I’ve been having a problem with this since wow started, but Dragonflight has made this problem get to the point where I am frustrated enough to request a fix.
Between dungeon quests that are only able to be completed when finished finding a group by either lfg or through organizing with friends/guildies, world quests that can require you to gather resources before you can turn them in, quests for reputation, quests for professions, quests for battlepets, quests for raids progress that you have to leave in your queue potentially for months as you try to do the raid enough times to get the raid skip, quests for PVP, quests for mythic 0s, quest for mythic +, and various other ongoing quests… The quest log is simply too small to contain every quest you want to have at once.
Here are a few possible solutions rather than just listing the problem:
Add an option to mark a task as “untracked” where you won’t get credit the way an “tracked” quest will, but also ensuring that untracked quests don’t count under the 25 quest limit.
The current UI already does something similar, with the ability to “track” or “untrack” a quest. This would allow for the same restrictions currently on only 15 active quests, if there is a gameplay/balance reason for the limit, but would ensure that people with overfilled quest logs can simply put a quest on hold without it affecting their total quest limit.
The obvious solution,Remove/increase the quest cap.
This would be my ideal solution, but it comes with a cost of dev time to make the system able to handle more than 25 active quests.
Create a separation between “ongoing” quests like raid skip unlock quests, and 1 time quests like leveling quests.
Another potential solution is to have only some of the quests count for the cap, but this be set up at the quest level instead of a way for players to control. I don’t like this solution as much as the other 2, but if there’s a balance reason to limit each character’s quest log to 25, this would allow for some quests to be marked as exceptions to this limit. This could include dailies, weekly, instance-specific, zone-specific, profession, etc etc. The main thing is allowing a quest that is going to stay in someone’s quest log for potentially a very long time to be marked as not impacting the 25 quest limit.
Create a way to track zone quests and accept/decline based on what zone you are in.
Similar to 3, but using zones to keep quests relevant to that zone. Say someone is starting on Darnasus quests, but then they move to Darkshore and will come back to do quests in Darnasus later. This option would make it so that when you leave a zone, quests are removed from your quest log if the entirety of the quest takes place in that zone. Then, if you return to that zone, the zone specific quests would automatically be tracked again while the ones in other zones you aren’t in at that time would be turned off. This is similar to the current world quest system, where specific zones have specific quests that only show up when you are in that zone. This could work especially well for daily/weekly quest hubs ala Zeref Mortis or The Argent Tournament, where the quests are usually locked to that specific zone anyway. This one could be easier to implement because it could potentially reuse the systems already made for world quests. The biggest risk is how it would impact multizone quests and still doesn’t solve the issues of too many ongoing “meta” quests taking up too much of your quest log.
Open to alternative ideas, as well as reasons why the quest log limits us to 25 quests in the first place when just the amount of activity types on the game go well beyond 25, let alone the amount of quests someone is likely to have at any given time while leveling and while at max level;
Edit: changed 15 to 25, not sure how I mixed up the number of quests;
The quest log needs work in several ways. In addition to some of the things you’ve mentioned:
Expanded total cap
Redesigned UI that restores the pre-WoD quest window’s glanceability
Some way to put quests “on ice” without losing progress, like void storage for quests
For point #2, current UI is nice if you’re concerned with the current objective (assuming it has an associated map) but it suuuucks if you’re trying to get an overview of what you need to be doing. The addon Classic Quest Log is a decent band-aid for this but really they should just take another crack at designing it.
1 other potential related idea for quest log UI design improvements: Genshin Impact has a quest history book that lets you see the events from past quests summarized. Implementing this would be challenging, especially with many quests not having documentation for any number of reasons, but I feel like this would be doable with the help of Wowhead and community lore summary channels on youtube. Especially if it’s a quest summary of only the Mainline quests and not the side quests, as it’s mostly the mainline quests that people might need a refresher on if they find themselves getting lost on the plot of that expansion’s story a few months in.
Which list are you seeing a limit of 15 on? If it’s the tracked quests on the right, I thought that number was much lower, like, 5-7ish, and you can have 25 in the quest log at once.
Mind you, I made a post about 25 being too restrictive too about 2 days ago.
I know why the limit was 20 in classic, and 25 in TBC (saving on server/database space and processing power/speed), I just don’t think those reasons are as relevant in the Year of Our Lord Two-thousand and Twenty-Two as they were when TBC was released.
Yeah, the database storage costs for quests have to be tiny relative to modern drives. Even the most complex quests can probably be measured in tens of bytes…
You’ve got an integer for the quest ID which is at most 4 bytes, 3 or 4 smallints for quest objectives which are 2 bytes each, and maybe a boolean for a yes/no objective which is one byte. So you’re looking at around 13 bytes per quest, multiplied by 25 → 325 bytes for a character’s entire quest log. Not megabytes or kilobytes, bytes, and that’s assuming all your quests are complicated ones (many aren’t, Fedex quests with no conditions would only weigh 4 bytes). There’s also probably clever tricks that could be used to bring those numbers down further.
I think Blizz can probably afford to give us a higher log limit haha.
It’s likely the aggregate processing speed which is the bigger issue these days (though, to be fair it was probably not an insignificant concern at the time either), but I’m honestly not sure quite how much more intensive an extra 325/650/975 bps per active connection would really be. That would be doubling the log size at a sampling rate of once, twice, or three times per second.
Also the quest tracker that’s built in needs zone grouping and collapse options. That way you can still have them “tracked” but not visible, like say you want to collapse your current azure span quests while doing your plains quests. I don’t want to untrack them, I just want the quests I’m doing not pushed off screen due to all the other quests I’ve acquired.