Taking a month, or even a year to complete a mission is no different to taking a week. The only problem would be if a faction had retreated from the system - which could still happen within the one week many missions have.
Devs: List of requested improvements for Missions system
- Thread starter Vitamin Arrr
- Start date
I have spent the vast majority of my time in Elite doing exploration, so clearly, credits are not my main concern. Earning credits/rank/influence faster or slower is not mutually exclusive with enjoying the game.
However, fully kitting out my Anaconda for combat will cost many hundreds of millions of credits. I would prefer to do a wider variety of missions, but at this point, I'm going to choose the fastest way to make credits. My suggestion is designed to even the playing field so that there is less of a difference between various kinds of missions in terms of credits per hour and grindiness. That way you can choose whichever types of missions you enjoy without feeling like there's much of a penalty.
More generally though, I just feel that players should not have to land in a station just to take on a job or turn in some bounty claims, exploration information, etc. In real life, many jobs allow working and getting paid from remote. I think some jobs in Elite should be like that too.
Obviously, delivery missions etc. should still require landing. But it would be nice to be able to accept a delivery mission from remote, then fly to the station to pick up the goods.
It would also be nice to be able to see what missions a station has on offer (not to mention, what ship upgrades it sells) without landing there first. I realize there are some websites like eddb that have some of this info, but if a website like that exists in real life, why not have similar information available from remote in the game without having to physically land or break immersion by going to a third-party site?
I mean, who enjoys landing at a station, only to find that there are no decent missions available? Now I have two choices: relog or leave. That sucks.
Perhaps it could be that if I complete 10 assassination missions that have a cargo reward, and I do the missions using my Vulture, then my cargo rewards will go into the Anaconda that I have stored at the station, or they would go into a storage bin at the station where I can pick them up within a certain time or sell them to the station's market from remote.
These are just "quality of life" and "realism" improvements, intended to reduce the feeling of "grind" by allowing players additional, optional ways to accept and turn in some kinds of missions.
And I honestly don't see why anyone would be honestly opposed to that, since if you prefer always landing at stations, you would be perfectly free to continue doing so. Why should you care if I prefer doing it a different way?
Anyway, it's just a suggestion / feature request, which I would hope could broaden the appeal and longevity of this game.
You make some excellent points that I had not considered.
Instead they could add a grace period where cancelling a mission within the first hour or something would not incur the rep penalty, or have each faction allow up to three cancellations before the rep penalties start.
Or they could just make missions auto-cancel if the faction's status changes in such a way that the mission would mess with the BGS.
Hmm, just some thoughts.
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I concur with your points and i think the new 'chained mission' mechanic shows this is 'doable' from a game lore perspective. If a faction can send you an udpated mission in space why can't you look at open missions in space? I imagine it would work such that you have a an additional tab in your communications console that you can look at open mission details 'for that system' - so you would only see mission available in that system and this would be udpated when you jumped into the system.
Interesting about exploration... obviously a lot of players gather a lot of money during exploration but they MUST return to hand it in? This would make exploraiton a much more potentialyl profitable enterprise if this was not the case because your 'on-again-off-again' exploits could continually fund your mission exploits / CG exploits whatever... that would be a real 'game changer' literally. I wonder if FDev would consider that seriously.
and yes, obviously if you need to actually physically pick something up and drop something off you need to be there in person.
I agree... it isn't shortcutting anything other than taking some additional travel time out of the equation - which will change the credit ear rate per hour, but not by a vast amount i would think. I don't see it as inherently problematical for the gameplay and may, as you say, add a few new incitements.
Nothing to add there OP.
Magnificent writeup.
These changes to the mission system and to some other areas of the game are sorely needed.
Magnificent writeup.
These changes to the mission system and to some other areas of the game are sorely needed.