story or plot to it except whatever is in the quest text.

Alto of this though is because the content of the overland map is tailored to be non-burdensome. You say the solution is less hand holding. In a sense I agree with you. But from my perspective the hand holding is taking place in the content itself. In the zone design itself. Certain things should be made less burdensome so that the content can go back to being MORE of a burden.

I should not be able to simply waltz through an enemy village whenever I please. But even old school MMOs are designed in such a way that this is not just possible but a regular occurence so that people may traverse the maps.

In Aion one of the Rifts from Asmodians to Elyos occurs in a place near a Mau (cat people) village to get there you need to get through a centaur village. When a rift pops people don't fight there way through that village they run through it. They either do something tricky to avoid aggro or they do a train of some sort. The design of that content is such that it is not simple to get through quickly but if done right is certainly possible and can be done reliably.

The players are basically forced to repeatedly abvoid trash over and over for no good reason. There is all sorts of hostile stuff along the way, but why is it even hostile? Just to kill people who screw up? It certainly is not a real barrier. If the the devs want to put in a real barrier they create a choke point with unavoidable aggro. The Aion devs do this in the MistMane part of the same zone. You have to fight your way through that area.

Most questing occurs in the other kind of zone. The type of zone where you can simply run through it if you know what you are doing. I suggest that this is the hand holding. It is basically creating directed content that has no real barriers to conquer. But they have to make that way or getting to the other areas is too big of a pain in the ass. Not just a pain but a boring slog if people are forced to kill the centaur everytime they go to the Frostmane Mau. That does not mean we should give people a free pass past the centaur and this type of content is perfectly fine for mob grinding gameplay.

But most of the quests are basically slapped onto areas like this that are essentially only appropriate in a mob grind context. If I want to do a quest in Frostmane I basically have to prepare myself for a long and involved slog through the whole area that will take 1-2 hours even if I have been there 10 times even if I just want to get to a place very close to the end that I have earned my way to before. On the other hand some other quest may be to simply kill 5 scorpions that are near the entrance to frostmane Mau. In that case I simply run past the centaur village and train a few aggro mobs or whatever and deaggro then kill the scoprions in the right spot. There is no earning my way to the scorpions there is nothing interesting at all really, because the designers do not want to inflict the 1-2 hour slog that the frostmane content entails.

Yet both of these are entirely in the persistent world and have nothing to do with instances.

MMO content is currently a constantly inflicted all or nothing game. Either you slog your way through an extremely burdensome chokepointed/trash packed area or you simply run past everything do the deed and leave. There is not mechanism to let people earn their way past the chokepoints or trash mobs, so they basically just removed them entirely.

Instead of having those centaur in the village just kind of wander around in aggro mode. You could have an initially impassable village that required some amount of fighting and/or stealth to make your way through. Once you have gotten your way through that village you then find a secret passage that you are able to unlock and thereafter bypass that village. Either through instant transport or simply by having a more normal short cut that unlock with whatever magic word or key you discovered. This passage has no mobs and only takes a couple minutes to run through rather than the 30 minutes of fighting the centaur village takes to fight through. But at no point is the centaur village ever trivialized to the point where you simply just run through it.

It is tempting to say that the secret passage mechanic I mention here is "hand holding" because it alleviates a burden but the burden it alleviates is pointless once you have conquered it. What is currently happening is the content itself has been trivialized to the point of being only somewhat burdensome so that it is functionally the same as the passage. This then means that any quests whose setting becomes trivialized version of the centaur village is also trivialized.

So I submit that the hand holding is not in what options are presented to the players but that hand holding has already taken place in the content itself. But it is more subtle because they simply trivialized the content so that they need not do any "hand holding". There are mechanics that may appear like hand holding because they give a helping hand. But the idea behind some sort of checkpoint/open passge mechanic is that you must have earned your way there. Therefore it is not hand holding.

So yes in some sense the problem is hand holding, but not in the way that many people characterize. The devs have made a simple calculation people are not doing certain things so we will make some things easier so that they will do it. This appears like hand holding. And in some cases IS hand holding.

But in this case I believe they had the right idea but made the wrong thing easy. They made the content easier so that people could have less burdens doing other things in the world. So that they could move around freely and still get things done. This was done because they had to keep coming back. So they made the content on the way easy to traverse. This is fine for something like a road or a well traveled area or even some mob grind areas with a lot of traffic (although I hesitate on that one). In the case of areas that you have directed content in I think this is the reverse of what they should have done. They should make that content nasty to get through but not force you to keep going over the same nastiness once you earn your way past.

The whole point of directed content of any sort is to continuosly push you through a progression of new nastiness. Push people through a progression of trivial zones and they get bored. Force people to constantly re-do the exact same challenge over and over and they get bored and feel like they are doing a job.

For the two major directed content types; quests and instances we basically have these two things. Quests are basically just pushing people through trivialized content. Instances are constantly forcing people kill trash mobs over and over.

I say let people earn the right to no longer constantly kill trash and un-trivialize the quest content in teh overworld map by letting people get past parts they have earned their past.

The entire overworld non-instanced design of many MMOs is heavily influenced on trash mob design and the fact that people are basically tired of that crap. This has then directly affected quests as well. Because a quest is only as good as the map/content it is set in.

This does not mean there should not be large free roaming areas in an MMO.  But quests themselves should be sending you into dangerous and involved places.  I mean that is the nature of a quest.  Its the whole mythology behind it and of course if it wasn't hard they would be asking they would do it themselves.  Instead they simply send you out into a wilderness with sparsely but regularly packed creatures that seem to be perpetually pisssed off for some reason to the point they strangely fight to the death all the time.  Rather than run away and avoid conflict like a sensible animal would. 

The grind feeling is better reduced by making the quests more interesting.

Like adding some puzzle elements or randomness to them.

Like say you had to kill 3 X mobs, but you had to do something in particular to pop those mobs, like kill another mob type in the area that hunt said mob type for food, which would make the correct mobs come out of hiding.

Or a mob that runs away from you so you had to cooperate with someone to catch those mobs, or lure it against a wall or something.

The monsters could team up against you, so you would have to find a way to turn that fact against them somehow.

Lots of ways to go at it really. Some quests might have you run away from a huge boulder coming at ya.

I tried to read through all of that but my eyes started glazing over.  No offense intended, Gestalt, I've liked and agreed with many of your posts in the past but you do have a tendancy to be overly verbose.  I'm sure you could present your thoughts in a more concise manner if you tried.  This is not meant as an insult but for pratical considerations it would be better to condense things a bit.  I'm sure you realize that most people on this forum won't even attempt to read through such a long post.

I am sure it's a thought worth reading, but you really should consider rephrase it to make it shorter by at least 50%.

The only issue I can think of atm is, when quests are that long it is VERY difficult to step in. I recall in EQ2 quests where long quest lines, and it was unbelievable difficult to find someone who was at the exact same spot as you. I understand you can tell better stories and make it all more immersive they way you say, OP, but it really would take a huge amount of time scheduling to get that done with MMO grouping.