Collection Drudge

In a post about the exploits of Nostalgia in Lavaspinner's Lair, Tipa has this to say about collection quests:

Our job was to kill those spiders and grab some of their webs — eight for each person who needs. And while we were there, maybe some blood from the higher-level Delve drakes guarding the nests in the northern part of the lair.

So, basically, an entire night spent getting uncommon drops from hundreds of mobs, because they are collection quests, the ABSOLUTE WORST kind of quests ever written in any MMO. The kind of quests that you don’t want to do in a group because it will take forever, but this being EverQuest, not the kind of thing you can do alone.

Yes, yes, by Marr! This is the worst. WoW is full of this kind of thing. Quests where you have to pick up 10 of something off a mob, and they aren't shared between group members. Worst is when they aren't tradeable either. So grouping generally makes things go slower. This is a bad mistake in an MMO, I feel. There should be as little friction to grouping as possible, and every reason to group up.

EQ2 does pretty well on this score. Most "collect X thingys" quests use virtual drops, and everyone in the group gets them at the same time. So grouping up helps you kill things faster, and otherwise doesn't slow things down at all.

LOTRO uses an inferior system. Virtual and real quest drops are rolled for individually on each kill. So one person can be done, while the other is still looking. There are other quests which are to be gathered directly from clickies, and players are in direct competition with each other for these. Often there aren't enough of them in a dungeon to complete the quest for everyone in a full group. I hate that.

Then there's sparklies. Most of them are in overland zones, which can be soloed, so no big issue there. But Runnyeye: The Gathering has a pickled eye collection with 16 or so different items. I think we gathered maybe 6 of them on the last run. Divide that by 6 group members, and then consider that one of them will be rare. That's a crazy amount of running through that dungeon. But it's a collection, that's sort of expected, I guess. Kind of why I don't obsess over collections, I guess.

One would have expected that the Everquest dev team would have figured this stuff out by the time DoN came around. But I guess not.