One of the main things about orbus VR is the player run economy, where you have to get your resources from getting them yourself or buying them from another player. Well it was mentioned that like, if your a merchant and you need to get your goods from town A to town B but there are bandits watching the roads, and you can’t fight while transporting your goods so you have to go and hire some player bodyguards to guard you. Well how are you supposed to find those bodyguards in the first place? Its unlikely that there are just going to be some players in town with “guard for hire” signs around their necks or something like that. So i was thinking, what if players can go to a bulletin board in a town and post like “need level X bodyguards to defend me while i move towns” and if another player sees that, they can go take the quest, and it’ll point them to the client. There would be different categories of quests like escort, gather, train, and stuff like that. If a player was looking for a rare potion ingredient, and you took that quest, oyu could go look for that item and when you found it, you would take it to a guild or something like that and deposit the item there to finish the quest. And when the client got back on, he could see that someone did his quest, and go pick up the item at the depo. The minimum pay would go up and down based on the risk of the area(enemy level, pvp activity). Also, earlier it was mentioned that there was going to be an assassin guild that you could pay to kill someone, and if you were associated with them, lets say you’ve killed someone and gotten away with it, you can go over to them and take assassin quests for lots of money. it would make looking for work much easier for player just going around doing jobs.
This is a really good concept. I imagine something similar to a ‘guild’ for this.
The player walks up to the guild ‘help desk’ and takes an empty flyer for a quest (taking the flyer could cost something, in order to prevent spam, and will consume an inventory slot). There is a table nearby that they can take the flyer to, and then they pull the flyer out of the inventory. This opens up a gui where you can create your quest.
You can write (type or handwriting, depends on what you’d prefer, although handwriting would be more immersive) a description of your quest that you want to submit, and there is a section to specify the rewards (currency, materials, etc.). After deciding that and the name of your quest, you go back to that same ‘help desk’ with the flyer in inventory and submit it to them.
Quests are displayed on a quest board (or several) in that same guild building, and the quests are instance specific (where the person who created the quest is in the same instance as someone who accepts the quest, and the quest follows its creator across instances, along with those who accept it being in that same instance). The quest continues until it is completed, abandoned, or deleted.
COMPLETION:
Upon completion of a quest, as long as the materials are present in the user’s inventory (or bank, if possible), the promised rewards will be instantly transferred from the quest giver to the quest completionist.
ABANDONMENT:
When accepting a quest, a copy of the quest’s description and objectives is in your inventory. By handing that back to the guild’s ‘help desk’, you can abandon a quest. Alternatively, by killing the questgiver, that would result in abandoning the quest. (Possibly, you could have it so becoming a bandit abandons the quest, unless the quest requires becoming a bandit.)
DELETION:
If you take your original quest back to the guild ‘help desk’, you can delete your quest. There could be a cost involved, depending on the content involved, but it isn’t necessary to have a removal cost.
Other things I would think could exist if this did would be reporting quests (given a quest submission etiquette) and having an ‘improper’ quest system where players can negotiate unofficial quests. Please feel free to criticize or add on as you see fit, and I personally think that by having this kind of player-driven questing system, it adds to the immersion of playing a VRMMO.
Quick edit: I looked up a little on player made quests, and I think that it has the potential to go wrong. The important things, I think, would be as follows:
- Do not use XP rewards. Quests, in general, should not have XP rewards. By doing this, there can be an abused system for free XP. That is why I think it would be important to have the rewards come out of the giver’s inventory.
- There should be an incentive to make quests that are fun, rewarding, and not ‘necessary to make’. The player driven economy you speak of should drive this; by posting a quest on the board that says you need escorts for materials, you could have the rewards be some gold and some of the materials gathered. Both the players and the questgivers need incentives for this system to work.
That’s pretty much all I can think of; this kind of system is pretty abstract as it stands, so trying to find a way for it to work would be pretty difficult. It’s your game though, so this can go in whatever direction you see fit.