Oh dear.
You don't appear to have actually considered any if the OP, just critiqued it from the viewpoint if the current game.
For instance, why must *all* of the missions have a tight temporal deadline?
What could possibly be the negative impact *to you* IR *to the game* to have some missions on the board that don't time out in 24hrs.
The answer, of course, is that it wouldn't impact on you, or any other players, or the game, despite your negative response.
In other words you have invested no time in proper analysis (or are exceptionally closed minded or hyyst plainly don't want others with less time to play to actually enjoy the game). Which is unfortunate.
Similarly in other topics and suggestions, you just defend the status quo with no real overall analysis.
The OP has spent a lot if time creatively analysing and suggesting improvements for the general player base, nine of which I can tell would be if a negative impact to any other player, including yourself. For instance, I'm pretty certain that he wasn't arguing that *all* missions should have more loosely defined timescales for completion. Just some...
Thoughts?
I play games to engage my brain, not to sit back and watch Netflix while the game plays itself for me. If I wanted that kind of game play, I'd just open my browser and let cookie clicker run in the background. The types of games I enjoy require you to build up skills, make thoughtful decisions, which in turn lead to meaningful consequences. One of those consequences should
always be the potential for failure.
Elite: Dangerous does a fairly good job of that IMO. Sure, many players claim the game is boring, and they NEED their Netflix to have fun, but like the "grind" in this game, it is mostly self inflicted. There are entire sites out there dedicated to taking the fun out of this game, by removing any outcome besides success. Your mileage may vary, but I consider guaranteed success to be extremely boring. The chance of failure is what makes success fun.
Much of what the OP is requesting is to remove many of the failure states in this game, often through automation, and then requests to have Netflix player added to the actual game, so they won't get bored. THINK about that for a second.
The IRL mission timers are one of the many things you need to think about and plan for if you're into running missions. Despite their very generous time limits, they still make you stop and think, "Do I have time to do this?" "What problems may I encounter if I do take it?" "How do I minimize the risks?" If I see a lucrative mission and agonize for fifteen minutes over whether to take it or not, considering what I know of my real-life schedule, then this is a good thing in my book. I'm engaging my brain, and feeling real emotion over the choices presented before me.
Removing those timers, either completely or by removing the "timers are still active when logged out of the game" part, simplifies that decision immensely. A 2500 light year passenger mission that gives you three days to complete can be very different from the same mission that gives you three logged in hours to complete. The latter requires only that you ask yourself, "How much time will it take to travel 5000 light years?" Either you have a ship that can do that within the allotted time or not. The former requires another question, "Do I normally have enough time playing Elite over the next three days to complete the mission?"
For players who can dedicate a lot of time to the game, the answer is always obvious. For players like me, who are lucky to get three hours a week at this game (BTW, I'm writing this while on break at work, on my phone, so please excuse any weird autocorrects), this leads to the most interesting question of all, "Is there any way of making up the difference?"
Like many players, I happen to enjoy trying to answer that question, even if I fail. Some players don't. If you're in the latter category, simply don't take any mission you can't complete during your game session. I simply don't want to see yet another interesting part of this game nerfed to meaninglessness, especially when one of the requested "improvements" to this game is an integrated Netflix player. It's happened too many times already.
It's happened to the economic simulation, because players objected when their lucrative trade routes ran dry. It's happened to Supercruise, because players never bothered to learn how to navigate and then brake at their destination, and then complained that it was "slow and boring." It's happened with both the interdiction and the combat AI. I don't want it to happen again.
Are there aspects of the game that need to be improved? Definitely. There needs to be a greater difference between low security and high security systems, places where its safe to go, and places where its dangerous, rather than this "it's not very dangerous anywhere" situation we have today. The reputation system needs to be deeper, so that you're not fed the fattened calf by when you visit a faction you're actively working against, just because you did them a favor in the past and haven't murdered anyone (yet.) The game needs more depth, more decisions to weigh, more chances to fail, not filling in what little depth there is.
