Private Exploration Missions

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead
Just an idea,

How about minor factions offering missions for you to explore a certain set of set systems, and offer you the usual variation of rewards in return?

People like me, who don't particularly "wander" around deep space, like a nice destination to go to. And it'd be nice if I could stack a load of said destinations, and make a trip of it, and get some materials as rewards (as I don't need money or rank).

Missions would vary wildly in distance and systems to be scanned, so something for everyone, from a few 100ly, to 10s of thousands, rewards scaling appropriately.
Death is an instant fail, as the data is gone.

Thoughts?
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
So, I wouldn't mind missions, purely exploration in nature, structured along the lines of:
  • Find us 10 rocky planet scans
  • Find us 3 ELW scans
  • Find us 2 Terraformable worlds
  • Find us 5 Pristine Metallic Asteroid Clusters (What? A use for Asteroid Clusters? How dare you!)
Etc.

SpatsirkSpart said:
Do you mean like the generation ships?
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Personally, I'd rather see search and rescue missions... which is not really what the current line of Salvage/Surface Salvage provides. They'd target uninhabited systems out to 50LY away from the current location, and you'd need to use FSS to find "human" signal sources on planet surfaces. You then get there and go through the usual "Search Signal" gameplay to find the target and recover an escape pod.. or find a ship in space which either needs repair or refuel.

Caveat with my usual "Too many mission types already... need to break the boards down into sub-categories just like the passenger lounge"
 

Riverside

Riverside
I'm not against these being added specifically, but more mission choice will mean fewer of the type others may be looking for so it's not all upside.

Does this need to be on the mission board at all? Why not just set personal goals & work towards achieving them, or tweak the codex?

As a side note finding specific types of body that are undiscovered (ie systems not already tagged or pre-populated with data) would be an ongoing challenge. Just finding a specific body type anywhere wouldn't be, and the codex already caters for that type of box ticking.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
Riverside said:
I'm not against these being added specifically, but more mission choice will mean fewer of the type others may be looking for so it's not all upside.
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See my comment on the need to break the boards down into sub-categories, just like the passenger lounge. It's long overdue.

Does this need to be on the mission board at all? Why not just set personal goals & work towards achieving them, or tweak the codex?
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IMO, yes. For a well designed game, all unstructured activities need lead-in from structured activity, and Missions are the best mechanism to lead players into unstructured activities.

There's a separate discussion to be had about whether or not the open-ended gameplay is worthwhile or not; my argument is it's not, and FD need to expend some major effort to rectify that, but that's a whoooole other essay I could write on that topic.

As far as I'm concerned though, it's one (positive) thing for players to engage in a bit of make-believe... it's another (negative) thing for the game to wholly rely on it.
 
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Screemonster

Screemonster
Jmanis said:
See my comment on the need to break the boards down into sub-categories, just like the passenger lounge. It's long overdue.
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I really want a mission board that lets you do more targeted things at other factions in your current system, or specific factions in neighbouring systems. Decent rep needed with the mission-givers, or better yet, low rep with the target faction.
"Hey, you've really riled up the guys at Greedycorp. I don't like them. That means I like you. I've got a job, if you're interested in taking them down a couple more pegs..."
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
Screemonster said:
I really want a mission board that lets you do more targeted things at other factions in your current system, or specific factions in neighbouring systems. Decent rep needed with the mission-givers, or better yet, low rep with the target faction.
"Hey, you've really riled up the guys at Greedycorp. I don't like them. That means I like you. I've got a job, if you're interested in taking them down a couple more pegs..."
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Getting a bit segued, but:
I've always advocated for:
1. Break down mission boards by: Combat, Commerce, Specialist (salvage, search and rescue etc) and Criminal (and ostensibly, Exploration)
2. Combat, Commerce and Specialist function no different to current boards, offering missions of that category (to get around the =~ 100 mission generation limit for whole boards, and making an overall more pleasant game experience). Critical component; none of these missions are "criminal".
3. The Criminal board offers missions grouped by faction, but A) they're all illegal, and B) they're all offered by "anonymous contacts" and have negative effects against the selected faction.

The different types of boards are optionally available based on different state/gov conditions... e.g a Democracy in Elections wouldn't have a Combat board, but a Dictatorship in Election would.

For (3), the board could potentially only be available if you've got anonymous protocols on... and docking would still be available if you were hostile with the owning faction as if you were going in with anonymous protocols. Mission rewards and availability would be a reverse-rep function i.e best rewards and availability for being hostile to the faction, worst if you are allied.

My old post about this is here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/overhaul-of-mission-board-ui-and-mission-lists.456902/
 

Riverside

Riverside
Screemonster said:
I really want a mission board that lets you do more targeted things at other factions in your current system, or specific factions in neighbouring systems. Decent rep needed with the mission-givers, or better yet, low rep with the target faction.
"Hey, you've really riled up the guys at Greedycorp. I don't like them. That means I like you. I've got a job, if you're interested in taking them down a couple more pegs..."
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This is a side-track from the OP but I regularly work on systems where one faction is dominant, pushing the remaining factions down into what I call 'the pack'. Where the Pack is offering missions with high inf rewards it's not unusual for the benefiting faction (at the other end of the mission) to be that dominating faction in another system, which seems counter-intuitive.

Jmanis, I'm not against your desire for a much more flexible mission system in principle but what we currently have works reasonably well (ie it's a dice roll) but I'm reluctant to promote potentially breaking something that's already a pretty good compromise considering what happened with exploration last year. Most people are not BGSers & I think your proposal may well do more harm than good overall simply by making it appear too complicated. If it were done it would need to have rather more thought put into it than recent updates have received to do anything other than make the game less accessible to new players imo.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
Riverside said:
Jmanis, I'm not against your desire for a much more flexible mission system in principle but what we currently have works reasonably well (ie it's a dice roll) but I'm reluctant to promote potentially breaking something that's already a pretty good compromise considering what happened with exploration last year. Most people are not BGSers & I think your proposal may well do more harm than good overall simply by making it appear too complicated. If it were done it would need to have rather more thought put into it than recent updates have received to do anything other than make the game less accessible to new players imo.
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Keeping off-topic here...
People aren't "BGS'ers" (for whatever that means) because the BGS is for the most part totally meaningless in the context of available mission types at the moment, which is a major issue and I'd be confident saying that it's not FD's intent at all. Economy, State and Government have next-to-no impact on the base types of mission available.

Nonetheless, highly paraphrasing your post... I don't buy "because you don't think FD are capable of doing it" as a reason not to do it. That just paints FD into a corner like with Voipals, where they're finally fixing it, but people are gnashing their teeth not because it's a bad change, but because they're so used to easy-street since FD took so long to change it. Additionally, new players wouldn't be affected, there's the BGS-locked newbie systems for that specific purpose. If FD just stopped a moment and thought about what they were doing, it'd be a straightforward change. Again, some people might get their nose out of joint, but as you rightly say:

Most people are not BGSers.

They get their info from Reddit or the latest hot-topic post about where to go. The people who know and supply this information will find it quickly and disseminate, and everyone else who doesn't understand will read that and go on status-quo.
Regardless of what your thoughts are about that though, exploration missions would fill the gap on lead-in mechanics to exploration, but yet-more-missions types, which is a pretty common request, can't happen til they address the long-overdue issues with excessive mission types on a single mission board; the only sane answer is subdivided board categorisations.
 

Riverside

Riverside
Jmanis, I don't think a game mechanism that largely relies on social media or 3rd party tools to disseminate information is a particularly good mechanism. That trivialises something that is supposed to be a challenge.

We used to have board flipping, which was similarly daft, now we have a huge resource of revenue for min/maxers (mining) and a huge resource of BGS points (mapping earth-likes in agricultural systems). A limited mission board at least encourages a wider variety of play - what you propose seems to me to just be yet another way to further increase the divides between playstyles (ie promoting grindy, monotonous play) rather than encouraging players to try different things (because sometimes undesirable or morally questionable missions are the only ones available).
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
Riverside said:
Jmanis, I don't think a game mechanism that largely relies on social media or 3rd party tools to disseminate information is a particularly good mechanism. That trivialises something that is supposed to be a challenge.
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Yes, it's a shame the game currently doesn't have sane, deterministic rules to allow for people to stop relying on 3rd party sites. That's entirely my point. A Corporate faction in Boom should offer lots of trade missions, not a board full of Salvage/Assassinations, which is an all-too-often occurrence.

We used to have board flipping, which was similarly daft, now we have a huge resource of revenue for min/maxers (mining) and a huge resource of BGS points (mapping earth-likes in agricultural systems). A limited mission board at least encourages a wider variety of play - what you propose seems to me to just be yet another way to further increase the divides between playstyles (ie promoting grindy, monotonous play) rather than encouraging players to try different things (because sometimes undesirable or morally questionable missions are the only ones available).
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Not going to try to change what you think, but what we currently have is a tangled mess of cognitive dissonance. Like I said, why would a Corporate faction in Boom not be offering a board full of trade missions? Of course, a bit of imagination leads to why that could happen, but it makes for a nonsensical and incongruous game experience. I mean, sure, 2.8% of Democracies out there might be malevolent and put out Wetwork jobs to silence political candidates... but the way to implement that in-game is not to give every single Democracy a nontrivial chance of spawning those missions.

I think you put way too much weight into the idea that people will go out and "try new things" when the game leaves them no option to do anything but something different. A good deal of the issues I see raised by people, whether it's PvP, Mining, PvE Combat, whatever, is that there's so many barriers to just getting on and doing what they want to do... and so many layers of RNG getting in the way of that. It's horrid game design to take an activity someone's enjoying and rip them away from it because "RNG says no trade missions this time". There's ways to get people trying different things, and that isn't it.

A robust BGS which provides predictable state-gov-econ mission changes would. People could then easily the conditions they enjoy and move on when those conditions change, and if someone's bound to a faction, the natural turn of states will introduce new concepts to try.

EDIT: Anyways, I've derailed this thread enough, so I'm leaving it there.
 
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Riverside

Riverside
Jmanis said:
I think you put way too much weight into the idea that people go out and "try new things" by leaving them no option to do anything but something different.
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And I guess the counterpoint is that I think that compared to me you put far too much weight on the raw numbers & not enough on the motivation.

What we have now is a reasonable compromise that works. The proposal in the OP is not (imo) something that would benefit everyone (which is fine) but is also not without consequence. But one more mission template is not a big deal.

Ideally it would work better if your proposal for filtered missions were added too, but that would have more significant consequences that I'm neither keen on even if done perfectly nor at all confident would or could be integrated thoughtfully at this late stage in the life of the game.

I do agree with your thoughts on motivation for mission spawn, there could be rather more rules added to the existing mission list to help optimise the list of missions we do see (so that they make more intuitive sense), and that may allow extra templates as the OP suggests more opportunities to be integrated if certain criteria are met (A Theocracy in boom seeking pure research for example).

But I also think that what the OP describes is the kind of thing players might do if no suitable missions are available, so it could just remain a normal activity (like A-B trading) rather than having to be added to the mission board at all :)
 
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