I’m sorry, but the immersion argument only goes so far with me. We’re not talking about world simulations here…unless you’d like to discuss taxes, the call of nature, romantic encounters, broken bones (and the need to heal over time), scars, aging - the list goes on.

Perhaps Harry the Froglok disappears for me (and only me) the moment I kill that 10th wolf. Perhaps his wife only appears (for me) when Harry disappears. Sure, I show up and there’s 3 other guys there…but I just set up the engine so I can’t see or hear their conversation with Harry (the one I can’t see but they can). They have their story they’re working on…and I have mine.

Having mobs which only some people can see is one thing, but having the same mob appear differently to two people breaks the immersion and shared environment unless there’s a plausible game-setting explanation. Otherwise, every time an experienced player hears “I’m over by Froglock Bob,” they’ll be reminded of that glitch in their game.
Unless, of course, they can say, “You can’t see him yet because you don’t have The Invisible Frob yet. Just look over by the hut.”

As for development time, it all depends on what the quest is. If it’s a quest that I would personally consider good enough and epic enough to be a “class quest,” it would be fairly long and non-standard (without much of the “long” being travel time or anything else like that).

In that case, 20 hours is probably conservative for concept, dialog/journal writing, and implementation. I’d more likely expect closer to 4-5 days for that type of quest, which is why it can quickly become daunting when you want to give all classes/races/alignments/etc. that type of quest, at least occasionally.

One could also make the same argument for raid content versus solo content. Solo content can be experienced by 100% of players versus a high level raid instance that maybe 10 to 20% of players will ever experience. Look at the pay off for hours spent in design versus the actual amount of players who will ever actually see or experience that content. Yet developers still do it.

I also think your numbers for developement time for each quest is a bit high. The purpose of the class quest is to give flavor/story and class specific rewards for completing the quest. So once you make the quest for one class it could then be modified for each of the other classes so not all work would have to be done from scratch thus cutting down on the developement time. However I will go with your numbers since your the developer and I am just a player

I will use EQ2 as an example. Instead of 16 (classes) X 8 (quests per class) = 128 X 2 (sides) = 256 X 20 hrs = 5120 hrs you could do it via archtype. Scout, Mage, Fighter and Priest. Thus its 4 (archtypes) X 8 (quests per archtype) = 32 X 2 (sides )= 64 X 20 hrs/quest = 1280 hrs total. I think most would view this as an acceptible compromise in a effort to make the game more unique based on the class /archtype you picked. The reward for completing these quest could still be based on the actual class/alignment so that players end up with a unique peice of armor that is class/specific.

Another way to give players a more personal experience and flavor for their character is what Funcom is doing with Age of Conan where for the first 20 levels you basically play a rpg and at level 20 you then start playing the game as a mmorpg. Will it work? I don’t know since I have not played it yet, but any efforts by developers to make the players experience more unique depending on the class they have choosen should be encouraged.

At the end of the day though I understand that developers have to look at the amount of time to implement things versus the numbers who will actually benefit from the effort.

Using World of Warcraft terms, let’s say you have a Class quest every 10 levels. That means:

9 (classes) * 7 (quests per class) = 63 (quests)
63 (quests) * 2 (sides) = 126 (quests)
20 hours (to make a decent quest, if not more) * 126 (quests) = 2520 hours of dev time

Then you consider reach. For some classes, it will be huge, for other classes, it will be small. It all depends on how many people play each. Let’s just assume that the average class quests reaches 11% of players (100% / 9 classes).

So that is 280 hours of development time (conservative) to reach 11% of the population, on average, by making 7 cool class quests for each class, or 2520 hours total dev time.

Now let’s consider equal effort per quest for an entire alignment, Alliance or Horde.

2 (sides) * 7 (quests per side) = 14 (quests)
20 hours (to make a decent quest, if not more) = 280 hours of dev time

Again we consider reach. Let’s just assume a 50/50 split. You reach 50% of the population of WoW for 140 hours of dev time, and 100% of the population for 280 hours of total dev time for 7 cool alignment quests per side.

2520 hours (class quests) for the same basic payoff as 280 hours (alignment quests). That’s nearly 1/10th as much development effort to make the same complexity of quests at the same frequency. Remove the alignment requirement and it’s now 1/20th as much effort. Increase the number of classes and it becomes even more logical to abstract the quest from the class level. Etc.

I agree that in making a game with 100’s of hours of gamplay that developers have to put in filler as it where. Sure some will see it as grinding. For myself what I see as grinding is doing the same thing over and over again for the same or similar reward. Raiding is like that. You finally take down some named dungeon npc and get rewarded with the BP of uberness. Now you only have to do this 23 more times so that everyone gets something. You probably have to do it even more as you often have to have a larger guild to consistently get 24 players for a raid.

For myself I don’t really dislike kill quests. I mean considering I am going to have to kill thousands of mobs to level any way why not get some bonus exp I would not have by doing a quest and killing 10 mobs? Or killing X mobs until I find the 10 items required for the quest? The problem is its a mechanical level that you have taught the player to pull and thus be rewarded and its one they will pull over and over again especially if its the most convient or fastest way to level. However it is mechanical and does not advance the story line or experience for the player other then to be a means to an end.

Where I would like to see mmorpg’s go however is more class, race specific quests. When you make your new level why get your new abilities automatically or go and buy them from your class trainer in town? What a missed opportunity to have the person learn more about their class and complete quests to obtain the next level of spells, arts or abilities from thier trainer.

Here is the chance for the devlopers to create the lore and the feel for the players that they are an evil ShadowKnight or a virtious Paladin. To make them have a completely different experience playing the game then if they had played another class. To often I start another character to complete the exact same quests and do the exact same things I did with every other character I started. I realize that doing this would require more effort for the developer to implement. However think of the replay ability of your game for doing so? Sure the game has the same background setting but by making your quests/story unique for each class every time you start a new character you would have a completely different experience and add greatly to the replayability of your game.

So I guess what I am saying is that quests should be used to help tell more unique stories for the characters of the game and while the story unfolds your killing mobs and gaining levels and thus it does not feel like your grinding but instead progressing through your own unique story/adventure within the game world.

I am not suggesting that these be the only quests as there needs to be larger scale stories / quest lines as well. I just feel that right now MMORPG really drop the ball when it comes to providing more personal and unique quest lines for the classes never mind individuals. When they finally can do this type of thing then you will hear less and less about grinding because everyone will be to busy expanding and experiencing their own unique stories.