Quests

[Kaden]

Grading

All quests will be graded by the community. Grading is fairly straight-forward. Once a quest is completed, the member who started the Quest will state as much in that Quest's thread on the Quest forum. At that point it will be up to the members to read and reward the Quest.

At this point in time there are no set guidelines for rewards, as we encourage the community to decide, on their own, what they think appropriate rewards are for a given amount of work. Some things make more apparent guidelines, such as the difficulty of the quest or the number of posts or the average length of posts or the quality. Each person is free to use whatever guidelines that they feel are appropriate for grading.

Once three different grades have been given, there will be a 24-hour "last call" period before the final reward is decided. Final rewards will be, roughly, an average of the community proposed rewards. If three people say that the Questers should get 10 XP and 500 Zeni, you can expect the final reward to be very close to that.

Along with a proposed reward, each grader is expected to provide some sort of feedback. You don't have to write pages and pages of insightful critique, but you should put something. Even a couple of sentences pointing out scenes or characters or dialogue that you dis/liked is fine. This is to both help prove you actually read the thread you're grading and to help the community as a whole. We're all writers, even small comments can go a long way to helping each other out.

Having said the above, it should be made clear to anyone doing a Quest that there will be some feedback and it may not all be positive. You know this going into it so getting upset or lashing out against people will not be tolerated. You are certainly free to explain why you chose to do a certain thing or ask a grader to expand upon a comment, but do so with tact and respect. Same to the people grading. Not all feedback has to be positive, but it does have to be respectful and constructive.

Some things to keep in mind when proposing rewards:

• Players have already received XP for their posts.
  
• There is no set XP-to-Zeni ratio for rewards, so don't feel like you have be locked into thinking that is someone has to get 50 Zeni for each XP they're rewarded.
  
• The proposed reward is per person that was involved in the quest. Rewards are not split. If you say the reward should be 1,000 Zeni, that means you think each person should be rewarded 1,000 Zeni.
  
• Staff are moderating all the rewards and have the final say.
  
• Though graders do no have to justify or explain their proposed rewards, anything that deviates drastically from what's already been proposed will be suspect. If a staff member asks you to explain your grade and it is not done within 48 hours, that grade will be considered invalid.
  

A final note about giving and receiving grades: this is a system designed to get the community to help itself. If everyone sits around asking for grading without doing any themselves, nothing will happen. We expect people to give at least as many grades as they expect to get. Obviously this may not always line up (if only two people are doing Quests, then they can't really give as many grades as they get), but we still expect people to try. If someone is doing nothing but asking for grades, Staff reserve the right to close a Quest for grading until the person/people involved have provided feedback and grading to their peers.