How does a Gnoll not drop a GNOLL PAWS

XApotheosisX

/rant on

So I'm playing World of Dumbasses and i get a quest that basically says "go find me 10 gnoll paws" i  think to myself, well 10 isnt that bad, this shouldn't take me too long.

.

.

.

57 gnolls later (i fricken started counting after about 15 so probably more than that) I had 10 gnoll paws. WTF is this bullshit, have we come so far in gaming that we are throwing even the basics of sense out the window? Realistically I should have been done with this quest after 3 gnolls, for the math geniuses out there. gnolls have 4 paws, if I kill 3 that would give me 12 paws ... more than enough.

I take another quest that says "bring me 10 goretusk livers" ... I thought ok thats fine too

.

.

.

43 goretusks later ... i have 10 livers.

Then i got a quest that said "bring me the head of <such n such>" i thought for sure that it wouldn't drop of the first kill either.

/rant off

coffee

Go play EQ2, VG, Lineage2 and do a similar quest... then come back and say sorry.

XApotheosisX

Originally posted by coffee

Go play EQ2, VG, Lineage2 and do a similar quest... then come back and say sorry.

who said anything about other games not being like this?

matsked

It has to do with the amount of damage you inflict upon the poor creature.

After a minute* of bashing the only thing to remain is a bloody pulp,

so only with luck you'll find an intact pawn.



*No I don't know how long it takes to kill a gnoll,

to long and much to many blows to be any were near realistic I would guess though.

olddaddy

Geez, what a noob. Gnoll paws are not an item carried on the gnoll, they are part of his anatomy located at the opposite end of the arms from the shoulders. If your sword doesn't sever one in combat, it will not drop, and you will have to cut it off after you kill the gnoll.

MrFlea

i think he was being ironic....

 

its a fair observation IMO.

Woodsling

I couldn't agree more... quests like that are just plain stupid. And every single game seems to have them.

-So grasshopper! Find me 10 feathers from megaevilnasty vultures!

-Yes master! I will...

[40 slain vultures later you still only have 6 feathers]

-Master? Aren't vultures covered in feathers?

-Yes Grasshopper, that is why this particular quest is so important to your advancement to enlightenment!

kngedgr

If it didn't take so long you wouldn't get as much experience.

Steakpuncher

There's a quest ouside Tarren Mill (Horde) to get 10 bear tongues, and A Spider Ichor (1) took me 147 kills to get the ichor. I was fucking fuming to say the least.



Still, when its not rediculously stupidly rare, its a good helper, as anything which makes you "grind with a purpose" speeds up your leveling, detracts from the boredom, and gives you some sort of goal to aim for. Obviously at the point where the drop rate is stupidly low, it hgas a far more negative effect.

MrFlea

The action and purpose of the task is not in question, rather the actual stated objective.

Is it not beyond the wit of man to word these quests differntly. Could the task not read, "collect 10 undamaged gnoll paws"?

matsked

Originally posted by olddaddy

Geez, what a noob. Gnoll paws are not an item carried on the gnoll, they are part of his anatomy located at the opposite end of the arms from the shoulders. If your sword doesn't sever one in combat, it will not drop, and you will have to cut it off after you kill the gnoll.

I do know what a paw is.
What I was trying to say was that there is not much realism in the game to begin with,
so questions like why you dont always get four paws of a gnoll is kinda unnessesary.
Maybe it's magic. Or maybe gnoll paws usally burn up after the gnoll dies because of the heart no longer is able to pump the cooling liquid throu the paws that are keeping the from going nuclear. Or you know... Whatever?
I do agree it's kinda strange and somewhat annoying though.

Deathstrike2

Originally posted by MrFlea


The action and purpose of the task is not in question, rather the actual stated objective.
Is it not beyond the wit of man to word these quests differntly. Could the task not read, "collect 10 undamaged gnoll paws"?

Now come on.  This is a RP attempt to make up for poor quest design.  If the OP was trying to get undamaged gnoll paws, I'm pretty sure that he wouldn't aim for the four paws on the creature.  Even if he accidentally hit one or even two of them, he surely wouldn't hit all four on dozens of gnolls in a row!  Call it for what it is...a time sink.  BTW, time sinks are okay if they aren't so in your face about it.  They should be designed in such a way as to be interesting.  Grinding for no good reason is not interesting.

And as for the notion that it's okay to do quests like this because all the other MMOs do it is crazy.   As my mother once said, if everyone else was jumping off a bridge, would you? 

I agree 100 percent with the OP's post.

C.L.O.U.D

Originally posted by XApotheosisX


/rant on
So I'm playing World of Dumbasses and i get a quest that basically says "go find me 10 gnoll paws" i  think to myself, well 10 isnt that bad, this shouldn't take me too long.
.
.
.
57 gnolls later (i fricken started counting after about 15 so probably more than that) I had 10 gnoll paws. WTF is this bullshit, have we come so far in gaming that we are throwing even the basics of sense out the window? Realistically I should have been done with this quest after 3 gnolls, for the math geniuses out there. gnolls have 4 paws, if I kill 3 that would give me 12 paws ... more than enough.
I take another quest that says "bring me 10 goretusk livers" ... I thought ok thats fine too
.
.
.
43 goretusks later ... i have 10 livers.
Then i got a quest that said "bring me the head of <such n such>" i thought for sure that it wouldn't drop of the first kill either.
/rant off

I remember those quest and I do remember doing both of them within 10 min, i think u just had bad luck bud cause its over a 90% drop rate for those things. Dont let this discourage u from playing, u are gonna have this in any mmorpg with  quest in it, which is like all of them.plus this isnt the worse thing u have to get in the game, there are some quest with things under a 5% droprate, and dont get me started of the recipe for Crusader in WPL, its a .2% drop and people farm it for somtimes days. so just keep at it and u will succeed

MrFlea

lol...ok, but i was thinking rather that few Gnolls actaully looked after there paws that well and would, by vertue of ther rather sorry existance, generally already have damaged paws, thus finding an undamaged one being a rarity. The chances of finding a gnoll who had regular pedicures being rather more limited. My only point was just by wording the quest differntly you could skirt around the feeblness of thne quest idea a bit better....

BTW, i seriosuly regret jumping of the bridge...when will i learn.

 

boognish75

Originally posted by matsked

Originally posted by olddaddy

Geez, what a noob. Gnoll paws are not an item carried on the gnoll, they are part of his anatomy located at the opposite end of the arms from the shoulders. If your sword doesn't sever one in combat, it will not drop, and you will have to cut it off after you kill the gnoll.

I do know what a paw is. What I was trying to say was that there is not much realism in the game to begin with, so questions like why you dont always get four paws of a gnoll is kinda unnessesary. Maybe it's magic. Or maybe gnoll paws usally burn up after the gnoll dies because of the heart no longer is able to pump the cooling liquid throu the paws that are keeping the from going nuclear. Or you know... Whatever? I do agree it's kinda strange and somewhat annoying though.

realism? Well i remember the last time in r/l trying to get a gnoll paw was hard....

Paragus1

I got one for  you.   Back in the days of EQ1, many of the classes epic weapon quest required you to get a red or white dragon scale.  The dragons who dropped the scales only spawned once in a real life week.   To make matters worse, the dragon only dropped 1 scale.  I mean WTF is that?   The god damn dragon is the size of a mack truck and only 1 god damn scale is salvagable?  Given this was back in the day before perhaps technology existed to give everyone in the party 1 of the item they needed, but this problem is age old.

MiNaAu

The rare droppings is just a sly way from the developers to help you grind your way along without feeling like it comes to nothing, if they drop once in a while it still makes you feel like it was worth it but if you think carefully you realize what a bloody waste of time it was, such as Silkroad, ask you to collect like 50 of a certain item from a monster and it is kind of cheating because the items have a drop chance of like 2%...leaves you thinking...WHY THE HELL AM I DOING THIS??

severius

Quests of this nature are holdovers from the very early days of computer role playing games.  It is a sad state of affairs that games today are relying on content created nearly 20 years ago because the devs are too lazy, or lack the creative energy, to come up with something new and entertaining.

MrFlea

I think there could be a little more imagination expended on these quests, but with the shear scale of these games some short cuts is perhaps inveitable...its difficuly to be oringal when there are thousands of quest to be incorperated in these types of games. I think a little more logic in what the task actaully entails is not asking too much however...

lomiller

One of the most basic rules in any type of any fantasy genre is that it is not up to the author to justify and explain every facet of the world and story. More is usually better but only up to the point where you would start to derail the story/gameplay with meaningless details.  

 

This means it’s up to the reader to come up with their own explanation for things that are not explained but not quite the way they would seemingly work in real life.  In this case my personal explanation is that the person wants intact paws of a certain quality in order to be able to positively identify them as Gnolls.  

 

For a long time Marvel Comics had a running joke related to this type of thing.  If you spotted an “error” and wrote in with an explanation of why it wasn’t really you could be awarded a “No-Prize”. As the name indicates the no-prize was actually an empty envelope, (the envelope itself being the award) to indicate that this was really something all readers should be doing all the time so it didn’t really warrant a prize.  I believe they eventually discontinued it after several decades because they were inundated with letters that only pointed out problems.

nomadian

See, if you would kill them in one hit instead of all the scuffling in between, you might have a perfect gnoll paw.

lomiller

Originally posted by nomadian


See, if you would kill them in one hit instead of all the scuffling in between, you might have a perfect gnoll paw.

Na, Gnolls are none to particular about where they stick their paws so a perfect one isn’t going to be common at all.   

XApotheosisX

Originally posted by lomiller


One of the most basic rules in any type of any fantasy genre is that it is not up to the author to justify and explain every facet of the world and story. More is usually better but only up to the point where you would start to derail the story/gameplay with meaningless details.  
 

to me it IS up to the author to tell me these little details. Or people will get frustrated because as i said, it goes against ALL sense that a gnoll doesn't have any gnoll paws. if they would have changed the wording around saying something to the effect of

"gnolls have a hierarchy that we are not completely sure about as of yet, higher ranks can only be distinguished by markings on thier paws ... bring me 10 paws with these markings"

then i could understand kinda ... although like others have said it still shitty quest design and needs to go away.

CleffyII

Thats because the Gnolls of the Barrens practice an ancient brutal ritual where when a gnoll dies, thier freinds would cut off a paw.  With all the Gnoll Killing in the Barrens, it isn't surprising there are so many pawless gnolls.  Maybe you might find a huge bucket of Gnoll paws in thier camp.

Also the Goretusk Boars have a major drinking problem which makes most of thier Livers unusable.

Ohaan

Originally posted by Deathstrike2

Originally posted by MrFlea


The action and purpose of the task is not in question, rather the actual stated objective.
Is it not beyond the wit of man to word these quests differntly. Could the task not read, "collect 10 undamaged gnoll paws"?

Now come on.  This is a RP attempt to make up for poor quest design.  If the OP was trying to get undamaged gnoll paws, I'm pretty sure that he wouldn't aim for the four paws on the creature.  Even if he accidentally hit one or even two of them, he surely wouldn't hit all four on dozens of gnolls in a row!  Call it for what it is...a time sink.  BTW, time sinks are okay if they aren't so in your face about it.  They should be designed in such a way as to be interesting.  Grinding for no good reason is not interesting.

And as for the notion that it's okay to do quests like this because all the other MMOs do it is crazy.   As my mother once said, if everyone else was jumping off a bridge, would you? 

I agree 100 percent with the OP's post.

Deathstrike hit the nail on the head.



I can't count the number of times that I took on a quest thinking that I had sufficient time to collect the required quantity in the time I had to play only to be frustrated by random drops that took a drastically long time.  If a mob has a 50% chance of dropping one of the required items, then on average one would have to kill 2 to get 1 item. At best it could be 1 for 1 but at worst it could be 10, 100, or 1000+. That is just bad design.  If devs want you to have to kill 20 mobs then they should just make it a 1 for 1 drop and require 20 items.

Briansho

Originally posted by Deathstrike2

Originally posted by MrFlea


The action and purpose of the task is not in question, rather the actual stated objective.
Is it not beyond the wit of man to word these quests differntly. Could the task not read, "collect 10 undamaged gnoll paws"?

Now come on.  This is a RP attempt to make up for poor quest design.  If the OP was trying to get undamaged gnoll paws, I'm pretty sure that he wouldn't aim for the four paws on the creature.  Even if he accidentally hit one or even two of them, he surely wouldn't hit all four on dozens of gnolls in a row!  Call it for what it is...a time sink.  BTW, time sinks are okay if they aren't so in your face about it.  They should be designed in such a way as to be interesting.  Grinding for no good reason is not interesting.

And as for the notion that it's okay to do quests like this because all the other MMOs do it is crazy.   As my mother once said, if everyone else was jumping off a bridge, would you? 

I agree 100 percent with the OP's post.

These quests are supposed to be "challenging" and "filled with Lore".



Are you saying they are not "challenging" when you dont get the quest item on the first try?