Secret Quests

Yeah, I'd love these kinds of quests here and there. And Elden Ring has proven that they can work. Make some social animations interact with environment that then leads to a quest. Make certain actions or actions in a certain sequence unlock something within a dungeon. All that kind of stuff would be great.

Now there's obviously a question of proper repetition that wouldn't just get spoiled by all the youtubers (as you've mentioned), but I don't think that one-off quests would be a good solution cause those only work in single player games or in fictional stories that we experience through the eyes of the MC so it's all seems cool to use because we're an MC of the world by proxy.

Shifting around some triggers and then having an npc or two point you towards those triggers would probably work. This would encourage people to read npc dialogue properly and would, at least somewhat, prevent YT guides from popping up every time such a quest is found out. Especially if you change the triggers every time the quest is taken.

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Or, you never see the Secret Quests in MMOs because they're secret and the people who find them never tell anyone.

(Since, if they did, they'd just be 'quests')

What if you made the player the quest hook?

Put some truly one-off quests in random places anywhere on the server. When the first person finds such a quest and finishes it, you reward them with a cool cosmetic and a rock, which description reads "Seems tradable" (unless "tradable" will already be a description on most items, then you have no words on the stone but that). Make that rock undroppable, undeletable or unsellable to the store.

Now this first player will probably trade the rock to a friend or a guildmate. Once they do, the second player sees that the rock is now usable. By using it, they've now spawned an npc somewhere in the world and received a quest to go talk to that npc (it would be shown on the map directly, just for ease of coding). Now this second player does the same quest, gets the same cosmetic and the same stone. But because they now know what the rock does, they understand that they have just gotten pretty much the rarest thing on the server. They could sell it or just pass it along among friends/guildmates.

What would make this type of quests even cooler is if, after some amount of completions, the last person would get that same stone, but now it'd say "give this to *The first player's name*" (I'd assume tracking quest completions is fairly easy code-wise). And maybe give the name/location of first player's home node just in case the rock made its way to some absolutely random person through trading. On the off chance that the first player have left the game, make the rock name the firstest player in the chain that's been online within the past week (again, I'm assuming this type of stuff is tracked within the code either way so should be too complex to make).

And when that first player receives the stone and uses it, they get a title option of "Leader of the *blank*", where the blank is some name that suits a group of people that have the cosmetic that you rewarded through the quest. And this would end the quest chain.

The quest itself could be whatever and to avoid the possibility that the very first person was recording gameplay or writing down all their actions for some guide, make the spawn of the original npc random, so that people on other servers would still have to find it themselves.

This seems like a good type of secret quest to me. It's as random as possible, as unique/rare as possible, it promotes player to player interaction, it has the potential to make people mega rich or to create a super exclusive group of guild members that have their own signature cosmetic. Feels like an all-around win.