Woman's Day Quest, Gift

[xQzes]

Super fain, dau greu!

[SideLo VIP]

Excited about skin bonus sneak peek

[Stefan Mihai1]

Foarte frumos acest quest! 

[Cubee]

Like this one

[Daiiana.]

Nu mi se pare prea wow, necesită foarte mult timp și bătaie de cap. 

[PuNNiSHER]

E bun questul doar ca necesita timp nu este ca celalalt de zilele comunitatii.. 

[Tinca.]

unul dintre cele mai slabe si mai buguite quest-uri

[cosminmhl]

interesant

[Madalyn.]

Slabe premiile de la quest

[IulyIDS]

Destul de interesant acest quest.

[TLG Eduard.]

Misto quest-ul!

[Andreea33]

Din punctul meu de vedere un quest super, singura problema e ca a trebuit sa dezinstalez modpack pentru ca nu mergea sa fac misiunea cu floriile deoarce cand vroiam sa fac poza mi se buguia si imi disaprea tot de pe ecran.

[Maple]

Well, as we are reaching the end of this quest, I think it's a good time to leave a review with my opinions on each mission featured, as well as some constructive criticism.

General

The quality of the dialogue left much to be desired, there were a lot of misspellings and dropped letters, and I was willing to let this go, until I found out that the Romanian version of the quest had similarly butchered words and nonsensical phrases. Mission #4 (Barbara) was particularly egregious, so I'll talk more about this in that section, but was there seriously no one to proofread the strings? Especially the Romanian ones??

There were also quite a few bugs, more than the Union quest and the Valentine's Day one. I understand that this quest came very soon after the Valentine's quest, but, if anything, that should have told you that you need to release a simpler, less ambitious quest. Easter is a month away, and I honestly believe it would be a better call to make that quest a 150-object fetch quest, like they used to be years ago, and use this extra time to plan out the quest after the Easter one, to give you more time to ensure there are fewer bugs and issues associated with it.

Day 1 - Katie

I don't have much to say about this mission, it really was just a somewhat more tedious version of the base game's Paramedic side-mission, given the 3 second player freeze to do the CPR animation. I at least appreciate the idea of making the player have to drive carefully and not damage the Ambulance, and also that you made sure to heal the Ambulance when that point of the mission is reached.

 

Day 2 - Helena

Somewhat annoying that you make us drive all the way to the Ammunation in Temple LS just to then make us go out to Shady Creek, when Helena is first met next to the one in Blueberry in the base game. You can make the argument that "well that would only be 10 metres away from where you start the quest, it would be boring," but that did not stop you from spawning Vlad at the exact spot Helena spawns in the base game, in the Valentine's Day quest's final mission.

 

Aside from that, I actually thought this mission was quite neat. I liked the idea of actually going out into the forest and hunting deer, it was unique. Though, in some places, the deer model was very difficult to make out against the dirt background, and it detracted from the feeling that you're sniping it from far away, as I personally had to go near it just to figure out where it is exactly, and then inch my way back to past 90 metres. Still, a pretty nice experience, and glad you didn't make us use the stupid Windsor for it.

 

Day 3 - Millie

Wasn't a big fan of this one, quite strange logic that we're driving around LV and photographing flowers and then also just stealing them off people's properties in full view, including ones in front of a goddamn casino. This mission also seems to have caused players using modpacks plenty of issues, but I can't speak on that given I play vanilla. Also quite strange that we're delivering them to Mirela instead of Millie, but honestly I'm actually glad we skip the extra trip, considering how boring this mission was.

 

Day 4 - Barbara

Here we go, this is where the dialogue really falls apart. But before we get to that, credit where credit is due, it was another unique mission. Having an investigation segment where we have to be careful with our answers was an interesting concept, but god was it dragged down by the horrible dialogue. Also, the first time this mission was available, the game told you to go out in the lake using "the Predator," but did not place a checkpoint at said Predator, but rather it placed it already in the lake, at the bodies. Thankfully this was fixed by the second time this mission became available. So, let's talk about that dialogue.

 

I've been willing to forgive the occasional misspellings in the English versions of the past two quests and throughout this quest too (even though there've been realistically far too many), but this mission is where I was starting to lose it. Nevertheless, I just saved them in some screenshots and went on with my days. That is, until two days ago when I saw an unrelated screenshot, in which Karther was complaining about similarly strange phrasing in this mission... in the Romanian version of it. Seeing that is kind of what made me want to write out this entire post, actually. I'd attach some screenshots of said phrases, but the maximum allowed size is 500kB and my ingame screenshots save at ~2.5MB, so instead I'll just list them out. These might sound very pedantic, but I really don't care anymore:

• "I've gave you Share Location" should have really been something along the lines of "I've sent you the location of where the bodies were reported;"
• "I got a warrant to search his vehicle, frisk it!" - you don't 'frisk' a vehicle, this should have been something like "I got a warrant to search his vehicle, go there and look for anything that might be a clue!";
• Blood slides. What the actual hell is 'blood slides' supposed to mean and how did you come up with this term, and not find out the term you're looking for is actually 'bloodstains' ?? This particular term is what sent me over the tipping point and made me realize no one is proofreading these strings when I first played this mission, because I was completely baffled as to how this could be unironically written. I really am curious what the Romanian version said here, because for the life of me I can't figure out how this was left in the dialogue without anyone catching it. Seeing as "Oh, you've gotta be kidding me... Doakes? [...] You son of a bitch!" was directly translated as "Ah, chiar tu... Doakes? [...] Fiul tau de nenorocit," I don't have high hopes;
• "Break his house and search more proofs!" should have been "Break into his house and search for more evidence;"
• "You found victims trophies" is supposed to mean... what exactly? Is it meant to imply he cut off fingers or something to that effect and was keeping them in a drawer? That's the only thing I can imagine would be useful as evidence against a serial killer. The phrasing is just strange, once again;
• "Be careful at what he respons;"
• Again with the stupid 'blood slides,' we ask Doakes: "Do you have a collection? Some blood slides, perhaps?" ???? And then he replies: "Collection of what? Of motherfucking fucking pokemons?"
• There were more instances, but I did not save screenshots of them all, so I won't bring them up since it would be unfair to try and potentially remember them wrongly in here.

Please, please, get someone to proofread these dialogue strings before you release quests like these. At least do it for the Romanian version, seeing as this is a mostly Romanian server.

 

Day 5 - Denise

Forcing the suspension of disbelief a bit, making people that played the base game believe that Denise - a local street girl whom CJ had to rescue from a Vagos crack house after he set fire to it, and who later is caught cheating on CJ with Big Poppa during A Home In The Hills - would have access to a helicopter and a Sniper Rifle and would be able to send you to act as a hitman to kill various rival gang members across the whole state of San Andreas, but whatever, I'm probably the only person that cares about this.

 

Once again, a decently interesting mission concept, making us kind of be in the shoes of Hitman Agency members. Really, my only complaint about this mission's gameplay is that the NPCs weren't loading in unless I was within ~200m of them, and only spawned in once you got within ~150m, so I couldn't really go for fun super-long range shots - instead, I'd have to fly close enough to spawn them in, then fly slightly further back but not too far away. Maybe this is just a limitation with the NPC system, and Hitmen don't have this issue with regular players, or they use a mod for extra Sniper Rifle zoom, I don't know.

 

Day 6 - Michelle

Well, if Barbara's mission had horrible dialogue, this mission had horrible gameplay design. This was the most anti-fun anti-player mission I've experienced on B-Zone, despite being relatively short.

 

Let's start with the bugs, and actually with a very welcoming one I ran into: this mission could potentially bug out in a way where it would also start another quest mission at the same time, thus spawning two girlfriends you could go to. In my case, it happened to be Helena's mission, which meant I got to use the Sandking, which was very nice considering the Windsor kind of sucks. Now, an actually important issue that clearly wasn't tested for is that this mission was very easy to softlock, because the checkpoints for the pickups you are instructed to get were meant to be taken only on foot. The script does, in fact, tell you to get out of the car if you try to drive into the checkpoint. But the checkpoint would still disappear as if you triggered it correctly. Thus, you would be stuck in the mission, and the only way to fix it was to quit and relog onto the server. This was the case for all checkpoints prior to completing the Hotrod, and many players ran into this bug.

 

This makes me wonder: how come there is no [/leavequest] command for cases like these? While otherwise uncommon if you exclude this mission, this isn't the first time a quest mission can softlock, and in fact one could be found in the Valentine's Day quest too. I think I was the only person to find that particular one, and I only did so at the end of the quest, so I never reported it, but it baffles me that there is no way to leave the quest unless you finish it or close the game. (for those curious, in the 555-WE-TIP inspired mission where you plant drugs in the trunk of Stefan's ex's car, if you killed the valet and then jumped into the clothes pickup, you would get stuck midair after changing to the valet model, and nothing could unfreeze you)

 

Another bug players said they've run into is that the condition to not damage the Hotrod carried over to the Windsor while driving back to Mirela, which, again, caused softlocks and unfair fails.

 

Now, about that anti-fun design, coupled with more baffling story logic: why do we have to drive to different corners of San Fierro to pick up wheels individually? Particularly, why do we have to install them individually, before we can pick up the next one? Why can't we just... pick up all the wheels and then drive back to install them? And why is one of the wheels in a stupid alleyway next to Wheel-Arch Angels? (okay, as I'm typing this, I realize the obvious pun, and if it was intentional, fine, well played, it's clever)

But most importantly, why is one of the wheels on the Navy ship??? Not to mention, it was clearly placed there with the expectation that you would swim through the rear of the ship and run all the way to the wheel (thankfully, it was possible to skip this nonsense by parking the Windsor next to a.. 'balcony' thing off the side of the ship and you could just barely jump and climb onto it, then jump back off). This makes absolutely no sense and is clearly there just to take the piss out of the player and to prolong the mission for no reason. The other two wheels are found in car showrooms, what the hell is this one doing on the navy ship?

 

Now, something that bothered me personally but can be argued to be a nitpick, I want to talk a bit about the setting of this mission. In the base game, we meet Michelle at the Driving School, and then we get to date her by going to her house, where she also has a garage. And, to your credit, both the driving school and Michelle's garage are used in the quest.

 

But... they're reversed. Michelle is working on a car at the Driving School, which we then deliver to her garage. Not only that, but we are delivering a Hotrod, a car which, in the base game, spawns at the Driving School after you get Gold medals on all the tests. This is such a strange choice considering you're clearly leveraging the base game for these missions, by using the girlfriends found there.

 

Day 7 - Mirela

The only noteworthy thing regarding this mission is that the introductory strings were left untranslated when this mission first became available, which just reinforces the idea that this quest wasn't properly tested. Aside from that, it's just driving all the way around the map and then back to Blueberry. Whatever, it's not the most offensive thing in the world. (Well, saying Katie "brings good vibes and smiles" when she's canonically into self-mutilation is surely a choice)

 

Final thoughts

I understand that there are only two scripters working on these quests while also working on the rest of the server's code and also having lives outside of B-Zone. This is why I tried my best to be as objective as I could and give credit where it was due, and to lay everything out in as complete a manner as possible, rather than resorting to calling you names for releasing broken shit, like some other members might have done on the Discord server. But I really hope that at least some of the things I've said in this massive post are taken into consideration for the future. You have great ambitions with these quests and these systems, and I respect that and all the work you put in to keep the server running, but you need to remember you're still working within the constraints and limitations of the janky SA and SAMP code. I don't think even OpenMP can do too much to salvage that fact.

 

Madalin said he prefers longer quests so that players can't easily go through and complete them on 10 different accounts, and that is fair. But this quest clearly shows signs of having been rushed in places and not tested thoroughly. If you want to continue making these storyline quests, you need to give yourself more time to work on them, which is why it's been suggested you break up this streak with at least one 150-object fetch quest, since it would be easier and quicker to implement. Really, with the next quest (probably) being the Easter one, it makes the most sense in my opinion.

 

And, at the very least, please add a [/leavequest] command similar to [/leavemission]. Relogging because of softlocks isn't fun.

 

I don't have much to say about the rewards, I don't really know what to do with my tickets and fragments, especially with the skin system rework that's been teased. I mostly cared about the gold, 500k, and wheelspins.

 

This is everything I wanted to say, I think. I probably forgot some stuff since I had to leave midway through writing this, but it's not like many will even bother reading after the first two paragraphs.

 

Edited March 21 by Maple

[TLG Escalasion]

Frumos quest, dar premiile sunt cam slabute din pacate.