While I appreciate the sentiment behind this post, it isn't needed. For one the community has been totally fine with me for a good while now and the death threats are largely gone.
Secondly, you'll note that I have made quests since Endgame and I am still an active member of the lore council and constantly suggest quests be added to the release schedule.
So you don't need to worry about me, I'm good. ;)
The problem is that quests can seem like a poor investment. They're, by design, limited pieces of content (you can only do them once) and often have requirements that can make the engagement with them seem lower. They also take a lot of time to develop, often as much as a new boss or piece of skilling content. This is doubly problematic when you consider that quests often need new graphical assets and graphical assets take a lot of time to develop and those resources need to be prioritised between things like new skills.
This is why I experimented with the format of the last few quests. Curse of the Black Stone being a good example. The experiment was to try and use absolutely no new graphical assets and to rely on existing gameplay and assets. In this case it was the Elite Dungeons. It was done either in my free time, or using the work of our newest developers, so it was arguably the best "bang for buck" of a quest we've done in a long while.
The results were pretty positive. Sure there were bits we should have changed (in hindsight I would have cut the whole black knight section and improved the dragonrider section as well as had a cinematic), but on the whole it proved that we don't need completely new assets to make something that is enjoyable. Also I won't be using solely my free time to make quests anymore as it was rightly pointed out that the oversight is needed to confirm quality.
We refined this approach a bit more in Desperate Times, where we used reusable puzzles as well as existing assets. The entire "temporal fractures" sequence was done using only existing assets that I plugged together and rearranged using code.
Still even then, making quests is "expensive".
Expensive means that it is expensive to the player. That time and those resources are removed from making other content. I.e the time taken to make that one quest could have made another elite dungeon (theoretically) or a boss, or a skilling update etc.
So what it boils down to is trying to work out where that expense is spent.
I , obviously, am always going to be on the side of quests. I want more of them and I want to be able to put juicy rewards behind them. But the question is whether that is right for the players.
So my advice, is tell them what you think. We have multiple avenues of communication, livestreams, reddit, you can get in contact with Mod Warden directly. Tell them why quests are important and what they mean to you. But also try and think what it is about quests that you like and whether we can expand the delivery of that.
Like the lore? Can we do more environmental and incidental storytelling? Do elite dungeons cover it, what about lore drops? What about incidental dialogue? Would you be happy for quests that consist literally of talking to people and then existing gameplay (skilling/combat).
Is it the puzzles? Can we better deliver that fix to you via repeatable content. Can we do more clue scroll like things to fulfill that?
Or is it something about the combination? Try and distill it down to exactly what matters to you. You never know we might be able to deliver more of the key part of it.
But anyway, I digress. Thank you for your concern, but I'm good and this hasn't been a concern of mine for a while. Also to those of you still grumbling about that maze, yes, we have learned and no we won't be doing that again (further feedback isn't needed anymore on that subject, seriously we get it ;) ).
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