How should open-world questing deal with lots of players?

I’ve been thinking about those Blazing Ingots again.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how they are findable and clickable, and what that means for players trying to complete the quest when there are other players around doing the same thing. Quest items that can only be clicked on by one player before despawning create a sense of competition between players — it’s in your best interest to do everything you can to make sure you get to that item before someone else does or you’ll be left without that precious 1 out of 8 items you need to tick your way through to finish the quest. Whether it’s ingots or Animacones or something else entirely.

It’s similar to when mobs for a quest are only taggable by one player — this creates a scarcity issue, as if you’re slower to attack mobs than other players, you lose out. Perhaps they’re ranged and your melee, or you have trouble seeing the mobs for whatever reason, the point being if the tag isn’t shared then you simply don’t get to kill that mob and have it count for the quest, and that means there’s an inherent struggle to tag all the mobs as fast as possible to make sure you finish your quest as quickly as possible.

Is that how quests should work?

I ask because there might be times you want players to compete. A sense of rivalry can lead to a feeling of triumph — a player who has an advantage in tagging and killing mobs might feel validated in the choice of class or spec they made, and a player who can fly and still click on quest items might well be thrilled to be able to complete a quest in this manner over the others struggling to achieve the same result.

What do you think? Should quests create a sense of competition between players in the open world in this fashion? Or are we better off with shared tags and multiple players being able to click on quest items?