The Calendar, Quests, and open&closed parties

[EdTheKet]

Dear all,

I would like to take a few minutes to clarify the use of the calendar for quests. The reason for this is that I received a request for no longer putting quests on the calendar if they are "closed".

"Closed" meaning that the party is limited to, for example, the attendees of a previous session (if the quest is multiple part or part of a series), or limited to those invited for somebody's CDQ.

I thought that if I receive such a request of one person, there must be others out there with a similar feeling. Hence this post.

This request will not be granted because of the following reasons:
1) Based on the locations the GM plans to use, as well as the spawns, quests can be geared towards a certain level range therefore excluding part of the player base who do not have characters in this range. We try to have quests for all ranges though.

2) If the quest consists of multiple parts, or is part of a series, the party may be in a location at the end of a quest (e.g. deep in the Deep) where it would not make a lot of sense to all of a sudden have new people appearing.

3) the calendar is used by players to schedule their playtime based on quests. If only part of the quests were showing, scheduling would be difficult.

4) the calendar is used by GMs to schedule their quests based on server availability so that we do not have 4 quests at the same time. If only part of the quests were showing, scheduling would be difficult.

5) If it is a CDQ, the player for whom the CDQ is run is allowed to limit the attendees. In many cases, it wouldn't make sense for characters who the CDQ-character has never seen before to showup all of a sudden. If we wouldn't put these on the calendar, we'd also have problems with #3 and #4.

So if you consider all of the above, all quests, regardless of being open or closed should be on the calendar. If we didn't do that, we could have problems with server load, quests using the same areas because people didn't know there was another quest planned at the same time, or players being on two series at the same time and not able to attend one of them if they were planned at the same time.

Therefore, the best we can do is put everything on the calendar, and indicate when&where it starts and who can attend and who cannot, because then everybody knows what to expect.


Thank you for your time reading this.
On behalf of the GM team,
EdTheKet