Please note that I am talking about the browser version only - users of the mobile app might feel more comfortable with the quest log.
When the island quests were moved to the quest log, it almost instantly became obvious that navigation via quest log is more complicated than navigation via town list (and quest icons in the UI). In most cases the opening of a new island quest via quest log will lead you to an almost unavoidable error message ("Your current city is not on the quest island"). Such "default" error messages on first contact should make the alarm bells ring in the heads of game designers and devs, and more so, when it is not even possible to see the challenges of the island quests without the effort of navigating to the correct island first and making one of those island´s cities your active one.
There are three major problems regarding the quest log:
1) Poor navigation (including error messages)
2) The nature of the both challenges is only visible after you have navigated to the correct island and made one of your cities there your active city
3) The nature of the malus you are enduring for hours on end is not visible any longer once you have made your decision.
And all that´s a bit weird, since one of the major reasons given for this IQ revision was that it
will make the handling (of) said quests easier and more intuitive to new players
. (Source:
https://devblog.grepolis.com/?p=1918). Well, I don´t think it really does.
---
When it became obvious that the navigation to the quest island/the right city on the island is more complicated via quest log than it was/is via town list, island quests in progress were included in the town list again in order to make it easier to revisit them. But on the other hand this well-meaning afterthought also blocked the only comfortable way of navigation to
new island quests. Thanks to Murphy´s Law each and every island quest I picked in the town list first was one in progress, and in many cases even one where all you could possibly do was wait.
- The "viable quest" icon
will remain in the town list even after accepting the quest, as long as you still have something to do (e.g. sending troops or resources). This change will not be applied on time based quests, as once you started it you don't have to do anything else than wait.
Anyways, got any feedback about the content of that line, other than the icon?
Now, in acknowledgement of the respective feedback, at least those (waiting-) time based island quests in progress have been removed again from the town list. Fine, but this still leaves the other quests in progress, and tooltips announcing them all as "new quest available":
I had suggested earlier (in the German forums) that it might be a good idea to distinguish new quests and quests in progress by using different colours for their icons in the town list. But even just assigning different tooltips to the quests in progress would help a lot.
I also had made further suggestions regarding the handling and the navigation via quest log, which for now I will not repeat here (for lack of time - too much work left on my desk before the weekend...
)