Daily Tasks

[Kiyaani]

Over the years there have been several discussion threads regarding tasks. Some of them have gotten a lot of feedback, others not so much. But the one thing I’ve found to be common for them is that they all request some kind of ability to choose your task.

With that in mind, I’d like to pull ideas from each of those threads and add a few others so we can have a bit of a more constructive and consolidated task discussion.

To start – there are four main task threads I want to cite here: "Community Projects", "Task requests", "Town Tasks", and "Tasks talk" found in the Features Requests and Suggestions board and the General Town & Outposts board.

The main points of each of the previous threads are the following:

• Request to offer tasks that drive community building without personal gain (materials tasks, donations, cooking tasks, flora/fauna tasks, construction tasks). These tasks would be advertised on town boards and available for all to contribute to individually or as a group and would be updated when completed. A designated place would house collected items. Some of these have been offered recently with Keth, Tse Gaiyan and construction of Haiban.

• Request to get a particular kind of task. Task types would be something like Single Combat, Patrol, Culling, Plant, Survey, Heal, Escort etc. depending on the guild you’re in. These tasks can still be turned down.

• Request for generic town group tasks. These tasks are similar to normal tasks (culling, surveying etc.) but are not guild-specific. X-town is having trouble with X. Find a group and go take care of it. The town would then provide a monetary or custom item reward upon completion and it could award possible reputation gains or prestige rather than guild points.

• Request to offer tasks as a board or menu system rather than random draw.

• Request to have non-task activities that still award guild points. (So far these have all been a GM-led activity or minor event, but could potentially be automated like totems for Templar).

Some additional things that I’d like to open to discussion:

Currently tasks are grindable, meaning you can finish a task, get a new one, finish, get a new one, until you’re blue in the face. Sometimes you will get the same task multiple times in rapid succession if not full-on one right after the other. While this is nice in terms of progressing through guild ranks quickly, it bothers me on some levels RP-wise.

For example… I was with a group earlier today on a culling task with another member of my guild. We both had the same task by some random twist of fate and had two other non-guild members helping to speed things along and make it safer. We finally managed to finish the task after a fair amount of effort and some decent RP and we went our separate ways. About two minutes later I get a PM from my guildmate saying she had gotten another task in the same place we had just been.

For survey, forage and herb grinding tasks this may not be a problem, but for large-scale cull tasks it can be for several reasons including the fact that it’s weird to think your hard work didn’t pay off, but also because you likely just left whatever group was helping you and it would be awkward to ask for help again.

What I’d like to propose is a bit more of a daily type task system. Basically, depending on your guild, you would still ask your taskmaster for a task, but instead of getting the same thing over and over you would get the option to choose, much like mentioned in one of the past threads.

So again – task types would be something like the following:

Single Combat
Patrol
Culling
Plant
Survey
Heal
Escort
Mark
Burgle
Craft
Collect

Or whatever else the GMs wanted to call them. You would be given options based on the guild and could choose to do each one, all of them, or none of them, in any order, but only once per day. You could choose the type, but not what the task is asking for and you could still abandon it for a re-roll of the task at the expense of points as per the current system. The amount of points awarded from doing these tasks would be greatly increased and points could still be earned from alternative means (for most guilds casting or battling certain enemies gives minor point increases).

This method of tasks would free up a lot of time for players to grind skills, learn professions, or most importantly – RP and flesh out their characters. It would also allow players to take more time to learn about their guild as they progress through ranks rather than just rushing to learn everything all at once.
Players could still help others with their tasks, but once you’re done with your tasks for the day, you have the freedom to pursue other activities or even to continue grinding without feeling like you haven’t contributed to your particular guild’s mission.

Guilds like the Monastic Order with fewer task options may be able to have up to three towns require healing assistance or something. Elemancers, 3-5 areas that need to be surveyed etc.

As always, constructive feedback and discussion is appreciated. And if you made it this far, thanks for reading.

[jilliana]

Thank you for taking the time to write this out. This is certainly one of those things that could do for some slight revamping.
Excuse me if I missed this in all the info, but I would like there to be a way for certain types of tasks to be limited to an hourly or daily basis. These would be tasks that involve culling MOB in a particular area, especially when a group just left it.

I particularly like choosing the tasks. Newer members of a guild may be able to gain a bit of promotion without feeling like a failure and older members may focus on those tasks that help them gain some skills. The latter of which can help with weapon usage and improving with crafting/forging,and the former can help them earn some riln so they may be able to purchase the essentials to play the game efficiently.

Overall, I like the ideas you proposed. It'll help with making a guild feel and look more well-rounded (community support, member RP) and in most cases, more than one person benefits other than there just being a mostly player guild mater communication.

[Kiyaani]

Yep, Jilliana, that's exactly what I was proposing =) I want the tasks to be limited to once a day so your character has more of a sense of accomplishment.

And any feedback or additional ideas or even differing ideas are welcome here. I just wanted to get task discussion consolidated and give it a bit of a jump start since it hasn't been a hot topic for a while.

[qinweiqi]

Well, I've heard that Rias has some ideas in the works for changing how guild tasks are handled and how guild points will be used/valued so that guild members don't feel inclined to grind away at tasks when they need guild points. I think tasks will still be offered for people looking for something to do though.

Also, I've been thinking about tasks from the perspective of the guilds. The guilds handing out tasks according to the needs of the guild does make sense. So, an argument could be made either way for being able to select a specific type of task or not being able to. For example, if the university needs dirt samples, they shouldn't necessarily care that you want to go collect water samples.

Similarly, with the repeat tasks, I can see that going both ways in some circumstances. For culling, I could see the task master thinking, 'hey, it'll be much easier to find three volunteers to kill 30 infested than to find one volunteer to kill 90.' Of course, I feel silly going to Tarueka and getting a water sample and returning it and then going back and getting another and returning that one. If I knew the university needed two samples, I would have just gotten the two samples. But on the flip side, I like to think about the university as a mentoring style organization. They're not really sending me after water samples because they need them, they're sending me to get water samples so I can learn more about the nature of water. So, sure, if you're still bugging a professor for something to do, go look at more piles of dirt, you're bound to learn something eventually. Both of these examples make even more sense in the context of guild tasks just being something you can do to fill your time and mentor you in the guild. So, anyway, there are some of my thoughts.

[Jaster]

+1 for non-guild related tasks. It would seem to make sense, especially with the looming ability generalization, and would give unguilded folk something to do if they so please.

[Lysse]

I don't really care for the idea of a "Player chooses what type of task they want" system, of any kind. To me, it makes more sense for a task to be automatically generated, so that from an IC point of view, you're doing something for someone, rather than just ticking off a checklist, or doing a Daily like in an MMO.

Heck, for something like this, I think that it'd be neat if the way it worked was that you took however many task types were available to you (based off of Guild, so no Monks being told to murder, no non-Thieves being told to burgle, etc.), and had to do the tasks one after the other, sequentially, and if you turn down a certain number of daily tasks, then you don't get to complete the rest.

So basically, a Mercenary might get asked to

1.) Cull some infested
2.) Heal some wounded (Mercs can get poultices too)
3.) Craft something (based off of their craft skills, probably the highest 2-3)
4.) Kill a Challenging Nethrim


And unless they did each of them in order (and wouldn't know what was coming next, until they completed the former) they would forfeit the remainder of the tasks that day, for being an unreliable so-and-so.

[Kiyaani]

I think that might work for some systems, Lysse, but honestly a lot of the guilds have diversity to them and aren't that rigid. The idea was more so that you could choose between tasks that the guild needs to have done based on your character's RP or skillset - with the assumption that you're working as part of a team and not all members of that team needs to do every aspect of the work. If you're a fighter, you can stick with those types of things. If your character abhors violence, you can do some of the less aggressive tasks. If you do a bit of both, but know you have time for one thing over another, you can choose to do a shorter task type now and save a longer culling task for later. Obviously that doesn't work for all guilds.

It would give players the freedom to play their characters more how they want. Then if the guild has something come up where they really do need Polly-Pacifist to kill something or Saul-shoot-em-up to do something more gentle, it can be more event-driven and character-building rather than an every-day sort of task.

[Kunren]

I think it'd be lovely to be able to choose your tasks, but it doesn't really fit IC for most guilds. Perhaps you could profess your desire to do tasks befitting your skills every now and then for those guilds that it wouldn't make too much sense being able to choose your task? Ie telling the guild master "Gimme combat work, it's what I do and I'm good at it." Or "I think want to help but I'm a sucky fighter. Any support tasks I could do? Crafting maybe, or getting necessities in order?". Could change your preferences once a week or so. I'd also support guiltless tasks, perhaps an unaffiliated to any guilds organization to pick up tasks of nigh any kind for money?

[Solaje]

I've had characters that never got off the ground b/c I stuck them in guilds that didn't fit them. Grinding with no goals or tasks gets pretty repetitive. Also, it seems like city tasks would make where you live even more important.

[Lun]

Another idea for city tasks!:
You could 'ask city taskmaster about task' and it'll go list tasks like guild masters list abilities...

you'd get a set # of tasks to do for the day like
1: kill 1 surly infested brigand
2: Kill 20 sweaty bandit
3: gather 42 oak logs
4: gather 3 iron chainmails
5: look for missing person (*spawns someone wounded that you have to bandage up*)
etc etc

And you can then 'ask city taskmaster about task 1 confirm' to receive the first mission, but it wouldn't respawn until the next day or something. Daily tasks, you do them all and then you're done.

OR

Tasks could be given out on a rotating player system and time limited. Err, as in to start being eligible for a city task, you register at a city task person like 'ask taskperson for register' to sign up for city tasks. Then tasks will be generated to the people waiting in queue. 1 mission is given out to 1 player selected at random from the pool. Like those limited person missions could be 10 minutes before it gets cycled out to another player and you get kicked out of queue.

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Benefits of doing all these city tasks in intervals according to how many you've done (like guild levels): increase city reputation, maybe unlock exclusive areas, achievements, riln, points for skills, skills training (like as a reward for killing a creature they offer a token which you can give to a trainer for a free session of training)...

[Kiyaani]

I really like the shop ordering type task system you mentioned as the first idea. I think something like that would be really neat.

[Jirato]

You can track the status of this request here: https://trello.com/c/yMz0ztNF

Right now it is in the Backburner/Undecided list, meaning we're not quite ready to tackle it yet or unsure if we even want to. it's a rather major project and has a lot of work involved. This isn't to say it's never going to happen, but you probably won't see any progress on it anytime soon.