/snip
There's a lot of good ideas in your posts, but I would warn you away from suggesting a 'smart mission director', as players never grasp the logic behind such a system's automagic output, and feel alienated by the discrepancy between how they think things should work and how they are actually working. Such systems work best on the fringes of the player experience where people aren't invested in them, not in the main interface to primary interaction loops.
I'd still like to see a system that considers the capabilities of the vessel I'm sitting in. If that's the only SMART variable pre-populating the query table as you open the board there won't be any need to upset players who can't figure out why some missions disappear if you accept others, or change target in the nav panel. (tutorials? youtube?) It would also save a considerable amount of the player's time as everything automagically changes when they decide to change ship, and they can't see the mission board(s). Manually re-selecting every variable at each station is going to get monotonous, very quickly.
Sitting here wondering why missions can't be continually procedurally generated client side in great volume and variety, not just linked to the 6 to 8 minor factions in the system, using a query interface to limit the view to only the criteria interesting the commander, then accepted missions are validated on the server for plausibility, to prevent local hacks from generating unfair payouts. A 'Share' button would likewise bump any mission up to the server, turning it into a Wing mission. Likewise, a 'Fill Me Up' button would form a set of similar missions from the pool to be accepted all together, subject to preselected query criteria.
This would work independently of the quality of the client connection.
Ultimately, this would make missions a primary commodity, bought up in bundles like stock market and credit market derivatives are today. This would reduce the current commodity market to secondary importance, used to obtain goods for fetch missions, engineers and to fill every last tonne of your Panther Clipper. We can assume that most commodity trading is carried out by Lynx Bulk Carriers owned by corporations, moving an entire system-month's worth of Coffee and Tea at a time, and the 'small quantity' commodity market would be the left-overs, trading at higher prices to mom and pop Commanders.
Well said.
We're in a tug-o-war here, between not enough variety and limited space to display them in, if FD is reluctant to redesign the interface completely. They did add one drop down selector for rewards but it just changes the colour of the missions you don't want instead of removing them and filling those slots with a bunch that match what you just 'filtered' for. Who's idea was that? Like, seriously guys. And why do we have to be teased with missions we can't do because, wrong something but we can't leave the board to resolve that and come back to find the same mission?
I appreciate the mission services are only moving to their own hardware and may not be changed in any other way...
It also seems sensible that an official announcement like this is probably being monitored for bad behaviour, if nothing else, and might be a window of opportunity to cast out baby, bathwater, kitchen sink, half a dozen ideas and a partridge in a pear tree...
And some dodgy humour, so they'll remember the post
First (biggest) space saving opportunity:
If we cannot complete the mission in the ship we're currently in, *for whatever reason*, don't be a tease.
We really don't need to see it and the real estate could be used for something else.
[Edit: *Should add a big caveat to this one, quick
Logical reasons please, like no refinery, no guns (at all), no cargo racks... (No pax cabins works ok, just fyi
]
[Edit: Bring in the previous post for context / what I was responding to]
