(OCD Bait) Abandoned Quests Tracker - Why?

Support Bug Report
1

I implore any and all players who find this to be an irresistable itch they cannot scratch to let their thoughts be known here.

The Abandoned Quests counter has been in play in the ‘Statistics’ window of the Character Achievements Panel for a considerable time, now.

To my knowledge, I am not aware of any players who find this to be a positive thing - please equally post here if you do find it a good feature, as discussion is always good.

I am however aware of a number of Neurodivergent players (including friends and previous forum threads) who find this to be a painful and stressful feature, in its current state.

:hammer_and_wrench: I posit that this feature should be removed entirely, for the following reasons: :hammer_and_wrench:

It is not working as intended(?):

  • For those who find this to be a positive addition to the game, and enjoy the feature, I have noticed that the game does not accurately track abandoned quests, and / or it is not adequately explained what consitutes “abandoning” a quest. Therefore, those who do like this statistic and are keeping score, are not receiving an accurate result.

Following some trial and error testing, I have noticed that several things seem to “count” as “abandoned” quests through no fault of the player.

  1. Completing a Dragonriding Race, but not beating your previous high score (note: Conversely, resetting the race using the stopwatch item does NOT seem to fail the quest).
  2. Passing through some World Quests while on other business (e.g. flying over it), but not participating in it or completing it.
  3. Being online during a Journal Activity but not reaching 1,000 Activity Points before the monthly reset.
  4. A Patch or Update which affects one or more quests you’ve already completed.
  5. Accepting a Daily or Weekly Quest but not managing to complete it before the Daily / Weekly reset due to other pressing commitments.
  6. Being forced to abandon a quest or reset it, due to a bug. (This outcome would of course be working as intended, but sometimes we are left no choice but to reset the quest.)

I believe it causes more (mental) harm than good:

  • As mentioned, there are many Neurodivergent players in this community who are affected by smaller niggling things, myself included.

  • Having “tainted” statistics that you cannot rectify (either because characters over 60 cannot be permanently deleted, or because you would have to remake a character you’ve put a lot of time into) can be a constant source of irritation; a niggling itch that you simply can’t scratch, but you’re always aware of it.

  • In extreme cases, this can absolutely sour a person’s experience of the game, and negatively impact their investment in it.

  • Other than striving to keep a “perfect” record on your character - which as discussed above, is very difficult with the current state of the counter - I cannot see a positive benefit to tracking your abandoned quests.

TL:DR - I do not see enough of a positive reason for your “Abandoned Quests” statistic to be tracked, and I believe it would be a true Quality of Life improvement for Neurodivergent Players in the community, to either remove this feature or make a provision for the feature to be optionally hidden.

I am not a developer, but I believe that this would not take a great deal of time or effort to do, as the counter is a display / tracking feature, rather than being integral to the functionality of other features.

I believe that the benefits in quality of life would be significant next to the work it might take to remove the feature.

Thoughts?

2 Likes
2

This is definitely true for me.

The quest stats on my main show:

Quests completed: 27615
Daily Quests completed: 16753
Quests Abandoned: 9914

9914, incidentally, is 5 more than the 9909 I saw that figure at a couple of hours ago - and ofc I haven’t Abandoned any quests recently, though I have flown over world quests in DF that I didn’t stop for.

9914 is an absurd number for me. I rarely abandon quests at all. I might believe 100 or 200 that I have actually abandoned, or a few hundred if we add daily quests I didn’t get to on the same day back in Mists. But 10,000??? No way.

This statistic is bugged.

Searching back, I see previous attempts to bring this to attention back to 2019, but it doesn’t attract a lot of attention. I can understand that, since it doesn’t really bother me, not having OCD about things like that.

But the statistic is clearly bugged.

2 Likes
3

Egad, I would love to do away with the silly Abandoned Quests statistic as it has been the source of much strife over the years from me.

OP, for now, a bandaid fix - a while back I asked in the UI & Macro group for a way to remove the Statistics tab entirely and the script works well. It might be worth a shot for you. Any way to block Statistics page? - #2 by Fizzlemizz-azjolnerub I still miss seeing the statistics, but it eases my weird little goblin mind a little bit with it gone entirely.

2 Likes
4

Saw the link. While you’re waiting:

1 Like
5

this isn’t a bug.

peoples medical issues aren’t a bug.

if you want to make suggestions, try the quest forum or general discussion.

6

The statistic shown is wrong.

Wrong,

That is a bug.

Showing wrong information is a bug.

7

How is it wrong?

8

I explained above. Not as well as OP, but my own observation.

I started off that morning, after reading this post, with 9909 as the number. A couple of hours later, I had not taken any quests, and I had not abandoned any quests, but the number was 9914.

I abandoned ZERO quests, but the number increased by 5.

That’s a bug.

9

YOU abandoned no quests. The game client had abandoned 5 quests without your awareness, because your definitions of “quest” and “abandoned” are incomplete.

The game tracks many things as quests that a player wouldn’t consider a quest, and these things aren’t displayed in the quest log. And the game considers an automatic quest to have been abandoned if you don’t complete it before it expires. Every emissary quest you are exposed to by being in the zone, but don’t complete counts as an abandoned quest. Every quest you’re offered automatically because you entered the quest area but don’t start before leaving that area counts as abandoned. (Jumping back and forth, repeatedly being offered that automatic quest and then having it removed, is a great way to spike your “abandoned quest” count.)

In other words, the count is not wrong; your definition of “quest” and “abandoned” is. The only definition that matters is the developers’, and if the number matches what the devs intended, it’s not a bug and QA will disregard the report as “NOTABUG working as designed”.

However , it is a valid argument that the displayed statistic is meaningless to a user, simply because it has nothing to do with the user’s in-game experience. But I’m sure it’s not being displayed accidentally. Thus, also not a bug. A puzzling implementation choice, but an intentional one.

10

going through an area with a daily quest will push the quest into your log

if you don’t do the quest, the game deems it abandoned.

the number can also increase from a partially completed quest which has expired.

…and the biggest factor, would be that the tracker has always been notoriously dramatic, and loves to flip all sorts of numbers around simply by zoning

(which is a bug) :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

11

This is false.

I had assumed it might be true myself in my previous messages, but it is false. At least, it is false in general, though there could be some circumstances where it is true.

I did the following:

  1. I took a lesser alt, with 1290 quests completed and 1010 quests allegedly abandoned.
  2. I flew around a cluster of 6 WQ, stopping at each, making sure that I saw the popup and, where applicable, the talking head.
  3. I flew around the same cluster of 6 WQ again, stopping at each, making sure that I saw the popup and, where applicable, the talking head.
  4. I hearthstoned back, logged out, logged in again, checked my quests. Still “1010 Abandoned Quests”
  5. I Accepted and then Abandoned a regular exclam-maek quest.
  6. I logged out and logged in again, and now see “1011 Abandoned Quests”.

I am now wondering how I got from 9909 to 9914 yesterday. But it was not from simply flying over world quests.

I invite you to try to find the conditions under which it is possible to increment this Abandoned Quests figure without actually Abandoning it.

P.S, I also tried the same thing in BfA. Same result. No increment of the figure.

P.P.S. Even if it were true, it would be nonsense to present it to players as Abandoning a quest, when that makes no sense to the player’s experience. You, of course, are just speculating, but if the devs want to assert the same thing, they should say so, so that we can all have a good laugh. :rofl:

12

take a look at the time remaining on the quests which you flew through
check your abandoned quest tally again after the quests have expired

:woman_shrugging:

13

Worth a shot! I’ll check tomorrow.

14

Now that is strange.

I left off yesterday with my character at 1011 Abandoned.

I left it in Valdrakken; didn’t do anything with it since.

This morning, it was at 1013 Abandoned. That would be consistent with the Expired-WQ Hypothesis, since two of the WQ I visted yesterday had expired - one pet battle, and the BfA WQ.

This evening, the other 5 WQ I visited yesterday have expired. Yet it is still at 1013. By the Expired-WQ Hypothesis, it would/“should” be at 1018.

Experiment inconclusive.

P.S. Now, this is getting EXTREMELY weird (cue X-Files theme)

I checked in on my test character again today, again having done nothing with it, and see the Abandoned figure at …

Any guesses? C’mon, Place Your Bets…

That number doesn’t make sense in so many ways.

I’ll keep an eye on it for the next day or two.

…

Update, as promised.

I did my round of visiting WQ on Friday. 1011.

I felt the characted in Valdrakken, doing nothing more.

I started this post Saturday Morning. 1013. Could be consistent with the Expired-WQ Hypothesis.

On Saturday Afternoon, after the quest reset (in EU), it was still 1013. (“Should” have been 1018, by the Expired-WQ Hypothesis.)

On Sunday, it was 1015.

On Monday, it was 1017.

On Tuesday, again having done nothing but left the character in Valdrakken, it is 1019. Yes, 1019. Where did THAT come from?? No WQ cover Valdrakken itself.

…

Update, Wednesday morning. Again, the character has been logged out in Valdrakken all this time since Friday, apart from my brief logins to check the number.

Quests Abandoned now shows as 1021.

Explain that!

…

Update, Thursday morning.

1023

This is getting creepy.

…

Update, Friday morning. 1025.

So the game has been simply adding 2 Abandoned Quests every day for a week, even though the character has been sitting unused in Valdrakken.

Do either of you sceptics have an explanation for that?

15

Only that something in the background is being invisibly added to your quest log (the real one, not the one you can see which is just a subset) when you log in, and then “abandoning” them when you log out.

Blizzard uses the “quest” object for a lot of things players wouldn’t consider quests, just as a tracking mechanism.

16

That is plausible. But it’s clearly not the right thing to do.

Hmmm, I must look up the API reference to see whether there is a way to get at those invisible “quests”.

I have logged a bug report in-game, referencing this thread.

17

That’s fair.

It certainly renders the displayed statistic meaningless, if “quest” means something different than the users’ understanding of the word. It’s been a long time (since vanilla, I think) since the developers started using quests for tracking non-quest events. They probably should have stopped displaying what constitutes an internal diagnostic value to the user as if that statistic meant something.

18

I have accessed the hidden entries using the following skeleton addon:

local k
local numEntries, numQuests = C_QuestLog.GetNumQuestLogEntries()
print(numEntries .. " entries containing " .. numQuests .. " quests in your quest log.");
for i=1,C_QuestLog.GetNumQuestLogEntries() do
k=C_QuestLog.GetInfo(i)
print (k.title," ",k.questID)
end

Here’s what I get on Friday

48 entries containing 19 quests in your quest log.
Hunt for the Harbinger 0
The Harbinger 79009
Guardians of the Dream 0
Wild Gods in Our Midst 76320
Dragonflight 0
Last Hurrah: Emerald Dream 80388
Embers of Neltharion 0
Caverns of Time 0
The Vials of Eternity 13432
Emerald Dream 0
Emerald Bounty 78206
The Superbloom 78319
The Tabard of Your Dreams 78363
Highmountain 0
Highmountain Tribes 42233
Krokuun 0
Army of the Light 48639
Thaldraszus 0
Ending the Blue Period 66457
The Azure Span 0
A Shadow In The Ice 66957
Broken Traditions, Broken Bodies 66141
Driven Mad 65702
Protect And Herd 66958
Story of a Memorable Victory 72291
Val’sharah 0
The Dreamweavers 42170
Zereth Mortis 0
Patterns Within Patterns 66042
Zuldazar 0
Zandalari Empire 50598
Horde War Effort 50606
Azerite for the Horde 53435
Covenant Sanctum 0
Replenish the Reservoir 61984
Dreamsurge 0
Dreamsurge Investigation 77414
Shaping the Dreamsurge 77251
Heritage 0
The Pride of the Sin’dorei 53791
Missing header! (quest designers) 0
Climbing 72560
Professions 0
The Master of Their Craft 69946
World Quest 0
Tortollan Seekers 50604
Battle Pets 0
Battle Pet Tamers: Warlords 40329

I am still at 1025 Abandoned Quests. I will follow up to see if anything disappears.

…

Update, Saturday morning. 1027.

Well, that was enlightening! I found 2 “quests” that disappeared. Diffing Friday’s list against Saturday’s gives

1c1
< 45 entries containing 19 quests in your quest log.
---
> 48 entries containing 19 quests in your quest log.
14a15,16
> Highmountain 0
> Highmountain Tribes 42233
29a32
> Zandalari Empire 50598

Highmountain Tribes 42233 and Zandalari Empire 50598 are daily Emissaries from Legion and BfA.

Of course, my unused character had been nowhere near Broken Isles or Zandalar, but apparently they got pushed - and “abandoned” - automatically.

So that accounts for the two-a-day on this test character this week.

I don’t believe it explains everything, though.

Legion+BfA took about 4 years. 4 X 365 X 2=2920. My mage did a bunch of Emissaries in those expansions, but even if she never “abandoned” any of them, that doesn’t come close to accounting for the almost 10000 “Abandoned Quests” in her statistics.