Requested Enhancement - Quest Search

[empower]

With the multiple threads that Blizzard is providing for leveling and pursuing achievements, I find it frustrating at times that I cannot find my "place" in the sequence of quests required to complete an achievement. For instance, my wife and I decided to pursue our class mount. I found the Zygor guide for the "Demon Hunter Class Mount" after going to Mounts, Flying Mounts, Class Mounts, and then Demon Hunter. In the sequence of guides I had to complete, the Broken Shores campaign was identified, BUT you do not have to complete ALL of the dungeons/raids identified in the Zygor guide to accomplish this. My wife discovered this by going to Wowhead and reading through various comments. She was correct. We skipped through several of the steps and got our mounts. At other times, we come upon a quest and do not know what part of what achievement will require that quest. We take the quest and then I guess what guide it might be in and look through the list of steps trying to see if I can find that particular quest anywhere.

This leads me to my specific request, with all of the lists of quests, and all of the guides you put together into a database of all of these steps, it seems like it would be an easy task to provide a cross-reference and the associated link to provide a specific search function by quest name. All of the quest names are unique within the WOW universe (and even quite funny, I am sure the developers have a fun time coming up with some of them). So, if I came upon a quest while I was just exploring, I would be able to type in that quest name and have the Zygor wizard tell me which achievements required that quest. If one of them looked interesting, I could click on it and I would be directed to the specific sub-guide for it. I might discover that it is step 10 in the guide and would then know where I had to backtrack to see if I had missed any steps or just move forward if I had not missed any.

Please support this effort. I believe it would make the difference in the Zygor guides being just great to becoming truly awesome.

[ZG Support 1]

The guides are not created like you think and there is no list of quests in a database. However this kind of post is why there is the feedback section of the Members area which is where you would see it's already been suggested for you to vote on. http://zygorguides.com/members/idea/120

[empower]

Nice thought.

However, it seems like this area is getting more visibility than the feedback section in the Members area where you directed me with your link. That link was originally posted back 2 years ago and there is still no activity on it. Does that mean I am wasting my time. Shuffling me off to an area that appears to be in the "twilight zone" does no service to me or anyone else thinking this is a good idea.

To even find out that this was ever a suggested enhancement, you have to be 1) an elite member and 2) know to do a search for something like "quest" and 3) wade through the myriad of results you will get (currently saw over 6 pages of "hits").

Besides, following your link and then back-tracking to the suggestions and doing the search, I discovered that it does not appear that ANYONE is monitoring these anyway. Based on what I was seeing, there are at least 2 other suggestions in the results that allude to the exact same request. The total number of votes for these is over 100 since 2017 which is the one you referred me to view.

If you are reading this and think it is a good idea, then give it a thumbs up here AS WELL AS voting on it in the linked Member's Area.

If this is a "General Guide Discussion", than contrary to what you seem to think is appropriate, this is EXACTLY the kind of thing that needs to be put out for "general discussion".

Besides, I have to admit, I am kind of miffed at being told, "this is not how the guides work" and "we don't keep that kind of information about quests", etc. during the previous 2 times I have brought this up for consideration.

[alyassus]

This has been one of the most wanted suggestions for years now. Recently, you said on the forum that the guides aren't written like we think. But how can they be written to make it impossible to search? Can't you just give the player the option to search for the quest name or ID and then tell the player 1) in which guide this quest is located or 2) what step you will find the start of the quest. I understand that your guides are written as a whole, meaning that you cannot just give me a 2 step guide only for the quest i.e. "Paradise Lost" in Azsuna. I understand that you have multiple quests intertwined. But people aren't asking to get a guide only for the one quest. We simply want to know what guide a certain quest is located in* and hopefully at what step it starts.

Every Zygor guide has a step that starts a particular quest. It seems to be a standard "Accept %Questname%". There is always a step to accept a quest, whether it is from a NPC or from an auto-accept item. So why can't you just point players to the guide and step where it says to accept the quest that a player is searching for? You either have the questnames in your guide (which I doubt) or you have the quest ID. I wouldn't mind having to look up the quest ID myself and then search for that if that meant I could find quests. Please implement this or at least have somebody explain why this is impossible. I was always hoping this would be implemented in your guides one day. I love Zygor and you do a terrific job, so that's why I always expected you would implement this funtion one day.

*Reason why searching for quests might be important to help your players: When I returned to this game two weeks ago, after a 4 month break, I was confused where I would find the new questline from Silithus (the one with the Azerite Ore). I found it in the "Argus Campaign" guide, which doesn't really make sense, but oh well. Another point where I would love to be able to search is for the Draenor Garrison (WoD). When you play this for the first time as a new player, it gets a bit confusing where to start. There's a Garrison campaing guide, there is Garrison leveling, then there is a seperate guide for Vol'Jins missions. If you are a new player today, who hasn't played WoD, it is really confusing to know which guide to use, what quest you find where, etc.

[ZG Support 1]

The comment about the guides not being written how the person thought was in regards to his statement about a list of quests that could be searched. We don't have a file that has a listing of every quest that gets referenced, the quest name (English) and ID are only associated with the steps in the individual guides. Currently it's not possible to search for a quest because the search system only looks at the guide names and a small string of keywords if a guide has that.

Problems that exist right now for developing the system to search for quests require a lot of thought on how we want to try to work around them. One issue is that another highly requested thing is to make the guides load on demand to reduce the amount of memory the addon is using. If the guides aren't loaded then they can't be searched so we have only a few options with this. Leave it all as is with all guides loaded, remove searching since having the guides load on demand would break the searching ability, or try to figure out some way to be able to search all of the guides without them being loaded which could result in a major re-write of the addon. Then we have to consider how to handle it if someone tries to search in a different language since the guide files are all in English. Then we also have to figure out how to display results from our include guides. These are guides that are 'hidden' that are loaded by other guides. For example, instead of writing out the exact same thing for both Alliance and Horde for the MoP cooking it was all written once into an include guide and then the different cooking profession guides will load that guide. During a search for a quest this could result in you seeing the quest in a guide name that doesn't exist in the guide selection window and is not able to be loaded directly. So now we would need to try to figure out how to make the search function be able to link the 2 guides together when searching so you could get a proper guide name result or we'd have to re-write a lot of guides to put all of the steps into each individual guide. There are some other minor issues that would need to be figured out as well but I think this is enough for now.

We're not saying that it's completely impossible, just that there are a lot of factors that we need to take into consideration. We have to decide on how much manpower we want to put into one small feature, how much would it impact things like writing the BfA guides or trying to develop new features or other suggestions/requests. There is no easy answer for the quest searching right now but we are not ignoring the suggestion, just trying to figure out if and how it could be done reasonably. I'm not saying it will be done, just that it's something that is always being looked at.

[ariael37]

Yes i understood yours problem.
BUT.
For example problem with memory: This can be solved by "index" of all quest - simple file (guide) with referencing into target guides. All guide have sequence of quest and location and lots of memos. If player open guide, your evaluate sequence of quest one by one. But all of this steps can be referenced as index - ideally by ID number of this quest.
And now you have basic search system. You can append another index with translate ID of Quest into supported language. And this system have direct reference into another guide - and by click from player it can be open and directly jump into step. Of course, another question is evaluate complete status before this step. You can create question - "wanna test before quest or not?"
This system is WORKING, without memory needs and don't need really huge change of your software.

Second solution is obvious - create this database on your web. This isn't very nice, but can be usable as temporary or support solution.