Town Jobs

[Cryptite]

Part of our upcoming plans to increase player retention involves getting new players into towns as fast as possible. That said, players getting into a town with nothing to do will quit anyway after a short while, so we're making official something many towns already do with their Job Boards.

Town Jobs can be created by town leadership with the CREATE_JOBS /g perm. In short all jobs are gathering jobs (we don't see a reason for much else at the moment, anyway) that pay out a new intangible town number we call Prestige. In short, Prestige is whatever you want it to be for your town. It's a number that you can use to tell who's getting work done in your town and it's up to you to use it.

To create a job, use /g job create and then use /g job list to view/edit jobs.
An example job is the following: /g job create 264 16 50 true Gathering Diamonds.
Broken down, the command reads:

• Collect 16 diamonds.
• Reward is 50 prestige
• true means the job is a turnin-in (see below).
• The Job name is Gathering Diamonds.

By default all town jobs can be repeated every 24 hours, but you can alter that.

A likely example for Prestige is that members that earn, say, 100 Prestige can now become Level 2 town members, etc.

Jobs have a few features (with more on the way):

• You can assign a sign in town for accepting them. This will be a great way to let members come to a central area to find quests and complete them.
• You can change how repeatable they are (or are not). Jobs could be set to be reapeatable every 30 minutes, 4 hours, 2 days, or not at all.
• Jobs can require a turn-in or not. When a job requires a turn-in, players must give the items they've gathered to your Town NPC in your TGen core room. Upon doing so, town members that can make quests can then go visit the NPC to view and claim their escrowed loot (exactly like the Market).
• Items gathered by players for Jobs are tagged both to the player who is doing the job as well as with special lore. This helps the items be separate from normal items (regular diamonds vs quest diamonds) and helps you distinguish what you have in your inventory. This also means you can't give diamonds to another player and have them turn in your diamonds for their quest.

Again Jobs are exactly what you need them to be. We'll likely add further filters like gating jobs based on town member level, etc.

Go Forth and Happy Jobbing!

 

[Defgnww]

This is very interesting!

 

[Ajaxan]

One suggestion would be a way to change the turn in point for quests. By default the NPC makes sense, but we would like to be able to have our new members turn in quests to our quest guild. Either to an NPC or a special chest.

Another suggestion would be a quest that requires a player to go to specific coords (perhaps in a radius of a certain coordinate). We've been meaning to make more lore and exploration based quests but before it was impossible to prove someone went there without an elaborate setup beforehand.

Also, would it be possible to make a book open, when a player clicked the sign to accept the quest? We like to put all that lore behind our quests and we already have the books. And this way we don't have to make a million books that keep on getting lost.

And finally, you may have already answered this question but is there a way for me to simply give someone prestige? And perhaps tie the ability to hand out prestige to a perm in town along with the ability to make quests.

 

[Cryptite]

Could you expand upon the location quest? It's simple enough to track being at a spot and complete the quest, but would you want to do more with that?

 

[Ajaxan]

Well for example, one quest I wanted to have players complete was a pilgrimage to a great temple of the Ancients. Now, to prove players had gone there we would have had to come up with some special way to prove they had gotten there by hiding some item or special thing to bring back or some special thing they had to read there. Such a quest could easily be spoiled by people who had done it before or by a curious nomad who stumbles upon the temple first.

And so, by making it actually based on reaching the location we can know for sure they have gone there. Now I'd always love to do more with the quests, like have some fancy animation or something when the reach the proper spot, but for now, just being able to prove players have gone to a certain location is more than good enough.

I know I mentioned a "radius" idea and this was simply to prevent players not having to reach the exact coordinate as long as they got within a few blocks of it.

 

[Ajaxan]

Alrighty, been using the job system and its awesome Crypt, can't thank you enough. The system was pretty easy to figure out and as long as people know that the jobs exist, I believe people will start using them once their towns get established. I did think of some more stuff to add to it that may be helpful as well.

1. First are Kill Quests! These come in two main cases with a special exception case.

• First for PvE ones the job needs to know the type of creature and how many must be killed. Then the player simply kills that many and they get the quest by turning it in through clicking the sign. Pretty straight forward, but super helpful in keeping players actively doing stuff. It's possible to claim this overlaps in the collection quests, but this adds a bit more variety instead of just "Collect this, gather that."
• Second are PvP quests! Basically contract killing where you name a player, and the quest is for you to land the killing hit on that player. I know this could be abused to get prestige, but prestige is only as useful as a town says so its up to the town to make sure it isn't abused! (The cool down timer also helps.)
• Finally the special case. This is for things like The End Dragon and big boss mobs. Everyone who can see the health bar can gain the quest from the killing. Since you almost never fight it alone (not to mention its much more fun with friends) this could be a good way to make some very fun quests.

2. The second thing on the list is the ability to either move the Town NPC or create a different NPC for quest drop off. This is just a convenience thing because the location of our Tgen is nearly half way across town from the Questing guild where all the quests are located.​

 

[Ajaxan]

Some more suggestions for quests, one of which I believe you may have mentioned inputting in the future!

Suggestions:

1. Quest Prerequisites: Just as it says, the ability to mark a quest as unable to be accepted until another quest has been completed at least once. These are a super useful tool to us in Auru at the very least due in part to our guild system. In this way, Guild quests could be protected from being completed by outside players by have a guild quest that must be completed first.
2. Owner Approval Quests: These would act as a "Catch all" case for any odd or weird quests that would need to be done. Basically the quest would be started just like any normal quest by accepting it and using its description to carry out the job. Instead of turning them into a sign or NPC however, the quest can only be completed by approaching a town member with the right permission (owners only by default) who then in some way "approves the quest" in doing so, you complete it. Its like turning an owner into the NPC where quests are turned into.

• I'd like to say this would be implemented by having the player right click the owner, giving the owner a prompt about all "approval quests" the town member has currently active. They owner could then approve the one town member completed.
• An example of this idea would be, for example, a player wants to turn in the blood of a player. Well, the ID for such a weird item doesn't really exist (from my knowledge) and so just allowing the player to show an owner the blood, and then having the owner approve the quest works much better.