How many quests?!

I've been thinking about the point Syp raised about questing over at Waaagh. I completely agree that something should be done to encourage people to read the text when picking up a quest. The Warhammer IP is one of the best developed (save maybe Lord of the Rings) around and its got some fantastic history and background storeys in it, seems a shame that no-one really reads the stuff.

While I do think that Wizards & Wenches idea of having one epic quest chain in an area, with fewer quests that grant more XP each would be great, I think this definitely wont be done any time soon (if at all). I really cant see Mythic rewriting and changing a huge part of the game when there are other more pressing issues to fix. Dont at blame the healer also came up with a good Idea of adding some pictures to the ToK to make reading the text easier on the eye, which would help but I don't think it would solve the problem. Perhaps the idea of having different options at each stage of the quest chain would make reading the details more important though (see the blog for stick-man awesomeness!).

So, I came up with an idea for a simple aid to help. It wont solve the problem entirely but I think it would help somewhat. I reckon the main thing that puts players (or me anyway) off reading the quest text is when you enter a new area, particularly a war camp, the mini map is covered with the green quest dots- there can easily be 7 or 8 that crowd everything else out, and a player just arriving at the quest hub's probably going to think “whooa, holy crap, its gonna take ages to read through all them” it's much quicker to run round the whole camp, get every one a quick as possible and then work your way round the red blobs on the map.

Now a few of these quests will be RvR or the repeatable scenario quests (especially in warcamps), and if these were given a different icon, say a red skull or crossed swords, it would make the mini map a lot less cluttered when you first reach the zone. Instead of being a blob of green quest markers there would be about several less, and the rest the Scenario/RvR markers. If you wanted to carry on questing when you reached the zone you could go straight for the PvE quests, and when you wanted to do some RvR you could go back to the appropriate quest giver and pick them up. I think every player wants to be as efficient as possible and reading quest text, as well as getiing tiring after the 4th ot 5th one, is time that could be better spent getting XP.

I'm not sure whether I've explained this too well, it made sense in my head! I think it would help in some way until Mythic can get round to tidying the quest system up, if not then it'd just look better :).