The other night we were working on Lone-lands quests. One quest had us collecting warg tails when we noticed that every dead warg had two tails. The next quest had us collecting body parts of of lynxes. Same story. Every corpse gave us both the quest items. In other words, we weren't penalized for grouping together to play the game. Compare that to other MMOs (ahem, WoW) were you are penalized for grouping on collection quests.
This got me thinking about features I'd like to see that support grouping. I've seen these in various games, but it would nice to have them all in one place. Pardon the incoherence.
- Simple quest sharing. A little icon next to the quest that I can hover over and see who in the group has eligible to receive the quest or has already completed it.
- Option to show your quest log to a group member. I'd love an option to just show my quest log to my group. Instead, I have to take five minutes to describe that one quest with the orcs, you know, east of the ruins south of the inn. No, the one where you collect their ears not their toes. No, not the orcs with swords. The ones with the spears... and so on and so forth.
- Have everyone confirm before an escort or guard quest begins. Hey, game designers, how about a simple confirmation dialog before starting an escort quest when I'm grouped? For example, the other night I was busy rummaging through my bags and character inventory. My buddy assumed I was ready to start the escort. I didn't even notice they'd started. And why is that every escort quest I've seen in LotRO has the NPC running directly towards the big group of mobs instead 10 yards to the right? Now I have to fight the regular mobs plus all the triggered spawns. I digress.
- Credit for collecting items. If the quest says to collect something, give all team members credit for it. In fact, if my friend is nearby, let him get the quest item too without having to loot the corpse. Same thing for those quests where you have to interact with X objects such as poisoning water barrels.
- Tracking group progress on a quest. If you don't give every group member credit for collecting a quest item, then let me see at a glance where they're at so I now if we need to keep killing woozles or not.
- Quest chains. Okay, for epic quest chains I understand not being able to share quest number 37 out of 51. But, WTF if the quest chain is I talk to person A, talk to person B, and then kill ten rats. I can't share that final quest in the chain because my buddy didn't talk to some NPC in Tanarsis.
- Travel, summoning. Dungeon Runners had a nice feature where you could easily teleport to a team member's location. I wouldn't want something that extreme, but then again I don't want to spend 45 minutes running to meet up.
- Level adjustment options. You know, mentoring and sidekicking.
- Scaling challenges and rewards. Sure, why not.
- Dynamic spawning. The more people in an area, the more mobs. Simple.
