Crowdsource Project: Quest Cleanup (Expired/Removed)

There are a lot of quests which have been removed from the game or which just shouldn't be listed on EQ2U anymore unless someone has completed them. Making a comprehensive list of this is going to take a lot of work and is not something I can really undertake myself. If you'd like to volunteer to help, I will build tools to make it possible to do this in a more direct way than sharing an Excel sheet.

 

Yeah I looked and it didn't seem like a list of quests I could just run with.

 

I want to hide all the world event quests which are no longer attainable. A character who has done a lot of quests over the years would not give me a good barometer of what quests are available *now*.

 

There's no perfect solution. Scanning Fallen Gate characters does tell us what quests people are doing in recent years. But it does not definitively tell us that a quest can no longer be acquired. I'm still pondering but my current plan, which is the most painful way, is to scan a huge amount of characters on all servers and get the latest completion date for each quest and then cutoff from there.

As for Quests on EQ2U, currently we have:

• Character Active Quest Journal
• Character Quest "Checklist" by Category
• Quest List by Category

I think we may need to add:

• Character Completed Quest Journal
• Expired Quest List

If the EQ2 team re-runs the Questgiver exporter script, we could have starting zone data for all quests.

 

We can expire a lot of quests based on various assumptions, # of times completed (some 1,200 quests have not been completed more than 10 times), last completion date, which category (World Events are immediately suspect, the city suburbs which were removed), etc. But ultimately, I have yet to think of a bulletproof way to do this that doesn't include a Voting system.

• Players are going to need a way to browse a list of expired quests and challenge them.
• Players are going to need a way to vote for a quest as having been expired with a certain # of votes triggering an automatic expiration.
• Quests marked as expired will still show for players who completed it.
• Quests marked as expired will not be offered in checklists.

Finally, since we're improving quest lists to be as useful as possible, restricting quest checklists by alignment, race, and class adds another wrinkle to the design.

• Quests restricted by class, alignment, race, and ts class will be "soft" hidden and you'd be able to click a button to show them without leaving the list of quests. I know you crazy kids will buy race tokens just to get the achievement count.

 

We have crawled over ten thousand characters to get a starting point for this project. We're considering:

• Purge quests which nobody has completed since July 24, 2012.
• Purge quests that 1-5 people have completed since November 28, 2017

Right off the bat that gives us about 2,500 quests. After that, it's going to be a lot of nibbling around the edges and we need a voting system or reporting system to track everything. We've never done anything like this on EQ2U before. We've reached out to Mazahs to see if we can get his list from Fluffy.

By the way, we may scan all Isle of Refuge characters to have a baseline as every quest completed there has to have been in the game within the last 2 years.

 

Your example is exactly why I have dubbed a new term of "expired quests". We aren't removing them and I won't be hiding these quests from your eq2u completed quest journal. However they will not appear in the quest checklist for characters who have not completed them.

 

I'm making good progress on a major rewrite of the Quest List view for character quest journal. So I knew the filters on the current live site were pretty janky but I didn't realize how broken they were. Still lots to do but not quite ready to roll it out or show a screenshot.