In my experience with playing both Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft, I have noticed that EQ2 groups are a lot more likely to grind, while WoW groups are usually questing.
What can be changed in EQ2 to encourage more group questing?
Here are some thoughts that come to mind from comparing these 2 games:
* Allow quest sharing.
This is an absolute must. The 'Shared' tab in the quest window is step in the right direction, but there should be a capability to share your quests. Having a quest of your own is a lot more motivating that merely helping a groupmate finish his.
In fact EQ2 is perfectly suited for quest sharing, since a lot of the time you don't need to return to the quest giver to receive the reward. In WoW it is sometimes a challenge - if you get a quest from groupmate, you will then have to figure out how to turn it in.
* Provide better directions.
WoW quests usually provide decent hints on where to find the mobs. In EQ2, sometimes it's merely "Oh, the mob is in Antonica... somewhere". This seems to be an echo of some old EQ1 quests, where you had to travel across half the world, without the maps to find the target NPC.
* Make sure the mob counts are sufficient.
There's nothing more annoying than finding the only place your mobs spawn, only to see that there's not enough of them to finish the quest. Waiting for respawns is not only waste of time, but it also breaks an immersion.
In any MMO, mobs respawn by necessity, since other players also need to get a chance to kill them. However, it's easy to imagine that the mob I killed is gone for good, as long as I am not sitting few feet away, and waiting for him to rematerialize.
* Increase the quest experience gain.
I haven't done calculations, but it seems that WoW quests generally give more xp, thus making them more advantageous than grinding.
* Make sure that quests fit together into a story line.
I am not sure how important this one to others, but it's pretty vital to me.
In WoW, the quests seem to have continuity and tell the story of the world. In EQ2, I usually don't have that feeling - perhaps it's huge amount of quests that causes it, but it seems like world is full of NPCs who don't really care about Qeynos vs Freeport standoff and just do their own thing.
Andy