Quests so bad I can't reveiw them

runeskald · May 2013

We need some method to report and get removed the foundry quests that are a waist of time. As usual MMOs can bring out the worst people and giving everyone the power like the foundry (even though it is way less powerful than the Aurora toolset was) makes them want to abuse it. It is sad to say but the foundry is clogged with quests that are so bad you can't even complete them. most of the time they are either set up as a trap to get you killed or just so over powered that it is ridiculous. A common theme is that they have zero story and therefore zero redeeming value. I will list them as I manage to get mangled by them here: "Home Invation" by @saedreath8, "This is what youre looking for" by @iampieman22, more to come (I am not going to track down all the others that I have already played and was unable to complete).

tfangel · May 2013

Yeah, it's a newer exploit, can't finish, you can't report with the foundry report option. So i just end up reporting via the gm help option.

levitateme · May 2013

I worry that some quests will get flagged because of bugs, not because of any intent. For example, one of the things I hit in mine 2/5ths of the time is that the player gets aggro'd through a door... which means they can't open it. Depending upon where they are in the dungeon, they may not complete. (I've spent more time working on wander radius and finally gave up on a lot of them... and set them to stationary.

)

Also, there is the scaling issue. A dungeon that plays great at lvl 10 is completely insane at lvl 40. (e.g., I couldn't finish "Yes, A Kobold Dungeon" at lvl 39 because I kept wiping at one of the boss stages. Lower level, I bet it's a blast.) I suspect there is a bug here, but I'm not sure how/what to do to help Cryptic out.

hercul33t · May 2013

I have a lot of people who leave rude reviews saying things like "Your map sucks. I got stuck on a trap and had to have a friend lure mobs to me so I could die. idiot" (my map is for solo) so I am curious if some maps are being flagged as bad when really it's user error.

wesleyeric · May 2013

The best are always "No sound 1/5" and "Chest didn't give loot for my class 1/5." Because authors really have so much say in these things.

I think there's a lack of information about the Foundry out there for the general population. Unless you've actually messed with it or created a quest, there are a lot of issues you would never know about (like the sound thing, for example). Doesn't make those reviews any less hilarious, though. I just hope the quests getting flagged due to no fault of the author are kept to a minimum now that you can only report at the completion screen.

hercooles130uscg · May 2013

There will always be those jerkoffs that want to screw with other people. Creating a quest where as soon as you zone in you fall off a cliff or have 50 ogres just rush you. Things like this are why we need a better report feature. Luckily these kinds of quest generally never get finished, so they never get rated and sit at the bottom of the HAMSTER pool

fongador · May 2013

wesleyeric wrote: »

... "Chest didn't give loot for my class 1/5." Because authors really have so much say in these things.

I'm not defending them doing this but I would add what I saw one author did at the end of his map and included text beneath stating he had not control over what would be in the chest. Then again if someone is that dense to judge a map off of something like that may just be a waste of time since they won't read or comprehend it.

zogvarnoka · May 2013

Something I noticed from watching youtube vids and Twitch streams is that quite a lot of players do not even read the text in Foundry quest. They just spam "1" throughout the entire dialogue or if that fails they will try "2" until they get to the next part of killing mobs. Excuse being they just want the daily over and done with so they can get into the "real" game of farming T2 content.... I bet quite a few bad reviews are given because people doing this ran into problems.

OP: I have to agree with you about some way to report them. My question is though how did they even make it past the required review stage. They shouldn't have even gotten published to begin with. Unless the info I have about that stage is incorrect.

duchessofkvetch · May 2013

I wish you could provide some players a giant red "I WIN" button to push every day that dispensed treats and tier gear, so they wouldn't bother the rest of us. But the devs need their money too - not sure these games would survive w/o the input of the goal-oriented powergamers, and weirdly enough, the 'dailies' are a great invention for keeping rushers focused. They can't NOT do dailies, it goes against the Pavlovian instinct.

narathkor · May 2013

What I would appreciate is if you have a problem with my map that is a real problem (too hard for your class at your level) or something, send me a mail to my handle and let me know what the problem is, I test my maps heavily with 3 different live toons after publish but its still easy to miss things.

kamaliicious · May 2013

tfangel wrote: »

Yeah, it's a newer exploit, can't finish, you can't report with the foundry report option. So i just end up reporting via the gm help option.

I intentionally made an very short but uncompletable quest. It is intended as a humorous quest to give as part of guild initiation, humorous both for the premise and for the guild members joining the quest to watch the initiate try to figure out how to solve it since you're told exactly what you are supposed to do. A bit of initiate hazing for everyone to laugh about after the fact, with no killing monsters, drinking, sexism or anything like that.

Never published it since Cryptic warned us in beta about making quests that couldn't be completed.

coanunn · May 2013

fongador wrote: »

I'm not defending them doing this but I would add what I saw one author did at the end of his map and included text beneath stating he had not control over what would be in the chest. Then again if someone is that dense to judge a map off of something like that may just be a waste of time since they won't read or comprehend it.

A lot of the Foundry veterans like Tilt42, Kamalicious, etc do that. They were part of the Foundry Beta event before Open Beta started and learned then what they did and didn't have control over. It's also why you will see a lot of those Quests also have an Emergency Exit on every map, as the little door button on the mini-map didn't use to be there and you could literally get stuck inside someone's map.

I'd love to see a couple things add:

A feedback form where you can send feedback to the author outside of the character limit for the comment section and that wasn't necessarily visible to other users. This would allow authors to give detailed information to each other without having to bog up the comments section (which is really more about advertising than feedback).
A feedback option for if I can't complete the quest. If I get stuck because the lever is inside a wall, a monster spawned in the floor, etc it would be nice to be able to let the author know why I had to drop the quest. No rating, just the ability to leave a reason why.
RATING FOR CRYPTIC QUESTS! Look, it's obvious we get the ability to rate UGC but why can't we rate Cryptic content the same way so THEY know what we think of that quest.
User tags. It's been talked about that a genre selection etc would be added to the search engine but what about letting the reviewer tag the quest with things like "Heavy Combat" "Heavy Lore" "Original Story" so that we get a feel from the people actually playing the content what it's about?

levitateme · May 2013

Those are all fantastic suggestions coanunn.

powereddjinn · May 2013

I agree totally!
You should have to review a foundry quest if you abandon it, far too many say x and are either 4 or 5 times too long or just running around looking for the 1 degree lighter grey to move forward! Or finding the 1 route through the lame trap every step!

If a quest says x mins to complete, that shouldn't mean x mins to move through the map already knowing the route and without any mobs present!

I dont want great loot, Crypic/PWE control both the loot and the XP, I want something that is fun to play with a story, not overkill encounters or maps that are grey on grey!

They should be fun to play!
Not just lame 20 ogres or 11 egg sacks hiding in the gloom!

zer033 · May 2013

To be honest there hasn't been enough time to really make anything that good in the foundry. Quests that are really worth people's time are few and far between because it does take a lot time to create them. I have a multi map quest being made now and it goes through a lot of phases, 1) map building, 2) polish any graphical errors in maps, 3) Add misc NPC/interactables/misc dialogue for atmosphere 4) setup main quest line/dialogue, 5) add alternate paths or things to do/kill 5) Run through very slowly and check for any and all bugs/graphical errors then fix, 6) add sound/music triggers, 7) Play through yourself multiple times and balance encounters, fix graphic errors, fix sound errors, fix quest errors overall polish, 8) release! This is the minimum feature set and testing you should do. Most people don't want to be taken away from the actual game for a long time, but they want to build a level as well so they just connect some rooms, throw in some encounters and call it a quest, that's not enough. All rooms in the game are too bare bones, you always have to add details to them and misc NPCs to liven things up.

apocrs1980 · May 2013

powereddjinn wrote: »

I agree totally!
You should have to review a foundry quest if you abandon it, far too may say x and are either 4 or 5 times too long or just running around looking for the 1 degree lighter grey to move forward! Or finding the 1 route through the lame trap every step!

If a quest says x mins to complete, that shouldn't mean x mins to move through the map already knowing the route and without any mobs present!

I dont want great loot, Crypic/PWE control both the loot and the XP, I want something that is fun to play with a story, not overkill encounters or maps that are grey on grey!

They should be fun to play!
Not just lame 20 ogres or 11 egg sacks hiding in the gloom!

They had this option in Beta, however, it was a major cause of griefing. This will not happen and I for one am glad, all some one needed to do to get you knocked off the list or removed is jump in and immediately drop your quest.

drakedge2 · May 2013

I spend an unhealthy amount of time in my quests testing them out and making sure they work as intended. Unfortunately though, I can not test everything and sometimes a bug slips through my clutches.

Unfortunately, having met the quagmire of some people's quests, I don't think everyone tests their content before clearing the ! and making it publishable.

powereddjinn · May 2013

apocrs1980 wrote: »

They had this option in Beta, however, it was a major cause of griefing. This will not happen and I for one am glad, all some one needed to do to get you knocked off the list or removed is jump in and immediately drop your quest.

No need to score the quest
- but to say why it got abandoned
no lighting, mob in door/floor, trigger in wall/floor, totally bugged out with invincible mobs etc...

but if getting feedback === griefing then there's a basic problem!!!

coanunn · May 2013

powereddjinn wrote: »

No need to score the quest
- but to say why it got abandoned
no lighting, mob in door/floor, trigger in wall/floor, totally bugged out with invincible mobs etc...

but if getting feedback === griefing then there's a basic problem!!!

Completely agree.. There needs to be a way to give FEEDBACK that is complete separate from the rating system and comment system. If I pick up your quest, it's a single room with no way out and you've rated it as 30+ mins then that tells me something didn't load right, the ability to send that info to the author is important.

apocrs1980 · May 2013

Just send the author an in-game mail or PM them on the forum, problem solved.

coanunn · May 2013

apocrs1980 wrote: »

Just send the author an in-game mail or PM them on the forum, problem solved.

That assumes that I took note of their handle when picking up the quest, and that I'm willing to log out of the game if they are on a different server in order to send it via the forums. It may seem small to you but in the end that functionality should be there if players are able to review content, they need the ability to give ACTUAL feedback and not just the character limited comment box. What if my feedback reveals a key part of a puzzle or the story that all be it needs to be fixed but being publicly seen ruins the quest for others. No, this is functionality that should have been a default with their current design.

powereddjinn · May 2013

apocrs1980 wrote: »

Just send the author an in-game mail or PM them on the forum, problem solved.

There's a form for it, if you complete the quest, but going through the effort of finding the quest again, noting the emailaddy/userid, logging out and emailing/pming the author just isnt going to happen!

There are some really, really good quests already on the foundry, there are also alot of very very bad ones too, & there are a few which with a little debugging could be good!

I'd have thought that those players that have produced the great stuff would like to see the poor stuff vanish or improve, but I guess everyone thinks everyone else is just out to troll!

Personally I dont have the skill to write a great quest, but do appreciate those that do...

Quests so bad I can't reveiw them

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