You're entirely right also that traditional and current quest models are a fairly faithful recreation of the same play style. In your last paragraph there I totally agree with you that when you term tasks "quests" you should treat them as the same quests that characters in epic narratives undertake.

My own humble opinion is that killing things should not be an explicit goal unless the way that you go about the slaughter is interesting in it's own right, and it should rather be ancillary to the completion of a larger and more epic goal. The same goes for any simple and repetitive task, these should only be a means to a more satisfying end.

I am pretty tired of the traditional quest hub system as well. It seems so silly to me that I would honestly prefer to go out and slaughter mobs instead of being tugged back and forth to the same spot like a rope on field day.

I've felt that all quests should be epics. Create long chains that get more and more in depth and last longer. Reduce the total number of quests and increase the quality of the few that remain. If they were so compelling we'd do them without worry of the experience bar being slow or fast. The "errand" quests could be dropped in favor of just regular killing and perhaps bounties. Instead of of NPCs sending you to kill 10 rats they could just reward anyone who turns in ears. This is somewhat like EverQuest but I think it is preferable.

It's almost universal that for any rule there are going to be exceptions, but they aren't usually the best place to make a point from because they are not a representation of the general case, and it's the general case that we need to improve.

I'm glad that we get some really good quests, and I hope they continue, but I stand behind my opinion that we need to do something about the majority of quests being more tedious than anything else.

I also personally would not call the tradeskilling quests much of an improvement, because though you are right they are granting a character experience for something other than killing, they remain in the same spirit of the other quests in that they tend to be "Build x number of y items, with a specific level of quality".

I do grant you the exception though, and I'm glad to have it pointed out that everything isn't completely horrible.

EQ2 has a plethora of tradeskill quests many of which require you to craft things, all the way up to an entire tradeskill epic quest that came out at the same time as the epic weapon quests did. There are also exploration quests, foot-race quests, quests where you assume the illusion of some other creature and infiltrate their lair, etc etc. While it is true that many quests in most MMOs do fall into the kill/fetch/courier categories, there are definitely other examples out there that you're overlooking.