Is this a joke?
- Thread starter Jmanis
- Start date
Look at the suggested CMDR grade : Elite / Elite / Entrepreneur - that's the explanation. Find an Elite for that last example and I'll be more worried about the discrepancy.
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None of the missions provided, or indeed the entire missions system for that matter, has any cogent logic applied, and there is no consistency in action. Because of howling, because frontier just do the needful to attack one issue at a time, and because people say "I don't really understand.." and assume that about covers it.
Missions system is a wasteland of illogical, inconsistent twaddle; it should instead be one of the signature pieces of code written by Frontier. This is Elite. Yet there is always, always someone ready to defend the abomination for being "not that bad? I don't understand.."
It is bad. The entire missions system is bad. It needs love and feeding and a proper, contextually relevant and consistency pass that ensures there is something for everyone, with payouts matching investment and risk; as was intended.
It won't, ever, if it continues to be the standard people walk past. It's diabolical. Take a step back folks and apply some critical thinking. It'll do the world of good.
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I disagree.
For that particular mission, I've claimed ~ 7-10 million would be a fair fee. Entrepreneur is the seventh of nine ranks. If rank price differences are proportional, then Elite would only take it up to 1.1/1.2m, with 100k at "Penniless". Alternately, if it's exponential or similar, we're only looking at 1.6m for Tycoon, and 3.2m for Elite. That's still excessively short, in my opinion. But I'll keep an eye out for an Elite rank, VIP, Luxury one-way mission (fml...) just to humour the idea. Years of mission running tells me it won't make a sufficient difference though.
Yup. I wish there was going to be a focused feedback on Missions, but something something "2.4 did that already!".... not really :/
Please go back and read what I've posted. I already said "Yes, that's fair", but you've got a fair bit of cognitive dissonance going on to say that in the face of another mission offering 34m for it's reward.
But please do me the courtesy of actually reading what I've written... and if you have, explain the internal consistency of a 1.4 million reward to Colonia, requiring no specilised fits, versus an 800k reward which needs a specialised ship + specialised top-end cabin.
Or how about this then? All 25,000LY missions *regardless* of their destination offer at most 800k for their reward. At least that would be consistent...
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I've just come to the conclusion the missions system is had-it and that's it. People are too busy having a seizure over (either) not grasping physics and crying "my immersion" to the new guardian fighters, for example; or just "where are my legs" endless threads - and don't give a toss if everything else falls to ruin around them.
The community has become remarkably fixated and intolerant. And Frontier tries and tries and tries and gets yelled at and can't get a damn thing done because any change is just intolerable at this point. Lord knows what Q4 will be like. They are coming for Exploration and I swear I can already hear the axes being sharpened.
The break has done me the world of good; sometimes you just gotta take a break from the madness because it will do you in, in the end. Meanwhile - the next update has about the least possible amount of change one can consider, for an update. I don't think that's a coincidence at this point. Frontier are just swinging where they can; that's it, now.
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To answer your OP; it's this way because this is the standard expected and accepted. Nothing more. Don't try to understand. Just accept and do something else (in game, or elsewhere); there's precious little chance the missions system will be touched again, beyond more clobbering of tall poppies.
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My main shtick in EVE Online is market PVP. You wouldn't believe the buy and sell orders people put up on the board in places where it's clear they will never be fulfilled. But even then sometimes they are. Why is that? Because there's always that one guy with very urgent needs who can't afford to be picky.
This is the same: missions have a degree of randomness and some are meant to be good deals while some are clearly not. It's up to you to decide how picky you want to be. Of course the bad deals do take a slot for the purpose of mission generation.
The OP isn't exactly comparing apples to apples here. The two missions he's comparing the "underpaying" one to are much higher ranked than it.
Mission rank does make a huge difference to payouts...
Mission rank does make a huge difference to payouts...
There is zero similarity between an actual player lead economy (which has a full time economist or two working hard on behalf of the developer) and the limited-and-gated simulacrum of one that is in Elite. This is no such thing; it's the approach taken by frontier in solving 'now' problems, as opposed to a consistent approach to the missions system with considered adjustment of overall behaviour.
Reactive, versus proactive. Excusing the current situation as "intended" is laughable. It's the culmination of a piecemeal delivery of mission types that builds on existing with completely disconnected value applied to each mission type. We've long since passed "degree of randomness"; the endless protestation that it's all fine when missions couldn't be more wildly different is just hilarious.
The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. I don't walk past the missions system. I've elected to stop playing entirely because it's not a standard I particularly accept. I think that's reasonable.
Reputation makes more of a difference than rank. The example the OP provides is certainly not an exception. Arguing that wildly inconsistent payouts are 'normal' doesn't suddenly solve-for-x.
I agree with a lot of the rest of your post, but this is not true. They change the mission system all the time - the early delivery bonus has been boosted recently, fetch / carry missions are now worth doing / bulk mission seem bulkier / more missions offered in space / more chained missions / those weird ones delivered to ships in USS. Plus the rollout of new wing mission types (they're adding base wing missions this time I think?).
I agree they could do even more with the mission system (as with most aspects of the game), but it's not fair to say it isn't changing.
EVE Markets are incomparable, as that's driven by player need. If you're stuck in Nullsec with ISK-out-the-wazoo and you need a Kestrel ASAP in order to drop a Cyno for your allied fleet to defend a Citadel in the region, you'd happily pay 30m+ for sure rather than the, what, 500k going rate? (I haven't checked in a while).
Likewise, if you've got a Jump Freighter going from Null to Jita, and one guy who's not blue to anyone desperately needs to get 1m^3 of valuable implants out and will pay 100m, you'll just as readily accept that as 100,000m^3 of Veldspar for an 800k reward, if you were flying there with an empty hold, because you can happily make that trip in a short time.
This is just not the case in Elite, because it's NPC driven, and there's no overriding motives to defend an asset or get somewhere. A trip to Colonia is an entire day, or a week casually, and there's an infiinite supply of missions going out there on the boards. There's literally dozens of return tourist trips to Colonia which each pay 30-40m, and if I couldn't find enough to fill my cabins I'd question my competence as a player. But given a choice of a round-trip passenger for 30-40m, or a one-way passenger for 8m, I might err on taking the 8m in order to save checking a board or two, and knowing it's a fairly safe bet. But 800k? WTB RAVEN 200 ISK is all I have to say to that...
As I said, I very, very much doubt the rank is gonna make a 1000% difference here. Elite-rank assasinations fetch up-to 2.5m, while Novice rank ones will fetch 500k. That is not enough of a difference, especially considering the specialised fit/ship requirements.
Slopey
Volunteer Moderator
I might be missing something here, but if you don't like the mission, don't take it.
Not all missions are guaranteed to be hugely profitable. Take the others, rather than this one. This topic is odd - it's like a person who doesn't like fish, walking into a supermarket to buy dinner, and complaining they sell fish along with other stuff. Just don't buy the fish. Buy something else.
Not all missions are guaranteed to be hugely profitable. Take the others, rather than this one. This topic is odd - it's like a person who doesn't like fish, walking into a supermarket to buy dinner, and complaining they sell fish along with other stuff. Just don't buy the fish. Buy something else.
It remains to be seen. I've given Frontier over 4 years to figure this out. When they have, I'll take another look. Fiddling with payouts is not what I am referring to; it's missions having a consistent basis and Frontier not playing favourites because they want to promote the latest mission types.
Every update the board goes into meltdown because they stack the deck in favour of the new; as though it cannot, apparently, just stand on its own. Four years. When they've figured out a sane basis to actually generate missions; then I'll give them the credit they will absolutely be due.
I guess this can be extended to everything; at which point, there is nothing left to take. That's a fairly deterministic outcome, just quietly. Consistency in mission generation is hardly the same as saying "I just want every mission to have a fat pay-check" it's ensuring people don't end up funnelled into limited options that induces frustration and disappointment.
Improving input in generation, improves output as a result. Just not doing much of the output, instead, means there's not a lot to be done as a net result. That doesn't scale overly well.
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I tend not to do missions for profit at all, usually for BGS influence. What I'm complaining about is not "just a bad mission" but complete internal inconsistency.
A while back I reported a bug which *was* a bug, and *did* get fixed. That bug was that the reward mechanism for cargo was back to front. As volumes and distance to target increased, the reward level decreased. Always.
Should I not have made a bug report and just gone "Oh well, I guess some missions are meant to be bad!" under those circumstances?
The subtlety people seem to be missing here is that the difference in pay isn't just "some RNG abberation", but it's inherent to the mission type, quite possibly because I've given one sample, but can guarantee I'll reliably get more without "churning" missions which don't prove my point.
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A good thing I wasn't comparing the two game systems but their outcomes. Frontier's highly abstracted system produces some idiosyncratic results in this matter which I find analogous with the results produces by EVE's much more granular and player-driven economy.
Wildly inconsistent payouts are a problem across mission types yes and should be fixed, but this is irrelevant in this case. Again, Colonia missions are not meant to be primary money making activities. But I would be 100% in favor of such inconsistence within a mission type, because randomness is good and sometimes forces you to adapt to a less than optimal situation.
In my book that's an argument in favor of Frontier reinstating high running costs they dropped in early 2015, because it is currently indeed way too easy to just hop to the next station (or worse yet, hop to a different server) to find a new board with better paying missions.
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![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
it seems to me, - as a completely non programmer so i am not claiming to be an expert - but it seems to me that there is not enough flexibility in the software to fix one thing without breaking something else.
ideally imo the devs should be able to tweak the payment of long range luxury passenger missions (for arguments sake over 1000LY) without having any effect at all on short range luxury passenger missions, or even long range business / economy missions.
on a software level they should be independent imo, so FD can just increase the pay on 1 thing. As it stands, it looks like if FD increase the pay on 1 mission type, it has a knock on effect on all others, which just does not seem like good design to me.
in an ideal world the BGS would be so robust that it can control the price on everything and it all make sense. but this is clearly not realistic to expect, so therefore the devs should be able to manually tweak edge cases without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
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