
In nearly 95% of the MMO's that are out there today consist of basically grinding out xp, and ALWAYS have the option of doing it the "easy" way through questing. I dont know about you but questing for so long in the games I have played has made me believe they are extremely trivial. I mean the only questing that we would do during our hardcore raiding days is so that we could progress further into the storyline and be able to access more content in the raider's perspective.
This isnt the case now, because after you hit a adiquate level where you can raid they still force you to quest to do things the easy way. I would rather do it a different way than the normal so I usually refuse to do quests unless I absolutely have to to progress. As a person that doesnt do NPC scripted quests I am pretty used to setting personal goals in my brain for what I want to achieve in the game that I am playing, this in and of itself is a quest of sorts. I remember back in EQ1 I used to dream and drool of being able to go to a plane of sky raid so that I could get to the seventh island and retrieve my Crown of Elemental Mastery. Oh the days I would see it in the bazaar for 100k and drool over it constantly, of course by that time planes of power was the latest expansion and everyone in the guild would tell me damn it man you have better stats than that outdated piece of trash. But you know what I wanted it more than anything still, even though I was way higher level than the item was intended I still couldnt aquire it alone.
These are the quests that need to be put forth, personal goals and player driven achievements to make you feel like you actually accomplished something. Do you think I give two damn's if a NPC said somewhere in the quest text dribble that they was greatful to have me around and help them out? Hell no I didnt really give a damn I just sat there and thought to myself wow I got about oh say 2000 more quests to go before I hit max level or get to the amount of gold that I wanted or get to the level of reputation with a faction. Developer's think that we have a blast when we do questing but to tell you the truth it is the only thing that we CAN do. The good old games back in the day didnt really have questing at all, I mean you could quest but good luck finding the NPC and knowing what the hell he is talking about and where to go because you was pretty much SoL in that department. A true fun game would not have questing unless it was for content progression requirements. A true fun game would have adventure instead of questing requiring adventure. The game would put me into a spot where I felt the need to venture out and discover things on my own and find out the secrets to the world that I was new to, not to get some old ass guy a book he lost in a river what the hell?
