There are a lot of popular games I haven't personally connected with, including The Sims, Minecraft, pretty much anything that looks like anime. Roblox is among them--oh yeah, Among Us too--and I've seen some of the more problematic issues with it. But last week, Roblox recorded 45 million people playing its various modes at once. According to Roblox CEO David Baszucki, the game-slash-service surpassed 45 million players on August 23rd. And I don't just mean for a single Steam game.

In this paper, we present adaptive quests, an extension to the dominant quest model that guides and motivates gameplay in MMORPG shared worlds. The standard model has proven effective, but is significantly incompatible with the desire for player driven change in the world. We present an incremental step to increasing player impact, discuss the problems it creates with the quest model, and show how adaptive quests can help reconcile the two. We present simulation experiments supporting not only that adaptive quests help mitigate those problems, but that they can actually improve them over the standard model.