Too few missions, no predictability = bad gameplay

[Siranui]

You probably aren't getting many missions because you don't have a high enough reputation at the station.
If you stay in one system for a while and work on your Rep, employers will provide better jobs for you.

and half of them are illegal or lvl gated by ship upgrades. i get the random missions on the bb but it is anoying cause most of the missions i get are cargo, illegal and mining

Try going to somewhere that's not a mining outpost and you will get missions that don't involve mining. Go to missions in war states and you'll find more wars. And as to the criminal jobs, those stem more in Anarchy systems.

The missions you get are highly dependant on where you are.

 

[clivewil]

mission payouts took a hit a while back, after a brief shining period of okay-ness. there's 3 systems i have been working in since v1.0 and my rep bar is maxed out - so it's nothing to do with low rep - and in these systems i'd regularly find plenty of surface salvage missions, typically 1.2 mil payouts for 8t of savage, occasionally reaching 2.2 mil - these have now disappeared almost entirely, if not entirely, and now the closest thing is salvaging 4t for 200k - 300k.

seeing as my interest in ED is mission-driven, most times i'll log in (if the servers will let me) and see there's nothing worth doing on the boards, and log out again. i don't leave the station's bar for 300k.

"not off on a job tonight, commander?"
"no, Reg. not tonight. nothing worthwhile came up."
"well, that's bad news for you commander, but good news for me. the more the merrier, as they say. another round?"
"yes! actually Reg, make it a double. i'm not going anywhere for a while."
"i'll just be a moment sir."
"ah, Reg?"
"yes commander?"
"why don't you just leave the bottle here, there's a good chap."

 

[The Wallet Inspector]

you can do any activity in the game without a mission.

if you like to do surface salvage - why don't you do it?

you will still gain reputation, and the market controlling faction will gain influence.

In other words, if this feature is broken, go do something else. Awesome advice..

 

[nats]

I would like to see a discussion where you get asked what mission type you are looking for and then get the list. These are whole worlds they will have a massive list of jobs that need doing. Its just too limited at the moment.

 

[Antinull]

There's too many missions already. There's a thousand things to do without a single mission needing to be taken. Yet you only think in terms of missions.

If any of the elite designers peruse this thread I'd recommend this read:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130108...nsic-rewards-in-kleis-latest-game-dont-starve

Well, you can certainly do several things thousands of times over. If there are thousands of distinct activities I have been missing out on, could you provide me with a list?
Some people like missions, more variety won't be a bad thing.

 

[The Wallet Inspector]

Well, you can certainly do several things thousands of times over. If there are thousands of distinct activities I have been missing out on, could you provide me with a list?
Some people like missions, more variety won't be a bad thing.

Thousands of things to do? Have I missed an expansion pack or two lol?

 

[DeLorean]

My current problem with missions happened at the big overhaul. Whereas factions used to give "Kill X amount of pirates" missions, now that it is more realistic and focused, so "Kill X amount of pirates from Y faction". Invariably I head to the system, go to the RES or Nav Beacon, and about one "pirate from Y faction" shows up every half hour. When you've taken a mission to kill 20-odd of them, that makes for dull, dull gameplay.

 

[Marc_Hicks]

My current problem with missions happened at the big overhaul. Whereas factions used to give "Kill X amount of pirates" missions, now that it is more realistic and focused, so "Kill X amount of pirates from Y faction". Invariably I head to the system, go to the RES or Nav Beacon, and about one "pirate from Y faction" shows up every half hour. When you've taken a mission to kill 20-odd of them, that makes for dull, dull gameplay.

Then change your tactics. Fit an FSD Interdictor and scan ships in that system whilst flying around in supercruise. USS's are a good source sometimes too.

These missions almost always have long timers on them too, so I suggest you break things up by doing other missions in between.

Personally, I think these "kill pirate" missions are way better than their pre-2.1 counterparts.

 

[Trafalgar Law]

Then change your tactics. Fit an FSD Interdictor and scan ships in that system whilst flying around in supercruise. USS's are a good source sometimes too.

These missions almost always have long timers on them too, so I suggest you break things up by doing other missions in between.

Personally, I think these "kill pirate" missions are way better than their pre-2.1 counterparts.

I do think they need to look at the spawn rates, it can be very annoying to spend ages going in and out of supercruise (into USS if there is one) and resetting the instance trying to get the correct target to spawn. Yes the timers are quite long, but you can spend several play sessions trying to get enough kills for some of the missions with larger target amounts required.

I'm also a bit disappointed with the way the missions will only spawn ships of a certain type, e.g. Dangerous ranked missions seem to only spawn expert and master rated FDLs and Pythons, Expert ranked missions seemed to just spawn Asp Scouts and Cobra IVs with the occasional Vulture etc.. I know it's trying to create an appropriate target (in terms of difficulty) for the mission but it feels extremely gamey, especially when it spawns a pirate from the target faction which doesn't count because it's the wrong ship or rating.

 

[goemon]

Well, you can certainly do several things thousands of times over. If there are thousands of distinct activities I have been missing out on, could you provide me with a list?
Some people like missions, more variety won't be a bad thing.

well, OP was actually asking for more of the same kind of missions, not for a greater variety of missions ;-)

Thousands of things to do? Have I missed an expansion pack or two lol?

here is a starter list:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/287248-How-many-of-these-have-you-tried

 

[fuub]

The search continues!


After one more hour I still couldnt find a surface salvage mission anywhere.


I tried Achenar, empire capital, every station, and then Deciat.

 

[Bambi]

Well, you can certainly do several things thousands of times over. If there are thousands of distinct activities I have been missing out on, could you provide me with a list?
Some people like missions, more variety won't be a bad thing.

It was hyperbole. But basically anything you can do that a mission will tell you to do, you can also do on your own. And then some, there are no exploration missions for example.

 

[Trafalgar Law]

It was hyperbole. But basically anything you can do that a mission will tell you to do, you can also do on your own. And then some, there are no exploration missions for example.

True, but personally I like missions as they give a sense of purpose and make it feel less like farming (or worse grinding).

 

[Vincent Starson]

<snip>

BGS aside, with 2.1 and Engineers, suddenly it became necessary to run missions to upgrade your ship. No longer can you do it with credits. For me, and I'm guessing a few other pilots at least, this is frustrating when you can't easily find where to get these missions that provide these commodities.

Yes, you can go to boom status high tech systems but you'd only know to do that if you read it outside of the game. It's a similar problem to when we didn't know what materials were on a planet (now somewhat fixed with the detailed scanner). I haven't played in a month, to be honest, so maybe this has changed with the item descriptions.

Still, having more missions, or at least being able to search for missions that provide the rewards you want, is a highly desired quality of life upgrade imho.

In conclusion, anything to remove the need to mode switch for missions is highly desirable.

 

[goemon]

or at least being able to search for missions that provide the rewards you want, is a highly desired quality of life upgrade imho.

absolutely. or being able to bargain rewards. which would make asking for more missions redundant for ship upgrades.

 

[DeLorean]

Then change your tactics. Fit an FSD Interdictor and scan ships in that system whilst flying around in supercruise. USS's are a good source sometimes too.

These missions almost always have long timers on them too, so I suggest you break things up by doing other missions in between.

Personally, I think these "kill pirate" missions are way better than their pre-2.1 counterparts.

I get your point, but will respectfully disagree. A lot of it comes down to how much time people have to play the game. I wish I had more, but unfortunately don't. I used to be able to pick up a mission and have a blast zapping (all) pirates in a RES/Nav beacon for a couple of hours. Now, sure I can kill all pirates and get the bounties, but if my target pirates spawn only 1 in 4, 5 or 6 pirates, the time to comlete a mission goes from a reasonable two hour play session, to eight, ten or twelve hours.

I'd also question how it fits in with the Background Sim. Surely if there is a system state which means piracy is a problem, wouldn't that mean all pirates? Maybe they'd be inclined to ignore pirates allied to their faction, but wouldn't *all* others be fair game?

I guess my main thought is that it needs another pass by the devs to get the balance between fun game/time-sink/realistic BGS more even.

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I do think they need to look at the spawn rates...

Agreed. It looks odd if there is such a dire piracy problem that missions are generated, yet when you get there, there are few pirates to be found.

 

[goemon]

I'd also question how it fits in with the Background Sim. Surely if there is a system state which means piracy is a problem, wouldn't that mean all pirates? Maybe they'd be inclined to ignore pirates allied to their faction, but wouldn't *all* others be fair game?

they are all wanted. cashing in bounties of them from the controlling faction helps the controlling faction.

basically: back a faction, and you have a perma-mission going on, which you can do via missions + many different sandbox-activities. if you have 20 minutes to play, and want to help that faction, shoot some pirates which are wanted by that faction ...

 

[DeLorean]

they are all wanted. cashing in bounties of them from the controlling faction helps the controlling faction.

basically: back a faction, and you have a perma-mission going on, which you can do via missions + many different sandbox-activities. if you have 20 minutes to play, and want to help that faction, shoot some pirates which are wanted by that faction ...

True. Just a shame that I can no longer take most pirate missions I'm offered, as they take longer to complete than I have.

 

[SentineI]

The search continues!

After one more hour I still couldnt find a surface salvage mission anywhere.

I tried Achenar, empire capital, every station, and then Deciat.

I'm no expert, but I seem to recall surface salvage missions appearing at systems where the (controlling minor) faction is at war. But such systems may not be very common, so you'll need to search for them on the galaxy map.

And Achenar is unlikely to be at war

 

[SentineI]

There's too many missions already. There's a thousand things to do without a single mission needing to be taken. Yet you only think in terms of missions.

If any of the elite designers peruse this thread I'd recommend this read:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130108...nsic-rewards-in-kleis-latest-game-dont-starve

That was a very interesting article, but I feel it's not too relevant to ED: It assumes you have a (likely single-player) game world with lots of interacting systems that the player can directly affect. But in ED the player is an insignicant bug, and their efforts mostly just nudge the BGS once a week.

And it would be very difficult to make ED work differently, because FDev want players to inhabit a shared galaxy where we all see the same things (in the same states). If every player had massive influence, there galaxy would be chaotic mess.

Most MMOs take a completely different approach, where the world is essentially static, but the states of individual characters/monsters are different for each player (or group). In that situation you might be able to scrap quests/missions, although it would still be very difficult.