The Daily Grind: If you designed a quest, what would it be like?

Looks like a picture from the renaissance festival in Atlanta!

The best quest I've ever seen in an MMO is the flying mount quest in Vangaurd. Second to that would be the original epic weapon quest in Everquest.

After a long night of too-much pipe-weed and ale you, and a party member, need to go find your mount.

I'd call it "Live off the Land". The player is placed in a separate zone, which she cannot leave until she spends a certain amount of time there. (Of course she can give up the quest any time she wants..)
She is stripped of all her equipment, money, etc and there are no trader npcs in the area at all. She needs to find out which foes she can kill with whatever she has on her (bare handed / spells), take their equipment, and basically survive until the time runs out.
A bit of extra: the more monsters she kills in this time, the better the reward is. (of course the level of the monsters is a factor) On the other hand, the number of times she died will affect the reward. (less is better)
PvP may or may not be allowed in this zone.

Well to be honest it is a really difficult question.

First of all the game system must be taken into consideration, then the amount of designed missions and their importance in levelling as well as solability of the mission and its importance as well as the world the impact it has on it and the respawns that are needed to happen.

It is not unreasonable that kill 10 something missions are popular in developers, they criteria for the missions can easily be filled by any fighting game system and the respawn ratings can be sufficient to facilitate a large player base.

Anyway on topic for a basic, starter level repeatable quest, I would do the following.

The "quartermaster" of the city would require each day (filled quotas reset at maintenance) some generic items obtainable from the various professions the system provides (hunting, scavenging, crafting) and tasks players to go for them giving options for various missions obtaining said resources, the missions stop as soon as quotas are filled, so for example if x resource is filled for the day no more quests for that type of resource is given.

Quest rewards would be in line for providing the community with what it needs maybe discount at the shops that use the relevant with the quest resource for the rest of the day or access to facilities that are available only to those that help the community.

I believe it would make a good generic and repeatable quest that could fill in in a variety of game systems and give the player some sense of accomplishment and continuity.

It would start off in a pub, would trigger after drinking a certain amount of alcohol, shady npc approaches and begins detailing quest, group of people come in and start fight, quest giver dies, you go off in search of whatever is required. Will involve lots more drinking and various pub fights along the way, ending in saving a bunch of wenches who will convincingly show their gratitude in various physical ways and of course by providing more beer.

I don't know. I've been thinking of what my mmo would look like if i ever had the chance to make one, but i haven't exactly designed specific quests or given that area much thought. I can't give an answer.

Now, do tell, which dev asked you to solicit ideas from us? :P

Greetings adventurer. I have a little dilemma and perhaps wondered if you can go to the nearest pub and get me a few pints of beer? A packet of salt n vinegar crisps might be a bonus too. Reward? Ehh, experience, just think of the experience you will get for your selfless act. Ta very much.'

I have a fairly clear picture, because as a City of Heroes player I have in fact designed some.

Mine tend to be surrealistic or satirical, and feature riffing on some basic joke or pop culture phrase. In one, players are sent to meet a Nigerian to discuss a money laundering transaction, only to find themselves caught up in a martial arts tournament with Deth Kickers and Ginsu warriors. Official canon is only given a nod to make fun of it.

One thing I definitely do is put a lot of exposition into NPC chatter. One problem in many games, CoH included, is that teammates who aren't on specific quest lines but are playing through them on another character often get no clue what the story line of the quest is about. They're a sequence of random hunts and combats. I try to get around this by putting all important plot points into text that everyone can see without making an effort to look.

Quest for high level players.
A witch turns you into a lvl1 rat. You have very limited possibilities to attack, you can just run or hide. There are also normal NPC rats around everywhere which don't like your smell and reject you from their family, and of course there is a normal lowbie quest for new players to kill 10 rats (player or NPC). To lift the curse you have to reach the mysterious rat village in nearby city sewers, and convince the high rat shaman to introduce you into the tribe.

Kill 10 boars then return. Next quest, collect 15 boar tusks then return.