Hobbitspotting, Part Two

The first day of Lord of the Rings Online is chaotic. It's us newcomers with the beta testers who are running around with their 15th level characters. Apparently, they all got a head start before the game went live. The rest of us are left to our own devices, trying to figure out what's what. 'Where is the hunting lodge?' we ask in the Advice channel. 'Why can't I equip a bow?' 'What does +10% morale mean?' The OOC channel is clogged with 'Is this better than WoW?' every three minutes, which starts a recurring series of overlapping arguments, like choruses of 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat'.

Permalink

Y'know, it'd be fun to have a quest in some MMO that involves relaying a line-by-line conversation between two NPCs that are quite within speaking/shouting distance. Except, the conversation is infinite. Make it a completely legitimate quest in the quest log, and simply generate random text for the player each time one of the NPCs is interacted with. Then you can just watch and see the mean time until the player figures out what's going on, and stops. Bonus points for removing the quest from their log completely! I think given a UI system such as WoW's (and the UIs it has inspired), where you can easily see the loot or currency that you will gain by finishing the quest, players would be stick with it longer than a system such as EQ's where quests are a bit less 'structured.'