I just happen to be a professional writer, and I thought it might be fun to come up with a random quest generator for VO. The end results might not be too different from the general combat or trade quest but they would have a story behind them and possibly an "opposing" quest [1]. I've only spent 30 minutes on it so far but it seems to me it's possible to generate some interesting quests on a random basis.

If there's someplace I can drop a PDF of my preliminary work, I'd like to know if it's useful or not to the devs [2] (especially, what kinds of quests are easy to implement right now so I can focus on making good story to surround those), my email is brian@wylfing.net or IM at btakle (AIM, YIM, Jabber). Alternately, if anyone would like to help develop a series of random-quest-rolling tables I can post them on my own site for criticism.

[1] "Opposing" means sub-quests in the short term, but I think it could be expanded so that other players have quests that conflict with yours (lots of combat AND non-combat PvP opportunities).

[2] Contributed on a BSD kind of basis. Just want the best stuff to be used.

The current rudimentary missions are merely placeholders for a much larger mission tree.

Thanks, I'm aware of that from other forum postings.

I don't want to read anything negative into your reply, nor do I want to underestimate the developers' abilities (so far classified as "outstanding"), but I think there are three good possibilites here:

1. Devising or contributing to a random quest generator.
2. Using a random table structure to come up with some really interesting mission stories (while I was working on it 2 or 3 fun stories were apparent).
3. Pretty key in my opinion is the idea of missions that may pit player against player to achieve competing goals. This is something no other MMORPG has at this point and could be a distinguishing factor (er, maybe Tale in the Desert has this, but assuredly it doesn't involve starship combat). This is something I'd really enjoy working on as well (pro-am style).

At any rate, if this is undesirable just say the word and I'll stop. I won't be offended or cancel my subscription ;-) I'm only pinging to see if this is a poor use of my time.

Sounds like a great idea wylfing, I'd love to see some sample quest thread ideas if you feel like posting them here or on your own website.

Hmm... I absolutely agree with you that written content is one of the things that is missing. Unfortunately so is a good interface for the written content, but the devs already know my feelings on that.

Ok, well, I'm not a professional writer (my hat's off to anyone who is), but I think I'm a pretty decent amateur writer and I'm a rather experienced RPG referee. I recently sent the devs a list of 73 plot ideas that I think could be generated randomly by making certain variables random or semi-random (a list that is initialized on a sector by sector basis, much like trade goods are). Alot of them of course require new scripts and content, but many of them are fairly simple and could be implemented at least in a trivial way (initially) with existing content. The real key bottleneck here is that there isn't a good way for me to take my ideas for textual RP content and present it in any sort of way which corresponds to how that content might be displayed. There is no conversational framework, and I'm told that the mission scripting is rather complex and more like programming than scripting at present.

The other thing is that we would like some key features - the names of a set of NPC's - to remain 'local' and consistant every time you visit the sector.

All that said, I'm still interested in seeing your ideas for a quest generator.

Wow 73 plot ideas! That's a lot to think up. The angle I was taking was a framework for generating plots more or less on the fly, to avoid the work of coming up with...well, 73 plots (I am a decorated hero of laziness). It sounds like you have found out the answer to one of my questions: whether content submissions will have any use, which at this point seems like a "No." I might still post my initial framework for fun, but there are bigger fish to fry here like UI design and mission scripting.

Now the other side of the idea, which presented itself while I was devising a way to auto-generate lots of plots (erk, I just said "lots of plots"), was that plots could be layered in a way that would pit players against each other. Example: A scientist on a research station finds her work threatened by a change in the local political regime. Her immediate need is for a player to run around collecting support from various officials (these could spawn sub-quests like "I won't give you the documents you need unless you fly out and assassinate my rival"). But consider the opposition to this scientist -- the people who want her to fail. They also have a quest, which is to run around gathering discrediting evidence against the scientist. All that's needed for fun to ensue is to give opposing questors enough information and opportunity to interfere with each other. Sure, they can camp a wormhole and blast the other one. That's pretty fun. But maybe they can also bribe the informants the other one is after. There are some entertaining alternates to the bribe, such as using your high standing with the local station's faction to intimidate an informant, or even "stealing" subquests like the assassination I mentioned.

I believe the most fun of all would be if players could enlist easily the aid of their friends in these matters, and share the rewards easily as well. Some could go interfere with the opposing questor(s) while others advanced the mission. It might need some experimenting to find the optimal level of information each side needs to effectively mess with the other (or track each other down for big space battles), but that can happen with per-mission channels or the news function at stations.