Addressing the Money making Whack-a-mole

[Malactus]

To get to point, FDEV is doing whack-a-mole with moneymaking schemes.

I personally dont have any issues with making bank, especially since I have big ships to upkeep, but the missions payouts suck in general, and even Wing Missions arent that great, and for new players looking at the prices, its frustraiting. But in anycase, here is my suggestion:

There is a pattern emerging with most of the money making missions: there are two pillars

- Stacking of Missions
- Doing all missions at the same time fast, or in quick succession.

Doing missions fast seem to have died out with kill missions awarding one kill per mission, but no all missions at the same time (mostly), although the Skimmers are definitely an exception. Increasing the range until spawn would slow it down a bit, but its no a root issue imo.


I think Stacking Missions is the main culprit here.

So how about the following idea to lessen the amount of times FDEV has to do whack-a-mole.

- Allow Board refreshing manually (instead of cycling between modes) OR
- Share all missions in all modes but Mission amounts should be effected by current amount of players (Supply (Pop) vs demand (Completion Rate))
BUT
- Limit the amount of missions you can stack depending on the Pilot's Federation Rank. Each Rank would give 1 mission slot for the player to use.
- Scale mission rewards even more depending on the Reputation with the Local Faction and amount Especially Massacre missions where you have to kill 50-100 ships that take for eons to do. or even the new wing missions where you shuffle tons and tons of cargo.
- Put a limiter on Mode switching from Open or Private, by adding 15 minute cool down to switching modes after going to main menu. You can log back in to the same mode you left immediately, but you cant move to another mode. Solo is except, and you should always be able to go from Solo -> Open / Private (Sometimes you want to play alone till a friend comes online), but not the other way around. (Would probably help with combat logoffsky too)
- BGS Effects ticks should be faster when player activity increases for a group of systems. Forexample the "Purple Hand Gang" should have already lost those settlements and lost the Civil War, meaning the missions would be gone, OR now be assaults against a legal entity and incur bounties.


About the Limits:

Currently 20 missions is the limit.

Instead bind the limit to the PF (Main Three) Rank:

- You start out as Harmless / Aimless / Pennyless with 6 Mission slots. Each rank in any category gives you a mission slot. Basically the higher rank you have, the more trust PF has in you to completing your contracts. Especially considering that contracts tend to be so short anyway (1 day most, 1 week for substancial amounts, while 4 weeks for long range)
- Being Expert / Merchant / Trailblazer would give you 18 slots.
- If you are Triple elite, you have 30 mission slots.

The reasons:

- This slows down the rep gain from doing missions to fresh players, but still allows them to participate and eventually gain lots of cash that they normally wouldn't get: However this still limits them from jumping too many ships ahead (sidey->Anaconda level) in less than aday. Its not like a new player is going to be doing more than 5 missions at the time due to cargo space, or due to mission requirements (tend to be smaller amounts) at the start, but as they play they would be experimenting with that more.
- Still allows completion of multiple missions in quick succession meaning feeling of progress, especially since you can on rank ups get even more missions.
- Allows those who've spent time doing other types of activities to enjoy the full benefits from such an occurrence
- Lessen Mode switching to flip boards, as you can cap out missions anyway.


The entire situation imo is actually a Valid one, but by the time it became popular, the BGS should have already updated as the influence levels are below 2%. Why would a faction still own two Settlements at that point? BGS should control that sorta thing more quicker.

After all, we commanders are supposed to be opportunists.

 

[Misty_Dark]

I agree, I do understand the logic behind why mode switching is working, and why it takes a bit of redesign to fix that, but I agree with the notion to take away mode switching and quite a few of the issues mode switching is causing, a faster refresh of mission available.

Today all session servers have their own generated mission list, and as more and more players are online we need more session servers, and the minimum we will always have is two, one for open/private group and one for solo. So when mode switching we will always get two sets of mission generated. and for each "new" session server you ends up on when mode switchning, they will genererate a new set of mission, a task FDEV have said costs alot of CPU time todo. So why not have a few servers generating missions for the session servers, and these server keep the mission in sync between themselves, so now we reduce the load on session servers and concetrate that load on a few mission servers, that now can be used by all session servers. This change would basically destroy the entire notion of mode switching to refresh the mission lists! As you would get the same mission list EVERY SINGLE TIME. And the only refresh would be when the mission list expires and it is generated (I believe this happens today every 15 minutes).

So in short form:
* CMDR chooses mode and get connected to a session server
* CMDR wantes to see mission, session server check to see if it already have an uptodate mission list, if not, it ask the mission server for an updated mission list.
* Mission is showed to CMDR

If we assume that mission list was just generated, it would be valid for the next 15 minutes, so now it should not matter if the CMDR tries to boardswitch, as the listed missions would still be the same.

Mode switching is an action caused by a less optimal game design regarding missions. And it rewards players for actually doing this than playing the game. And as long as the reward for mode switching is this great, players will do it.



I do like the generic idea about how many missions you can stack is dependant on your ranks. But I would take it one step further, to actually change so that you combat rank affect how many combat missions you can stack. But do not affect exploration or trading missions and vice versa.

But this also suggests that missions themselves should now give some increase to the rank it belongs to. I'm not entirely sure they do that today.




I also think that BGS has a great potential to affect these missions... So take a favourite, Skimmer missions, if many players come to a location and only take skimmer missions, then the reward should go lower, there are PLENTY of CMDRs doing these missions, so the logical step for the mission giver would be to notice that they have a huge line of CMDRs waiting to pick up those missions, why pay top credits when you have an abundant number of CMDRs willing todo the task? And this should of course affect other missions as well, if noone takes them, they should increase their payout to attract more attention, and this change should only happen when mission are taken...


So to summarize this:
* Many CMDRs come to a station, looks for a specific missions.
* "BGS" tracks how many mission is taken
* "BGS" adjusts rewards down for very popular missions, so in most cases all the "get rich fast" missions would have bad payout within a few hours.
* "BGS" adjusts rewards up for mission not taken, so they are more enticing to take.
* "BGS" will spawn more of the popular missions, as there is a demand for these mission... This means more low paying missions in huge numbers!

So now we will have a self adjusting system that drive the profit down on popular missions, and the same time to drive profit up for the unpopular missions, that will NOT spawn that many of in comparison. So if Skimmer mission is the rage, we could find 20,. 39, 40 of these now low paying missions, but only 1-2 of other missions, like kill pirates etc, that in comparison will have a much higher payout than the Skimmer missions.

This would in conjunction with the changes to how may missions you can have based on your ranks would making any "get money fast" schemes less viable, as they would only allow you take a few missions that gives very low rewards as to what they where when it was discovered and posted online.

 

[Nasirrh]

I can relate with that issue and can only say that the concept: "GRINDING = FUN" , which maybe can be related to Elite's todays philosophy in therms of gameplay, is a very narrow-minded way to accomplish the goal of a fun game. It is true that some people love the grind for credits and they have no problem in doing boring or monotone things to accomplish their goal and get more credits, BUT I the point is that these are not the majority of gamers.Most of us play games to have fun. Fun is the main reason for playing a game and it is the main motivation for playing this particular game that gives us this special feeling of having fun.
So the point is that you have to create a game which makes fun to play. and for that you have to recognise that there are verious types of gamers with various types of having fun.
And in my case, I've bought this game in the hope of having a open world galaxy spaceship simulator with a imersive, living and ambient but realistic world and a good mixture between an spaceship simulator and a arcade game to make things easier. what i got was a empty repetitve world with only one motviation: grind for credits , so that you can fly the next bigger ship.

So there are two different solutions for that grindfest called Elite:

1) A lot of Games using the grind mechanics have accomplished to find the perfect mixture between time/effort and reward in exchange. when nearly everone in the community has the opinion the game is to time consuming, then maybe there is some little spark truth in it.

2) I think nobody of us would have a problem to play the game for 100+ Hours till we could afford us a better ship, IF playing the game without credits in mind would be FUN. And alot of games have accomplished that and alot of commanders in the community have some solid solutions to fix that problem. All Frontier has to do is take the suggestions, analyse them and take them for their advantage in creating a better game.