Part of the idea of having quests at all is to provide incentives to explore areas. Providing a roadmap, even a partial one, defeats that purpose.

There are a number of quests which can be attempted at a very low level, but are still very obscure. I'm perfectly OK with them flying below the radar- it provides a nice perk for people with an especially careful eye.

As for the prevention of flamers/spammers, that would make sense if the battlefield was not open to guest posts.

The Battlefield is open to anonymous posting because it's for the discussion of characters, which is often best done by people posting as those characters. The Bug Forum is also open because posting some kinds of bugs under a registered handle would reveal who that player is playing, which could (unfortunately) color IC interactions with less scrupulous players.

The New Player Forum (and Gameplay, and AskAnImm), by contrast, is a discussion amongst players, independent of their characters (*). It also provides continuity- people can establish a beneficial reputation by posting consistently with a single handle. (They can also establish other types of reputations, which are also useful for the community to keep in mind.) Credibility is important- if someone has previously demonstrated to me that they observe the game more objectively, they don't have to work as hard to convince me that their current observation is valid.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

(*): Ideally. Some players alter this equation by lobbying heavily for their present character, which I'd prefer to discourage for two reasons:

First, people tend to overreact (positively or negatively) to recent events, and putting some time between when you notice an issue and posting about it can provide perspective. We've all seen threads where people flip out over something that happened very recently.

Second, if one waits until a character is gone before lobbying for gameplay changes that would affect that character, it removes a number of questions about motives. Ideally, all parties would be suggesting topics based on what's best for their game, regardless of how it impacts their present character.