Reputations

[Ivan_]

I'll keep this thread short. Reputations aren't fun. Even if we ignore the fact that you need to do one same quest 58 times (which is ridiculous) and theres 54 quests in total in order to unlock all the rewards - the quests themselves are boring. I thought by now we would move away from "grab this and this from here, then grab that from over there, and use the crafting table in the corner". Like the quests themselves cant be less exciting, honestly. Theres no challenge, no skill needed, the hardest part is finding the items and thats only for the first time when you do them, after that you will know the locations already. Whats the point of having a repeatable quest that is literally "find this missing person" and after that the missing person is always in the same spot, AND you would need to find that person 58 times. And the only reason why players would do those is because of the rewards, and not because its quality content.
I am very disappointed especially since there were so many signs that the gameplay is going in a great direction, I was very happy how talents were introduced, I am happy with all the system reworks (party, friends..), I like the Dev blogs and Droobletalks, I personally support the merging and removal of certain teams in order to make good quality content, and there were some suggestions that were accepted which really got my hopes up when it comes to new gameplay (for example this one https://potterworldmc.com/threads/npcs-are-boring-and-so-are-quests.12019/) but reputations seem like a big step back in my eyes.

 

[Somnambulist]

I like the idea of Reputations because it gets players active in the towns located in the main world. I think they did a great job with implementing each Task combined with using the compass to find the NPCs for the Tasks - which has been super helpful. Though I'm not a fan of the random reputation reward and getting 10 rep most of the time.

Having said that, I was initially excited when doing my first round of Reputation Tasks in all of the towns that had them - but upon doing my second round, I realized that the majority of the Tasks were repeated except for trying to find the missing NPC. I was kinda disappointed because I expected a Task to have at least 3 different activities to do for each NPC and then repeat them. There are 54 active Tasks for Reputations right now, so that may seem like enough for people, but I do agree with Ivan, that it will become old and boring if you're doing the same task over and over again.

Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the new content because it has been awhile since I've actually bothered to run around each of the Towns in the main world. I think the base framework for Reputations is there and seems fine from what I've interacted with, but the lack of variation in the Quests is what kills it for me. I disagree with what Ivan mentioned "reputations seems like a big step back" because I think Reputations brings back the activity around the towns and also helps the server economy to move mob inventory around.

I know that there's going to be a second update, likely for the other towns that don't have reputation quests yet, but I'm hoping that it will include extra tasks for the older towns.

 

[ForestSpy]

I agree, I feel that reputations will end up extremely repetitive. Maybe if you didn't have to do them so many times, or if they had more variation between days, that would help. But doing 56 tasks 58 times is just too much.

 

[Ivan_]

I like the idea of Reputations because it gets players active in the towns located in the main world. I think they did a great job with implementing each Task combined with using the compass to find the NPCs for the Tasks - which has been super helpful. Though I'm not a fan of the random reputation reward and getting 10 rep most of the time.

Having said that, I was initially excited when doing my first round of Reputation Tasks in all of the towns that had them - but upon doing my second round, I realized that the majority of the Tasks were repeated except for trying to find the missing NPC. I was kinda disappointed because I expected a Task to have at least 3 different activities to do for each NPC and then repeat them. There are 54 active Tasks for Reputations right now, so that may seem like enough for people, but I do agree with Ivan, that it will become old and boring if you're doing the same task over and over again.

Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the new content because it has been awhile since I've actually bothered to run around each of the Towns in the main world. I think the base framework for Reputations is there and seems fine from what I've interacted with, but the lack of variation in the Quests is what kills it for me. I disagree with what Ivan mentioned "reputations seems like a big step back" because I think Reputations brings back the activity around the towns and also helps the server economy to move mob inventory around.

I know that there's going to be a second update, likely for the other towns that don't have reputation quests yet, but I'm hoping that it will include extra tasks for the older towns.

Yes, the concept of reputations does bring attention to towns which were useless after you finished the standard quests, and yes, it does boost the material economy (tho that kinda beats the purpose of those quests, if you just buy the things needed). But at what cost? This is just forcing people to do the same boring tasks, over and over again. I do think this is a step back as there's no depth to it, its just a bunch of basic quests with zero innovation, zero difficulty, same formula and the only difference to standard quests is that they're replayable, they're even easier, and they can earn you cool rewards which again, is a pretty lame way to force people into doing them and reminds me a lot of old professions. A quality content would be something that you want to do because it's interesting and fun, and not something you do to get rewards, the rewards should always be secondary. I might understand if someone enjoyed doing then once, but just as you said, the second run is already repetitive.

 

[Somnambulist]

A quality content would be something that you want to do because it's interesting and fun

If this were the case then it's likely that someone would make a suggestion thread about why they aren't receiving rewards for doing such a thing.

I think the rewards for each of the towns are pretty neat. I like the idea of unlocking warps to each town through Reputations instead of having the warp unlocked just because you found the area once. Plus the cosmetics and housing sceneries seem like a good reward for maxing out a town's reputation.

This is just forcing people to do the same boring tasks, over and over again.

they can earn you cool rewards which again, is a pretty lame way to force people into doing them

No one is forcing players to do Reputations. This is just additional content for players - likely for lower level players so they can earn extra XP along the way.

 

[Ivan_]

If this were the case then it's likely that someone would make a suggestion thread about why they aren't receiving rewards for doing such a thing.

I think the rewards for each of the towns are pretty neat. I like the idea of unlocking warps to each town through Reputations instead of having the warp unlocked just because you found the area once. Plus the cosmetics and housing sceneries seem like a good reward for maxing out a town's reputation.

No one is forcing players to do Reputations. This is just additional content for players - likely for lower level players so they can earn extra XP along the way.

1. Never said there shouldn't be rewards. I just said rewards should be secondary.
2. The rewards are neat and that's the thing. The quality of rewards is much better than the reputations themselves.
3. You're missing my point. I most likely won't bother doing them but why should I or anyone else be left out from those rewards, just because we don't wanna do 54 quests, 58 times. That's over 3000 times of doing the quests that you already did. This isn't "just additional content". For example, warps are something players complained about since the first day Revelius came, and times and times again we were told that we wouldn't get warps back since that's not something they would like players to have. My own suggestion (which was declined btw) said how we could have quests that, once finished, would eventually unlock the warp for the said town. And now they come up with this thing where I would have to grind the same 6 quests everyday, for 2 months straight, just to unlock one town fully... Call it however you like, but imo that's just forcing players into doing it.
I believe PW has received enough feedback when it comes to grinding, repeatable quests AND the quest content itself to not come up with things like this again. I might be wrong, but i think that this type of gameplay (where you repeat guests endlessly) got backlash the first day it was introduced (Halloween event 2017 i believe). But here we are.

 

[ForestSpy]

If this were the case then it's likely that someone would make a suggestion thread about why they aren't receiving rewards for doing such a thing.

I think the rewards for each of the towns are pretty neat. I like the idea of unlocking warps to each town through Reputations instead of having the warp unlocked just because you found the area once. Plus the cosmetics and housing sceneries seem like a good reward for maxing out a town's reputation.



No one is forcing players to do Reputations. This is just additional content for players - likely for lower level players so they can earn extra XP along the way.

The lowest level for Reputations is 25, so I don't think it's as much geared towards lower level players

 

[Ivan_]

The lowest level for Reputations is 25, so I don't think it's as much geared towards lower level players

+I don't know how much XP is earned from questssince I'm a graduate, but by the time u unlock the 1.5× boost for mobs, you would already level up enough to not need to farm those lower lvl mobs.

 

[Pankakes]

I thought by now we would move away from "grab this and this from here, then grab that from over there, and use the crafting table in the corner"

"In terms of quests, we are continuing to work on quest content, and are continuously exploring new ways in which we can make quests exciting, different, and enjoyable without the 'fetch quest' content." 16 Mar 2021

Aged like milk.

 

[Micah Cresswell]

I agree with all of this. They are SO repetitive, and tbh not that fun. I was really looking forward to reputation, but I kinda gave up on the second day because I knew how long it would take me to get just ONE prize.

It pretty much just adds to the already long list of dailies.

 

[ForestSpy]

I agree with all of this. They are SO repetitive, and tbh not that fun. I was really looking forward to reputation, but I kinda gave up on the second day because I knew how long it would take me to get just ONE prize.

It pretty much just adds to the already long list of dailies.

Same thing happened with me. I tried it once for one town, and it took me 2 hours (housing was down, so I couldn't access the supplies that I had), after that I gave up. Not gonna do it 58 times

 

[Micah Cresswell]

Same thing happened with me. I tried it once for one town, and it took me 2 hours (housing was down, so I couldn't access the supplies that I had), after that I gave up. Not gonna do it 58 times

Yep.

 

[NSgaming]

Hi Ivan! Thank you for your feedback, we want to address your concerns as best as possible. First and foremost, I think we should fully explain why we decided to invest our resources away from the expansions we produced shortly after Revelius came out. Once Revelius was released, we quickly realized that there were portions of our game that were simply too hard. We took a step back, following the release of Walden and Greenshore, and decided that we should spend our time and resources to ensure that more players could become Graduates so they could play that content. To that end, we started work on several projects, many of which have been completed over the past year, including slashing firedust prices, revamping the Warpkey bags, adding tons of new fast travel locations, an experience rework. Our two biggest projects, however, were Reputations and the First Year Experience. With Reputations, we understood that sitting in a tree for hours killing mobs was really, really poor gameplay. With that in mind, we wanted to create enough content that players would almost always have something to do, and ensuring that the content was repeatable.
Creating Reputations for all levels would be a fairly large task. At launch for Revelius, we had 76 total world quests. With Reputations, we were looking at the total number of quests reaching closer to 102 quests for the entirety of Reputations. We made the decision at the outset that these would be simplified, and thus, would not be considered quests, but instead "Tasks", denoting the type of content to ensure that we wouldn't be misguiding our players into believing they were full quests. Not only that, but whenever we did talk about Reputations to the community, we would always say that these were not full World Quests (https://potterworldmc.com/threads/game-design-blog-january-2022.11801/). We never intended for this content to be the sole focus for gameplay - instead it's meant to be something for players to do as they level up. A lot of why it feels repetitive and unnatural is because it is not being done in conjunction in with other content.
For your feedback about the Divination task, we did work to implement three different NPCs in each town so that it would be randomized so you're not going to the same NPC in the same location every time, and it would require you to search around, at least a little bit, to find the correct NPC. Lastly, we want to say that we're continuing to work on the content that we know the community enjoys the most. We have a revamped First Year Experience in development, as well as a World Quest update coming in just a few weeks that will add new quests to the world. We're also hard at work developing content for Woodshire, as well as our events, on top of a few mystery projects that we're not ready to announce just yet. We know the community wants more of these kinds of quests, and we will deliver this type of content in time, especially as we really like designing World Quests. But in the same way not every piece of content is geared towards Graduates, not every piece of content will be full World Quests. We want to explore and expand the world in new ways, while also ensuring that our playerbase is able to level up easily enough so they can explore everything that our server has to offer.

 

[Pankakes]

A lot of why it feels repetitive and unnatural is because it is not being done in conjunction in with other content.

I don't think so. A lot of other content is repetetive as well, especially quests. Different names, items to bring and just different town don't make it non-repetetive.

 

[Ivan_]

I want to address a few things

Once Revelius was released, we quickly realized that there were portions of our game that were simply too hard.

What are you thinking of when you say certain portions of the game were too hard? The things you mentioned after (slashing firedust prices, revamping the Warpkey bags, adding tons of new fast travel locations) are all travel related and traveling is something you received huge backlash once revelius came out and the warps were removed. My own thread Travel issue (https://potterworldmc.com/threads/travel-issue.4639/) got declined and I want to highlight my suggestion "You would have a warp key bag and whenever you discover a new location you would need to finish a quest there in order to get the warp as a reward. This way, you still need to find, explore and finish a quest in that location in order to get the warp. " - This is literally what reputations are, only difference is that you dont do the quest once.
The only other thing you mentioned is the experience rework, which I don't know too much of, but from what I understood it is easier to get xp than it was, mainly from ACs which got a buff. This is something I support.

With Reputations, we understood that sitting in a tree for hours killing mobs was really, really poor gameplay

So instead of giving mobs a rework, you decided to come up with repeatable gameplay which uses the same "poor gameplay" you just mentioned (killing mobs from trees, and before you say "oh but reputations only ask for a few mob kills" lets not forget how many times you gotta do the reputation quests).

We never intended for this content to be the sole focus for gameplay - instead it's meant to be something for players to do as they level up. A lot of why it feels repetitive and unnatural is because it is not being done in conjunction in with other content.

Whats the reasoning behind the rewards then? A huge portion of the rewards are collectables and thats something that has nothing to do with leveling. Collectables are realistically most appealing to graduates and players who have been for a longer time, so if reputations are not meant for graduates, why even have collectables as rewards when you can fully focus on rewards that are also meant for players who level up (huge xp rewards, better brooms, gold..). After all, look at the the boards, all of the top players are in fact graduates.
Whats the reasoning behind the huge amounts of points needed to unlock those same rewards? We already made some comments about earning xp and how that is connected with reputations, you didnt mention any of that.

For your feedback about the Divination task, we did work to implement three different NPCs in each town so that it would be randomized so you're not going to the same NPC in the same location every time, and it would require you to search around, at least a little bit, to find the correct NPC.

So out of the 58 times I am supposed to do this "task", only 3 times will be me actually searching for the person while the other 55 times is just me repeating the same "task" over and over again. And multiple all that by 9.

So in conclusion what I got from this reply is - reputations are something you wanted to make for a while to
make leveling up easier and to make some sort of repeatable gameplay. They are meant for players who level up (so not graduates) and they are not full quests but "tasks". But you still didnt fully address my main issues, which is literally why I made the thread
1. "Tasks" being boring - You just said how they were supposed to be easy, but my point still stands - those "tasks" arent anything new - they use the same formula and they are not fun at all. Just because you say something isnt a "quest" and is a "task" doesnt mean you shouldnt consider the feedback you got on quests because in reality, those tasks you speak about are just washed out quests.
2. Amount of points needed - I wanna know how did you decide on those numbers and why do you think they are valid
3. The rewards (tier 3,4 and 5 which take the most effort have nothing to do with leveling, they are either collectables/cosmetics and the warps which are again, probably more targeted for gradutes)

 

[Samuel]

I totally agree with Ivan here. The rewards do not help with leveling in any way, so why would anyone who is still leveling even bother doing them?