Player-created quests

Zoso has a brilliant article about the NPC whose house is filled with murloc eyes. And he mentions the idea of player-created quests, but is doubtful about it. And I think that if you'd allow players to write quest descriptions etc., most player quests would be really bad. But in a way player-created quests already exist, you can find them in the auction house.

A short look at the trade goods section of the auction house tells you that a stack of runecloth sells for 1 to 2 gold. That *is* basically a quest: "Go forward and kill level 50+ humanoids. Collect 20 of the runecloth they drop, and I will pay you 1 to 2 gold." Only the xp reward is missing. And from all the possible monster drops, trade goods are a rather small part.

So to make a game with player-created quests, you would need to expand the crafting system a lot, so that it uses a lot more of items that drop of monsters. Then a crafter who needs items for a tradeskill goes to some sort of NPC and indicates what he needs and how much he is willing to pay for it. The NPC transforms this buy request into a quest, adding information about on what mob to kill to get the item in question, and an appropriate xp reward. But you can't get the xp reward by simply handing in the items, you need to take the quest first, then kill the mobs, and while you are on the quest every item that drops that is needed for the quest is flagged as "quest item". This is necessary because otherwise two people could just get endless xp by sending the same stack of runecloth back and forth.

The interesting part of that is that it creates a more dynamic quest system. The demand of items varies with time, so the quests on offer change with time. If the crafted items are actually good, and not much inferior to found items as they often are in tradeskill systems, a symbiotic relationship develops between adventurers and crafters. The crafters pay the adventurers to go materials hunting, and the adventurers buy the crafted items. This is probably extremely hard to balance right, but could make for a very compelling game.