Developer Spotlight: Review of Quest Data

More PvP quests (especially something for arena with similar safeguards, perhaps even stricter, than sparta), more RMS/Skirmish-styled quests, more 20-40 pre-leg repeatables would be my request!

But I cannot speak for everybody, and am in one of the minority playerbase demographics (hardcore pvp, casual pve)!

Thanks for the writeup mate, real interesting to read over!

 

Ty for those lists Andy I'm surprised about some results like the war effort, i expected that a lot of players didn't do them anymore since the cooldown was increased. Its nice to see that most players still like the old grinding quests like elite rogues/pharaos/coercion Its also nice to see that a lot of new legs are played so keep up the good work

 

I just want to point out one observation that I see that you didn't mention:

A L L I A N C E W A R S

 

In all seriousness though, I love the idea of more quest diversity. Variety is the spice of life!

Big opportunity to introduce a never before seen (in Celeste) quest pack after the Romans are released to kind of go hand in hand with them, imo.

 

"short and profitable - very popular" This really doesn't surprise me.

The issue here is that we can spend a long amount of time doing a challenging leg quest and all too often gain only vendor fodder from the chests OR we do for each civ. a fairly quick elite quest and with the rng as it is, get an occasional decent reward.

So in summary:
Leg quests - very satisfying to do but rewards are often soul destroying
Elite quests - soul destroying to do but rewards are usually worthwhile.

So to answer the original question - What kind of quest do we need?
We need quests that are satisfying & challenging to do & which give chest rewards that don't feel like a slap in the face with a wet kipper!

 

Quests notes/ideas

Easy/Quick quests with high reward
The really short quests are good for rewards, chests/gold/ep and materials for decorations, but aren't very satisfying quests in themselves, its the rewards I do them for. More of such quests but more interesting questing experience could be fun. Could look at the low level quests for ideas, there were lots of small duration, limited unit/goals.


The legendaries and elites
Want to do legendaries, but two blocks:
(1) don't have sufficient gear, so elites are better option. New interesting elite quests would be awesome, perhaps with way to build towards guaranteed rewards, either with 'Elite Points' that can be used to buy gear, downside of that is it encourges grinding the easiest elite quest. Better I think is complete all of set of new Elite quests to get a Legendary chest, or Epic/Legendary chest. etc
(2) don't have time for the legendary quest. Can also be true for the elite quests. If I'm doing an legendary I usually try to do it when I've a 1.5-2hour gaming window, even if I think it will just take me 45-60min to do, I want to have buffer to restart, not worry about running out of time at the end, and if it all goes wrong I can go off and do something easier and feel satisfied with my gaming time. A possible idea would be to make Elite/Legendary quests, but that only last 15-25min. Maybe something that is a sub part of a Legendary style quest.

As an example:
Take the Valley of the Kings quest and split it into 3-5 solo min-legendary quests, can call it 'Training for the valley':
(Quest 1) you start like valley of kings, but goal is just to take the first base. Big trench/mountain cuts off where player 2 would be and all the npcs past the first base. You start in age 1 and need to defend, maybe take the wonder too even, push in and destroy the 1 town center, 2-3 fortresses and the boss, tune it a bit, but basically that, quest should be like the first ~15-20min of the valley quest, for an average player.
(Quest 2) you start basically where the last quest ended. With your base build up a bit, resources, some units in the empty space where the first npc base was. Now you have to push through the valley a bit, to the priest boss say.
(Quest 3) continues where quest 2 ended, you push north and finish the map.

Maybe there is a meta quest for completing the 3 subquests, rewards some chests, so you get less in each small quest but nearly the same amount as full legendary when you complete all 3.

Would be cool to see the whole legendary map and you just work through a part of it each quest, with trench cutting of the area you aren't meant to go to. But if it was a smaller map and you just achieved the small goal that would be fine too. Anyways, idea here is that it would be good to have interesting/challenging quests, but that take 15-25min for average player who has good gear equipped. The key being the time commitment not the difficulty.


My typical quests:
Pharaohs Challenge - I want the EP and gold for the time required, less bothered by the chests but they are nice. Gameplay is ok but as occasional thing, don't enjoy doing it so many times.
Lots of rogues - I want the EP,gold,chest rewards and enjoy the time required. Gameplay is boring by now.
Trade doc quests - are ok, but done so many times, but need to decorations.
Summer mini quests - merchant was ok a few times but boring after that. Fortress destory was nice gameplay. Base defense i enjoyed, make it 10min instead of 15 and more difficulty could be good, so i don't just build 3 fortresses and go afk. Priests I found too unreliable to finish. They are all nice, but after first few goes I'm doing them for the time to reward ratio.
Summer legendary - really enjoyed, could do solo in 45min consistently. Some legendaries in the 25-40min for average players would be awesome too. Scale rewards accordingly.
Crete - I enjoy it, but played it a lot back in original AOEO so bit tired of it. But difficult quests in 15-40min ranges are cool.

 

To build on the summer defense quest idea. Enjoyed that a lot, but hits a easy stage. Would be cool if I needed to build units to send out and catch enemy before they got close. Maybe enemy gets long range siege, defending by different unit types, so i need to build different units to take them down efficiently. So I need to maintain an outside army too. Could be a different levels to it, like Crete. 10-20min are good durations for it.

 

I am sorry Andy but I think you missed the point I was trying to make. I obviously didn't make myself clear enough - sorry for that.

What I'm trying to say is that the long leg quests are a joy & challenge to do but if at the end you only get vendor fodder from the chests as is very often the case, you feel that they are a waste of your time and therefore resort to doing the boring short, but frequently profitable elite quests.

The bottom line is that it is so demoralizing to complete a long & difficult quest for poor chest rewards.

See this example: Leg Liberating Thebes -
This guy spends about 1 hour 20 mins doing the quest
At 1.30 the guy opens the 12 chests gained:
1 half decent item: an epic los helmet & 11 items for the vendor.
His comments in the video echo my thoughts.

UPDATE
I watched this video again and noticed a couple of things:
1) The 5 treasure camps on the map were all large camps which should yield between 1 & 3 chests each. From the 5 camps this player got 5 chests?
Was the RNG against him 5 times out of 5 or is some fix needed ?
2) The video does not include game play in attacking the guardians at the 5 treasure camps so in fact the total time for this quest must have been at least 2 hours.

Conclusion
Although I stated 1 of the 12 chest items was 1/2 decent it's something I'd never use. Soldiers gear slot 4 get only gloves or gauntlets but an epic los helmet is at least a GM salable item.
So as Ardeshir states below: 12/12 useless items from chests

As I understand it the new leg only quests at Rhakotis are designed to be the most difficult quests in the game. Designed to be a real challenge for the best players among us!
But as we see here the rewards excluding the coin + EP, can be just awful.
Does this explain why many leg quests are unpopular? - I think so

To quote the player in the video - Mehh - Not worth it, just not worth it.

 

Another thought. I like have lots of time play when I do new quests, legendaries and even easy ones really, as you don't know how they will turn out and there is inclination to do what you know will reward you. So could be interesting to have a weekly or month quest to do 5 randomly selected quests, or 5 quests you've never done before, if that can be calculated, that rewards you with a legendary chest reward or something reliably good. Basically something that gives players incentive to try new quests and so get used to them and open up the variety of quests they think about doing normally.

 

New craft recipe of consumables such as Military, Potions etc. more useable in all ages. And add a legendary variant of actual consumables. Obviously, craft from a lot of materials.

 

I really like Aryzel's idea of if you did all quests in a category (say Elite quests in a region), you get a legendary chest. That could encourage people to do more different quests.

Another thing I was thinking is: Instead of saying that we need short quests with good rewards, we should come to terms with the fact that existing long quests are under-rewarded and adjust them accordingly? I mean, if Elite Rogues could get you 5 chests in 5 minutes, then a 40 minute quest shouldn't just give you 8 chests, but more like 20 chests.

For Beorix, although I have never done the quest, I wonder if the reason for its unpopularity is due to people being intimidated by the Age 2 optional?

 

Really great information to read and a big thank you for this information, some eye openers there and very interesting. It’s a pity it was done during the summer event to get real data although you can remove those particular quests from the sheet, it will only reflect a rough estimation on remainder quests as players will often sacrifice certain quests from their regular routine to do event quests, but nevertheless great info and a no doubt a great direction that this will ultimately bring us.

I would love to see more fun quests in the 15 -30 min range and especially quest line type or story type missions with repeatable versions to include Elite/Legendary follow ups something like the Cyprus/Athens etc quest lines but more like the Age of Empires II/Conquerors etc, very story line based. Send an Emissary to such a place and follow up quests for different regions etc. Heck we could even track down Bahram and jail him for corrupt trading or hand him over to the Babylonians after undertaking a fantastic story quest line to chase him around, He’s currently taking forever to get to Tarsos. The rewards could be the usual EP/Gold per mission and total quest line ultimate reward of a Home City building/Statue of Bahram Hanging in Babylon or Home City Building of Bahram in a Jail . “It wasn’t me” Anyway, you get the idea story lines are limitless.

Although delighted, amazed and surprised by the release of the new Legendary quests in Rhakotis with the Romans still inbound, I was saddened not to see a standard questline, followed up by a repeatable versions to also include Elite/Legendary that would have eased the more not so Elite players to play them and get used to them. At the same time, I do realise that this is a considerably more work, but maybe it can be looked at in the new year.

Another aspect of the daily type quests that could be looked at is that the cooldown timer be moved for the twice dailies from 12 hrs to maybe 10 hrs and also introduce a number of full dailies mid-range (15-30 mins as above) that can be done on an actual daily basis, but having their cooldown timer of 20 hrs instead or 24 hrs. Reason for these shortened timers is that players usually have a certain amount of daily playtime and sometimes one can get tied in in some r/l maters and miss out on their daily activities and slightly shortened c/d’s would give lenience for this and the simple fact that quest c/d timers start when the quest finishes, so you’re always out of sync and this would alleviate that and also restricts any abuse of questing these dailies/twice dailies.

As a lover of AoEO’s unique Home Cities feature in the AoE franchise, I would love to see more quests available from our Home Cities or other players Cities and possible rewards of new City buildings and could even entail some sort of storyline taken on here. Even reworking the Mamu and Peepaw/Ol’ Man Fischers quests that seem totally useless after first completion apart from having players visit our Cities to undertake same, a few extra types of these that may reward statues/buildings/units for cities would be great. City quests are unique to this AoE game and should be expanded and developed further. Take a questline that you have to visit and play from X amount different player Cities etc, something along the lines that Aryzel has mentioned above for doing Legendary quests from maybe different locations and getting a unique rewards after 3/5 have been completed within say a week/month/whatever with a c/d timer and untradeable.

Crete quests: Even More (Whatevers) I’m surprised at tbh, I thought they would have been a lot more popular, but there are a few maps there that I have never tried at all, even from back in MS days, I do 2-3 of the maps only atm, but at the same time I love to play them just to get the City Wonders and it’s a long hard grind but I hope to be playing this game for a long time and that doesn’t bother me to keep at them per civ. I like the fact that the mats for these are untradeable, keeping each civs Wonders unique. I’ll eventually get around to all maps though. But quite shocked at their stats, so obviously need reworking.

PvP players could also have their Cites say threatened (without actual any form of destruction, last thing we want is Carnage in our Home Towns lol)), via their Embassy etc and playing 3/5 different players with a said quest would offering unique rewards over a said time (week) and even expanding this to other quests or rewards of Greater Wonders/EP/Vanity rewards over much greater amounts of time/challenges. First time PvP players could get certain rewards for first 50/100/500 matches played with some sort of restrictions to try stop any abuse of pairing up to abuse. PvP needs more incentives for players. Please also remove the “Win” aspect for Participation on the Sparta events, it’s participation that’s needed to grow that base > Yeah I’m useless at it but have great fun trying.

So in Short:
Story line quests
Regular Quest lines with Repeatables/Elite/Legendary
More fun 15-30 mins Quests
Crete reworking
Expand City Quests and Reward City Buildings/units/city vanity
Hunt Down Bahram
Allow shorter cool downs for twice dailies/New full dailies 10hrs/20hrs
PvP Incentives

But a Big Thank You Andy P for this great info/demographic and it’s very encouraging to see some of the great responses above, already some great ideas straight from the player base.

 

I disagree that upping rewards for existing under-rewarded would change the economics much. The rewards/time for many of these quests are so bad that even if we double or triple the rewards, it would have almost 0 impact on the game since it's still so much worse than the popular quests. (ex. Breaking Eggs takes 30 minutes from the timer no matter how good you are at blowing up enemy TC's, as far as I can tell.) People who just want rewards aren't doing those quests anyways. The only issue I could see with the approach is if we have to nerf Pharaoh in the future, then these quests could suddenly became optimal if we dramatically increase their rewards.

Speaking of which, my opinion is that a nerf to New Pharaoh, Elite Rogues and the like is inevitable. I don't think we want to introduce any more quests of New Pharaoh's efficiency. However, if we don't, then Pharaoh remains the best, and people would be "forced" to farm that, instead of playing any of new short quest that's introduced.

Anyways, I have no idea that Trade For quests are so popular. I figured that if you want EP and can't do Pharaoh, you would just do Elite Rogues or Persian Coercion. But then, I don't really care about decorating my capital. One question I have. Do people play any of the "bad" lvl 37 quest reward quests like Craftsmen Rescue, We Can Always Use More, etc?

 

LoS on an epic? that would be the biggest waste of the bunch. 12/12 useless items

 

Prepareth to square! We shall chaseth thee to the endeth and gleefuly gaze thee hangeth in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, 'r wouldst thee pref'r a cage, feareth not f'r I shalt remaineth loyal to the end thus is in the spirit of the game.