There's been a lot of flak lately surrounding missions, rewards and balancing especially with terms like "nerf" and "exploit" being tossed around willy nilly.
From my post on Exigeous's video:
I think FDev should allow Mines to work as bombs in planetary environments, include a bomb trajectory indicator on the HUD when Mines are the active weapon group, and allow you to entirely blow up enemy base defenses in one or two passes.
I'm not sure payouts are even an issue really, considering the expense of ships, outfitting and insurance. I believe the real issue is a lack of interesting gameplay, where you have an infinitely large sandbox, but no toys and very little sand.
Probably the easiest way to balance missions and payouts would be to allow players to only take ONE of each mission type, with a maximum of five missions taken at any one time, and increase payouts across the board, especially for combat related goals. Or even better a single mission that is several missions combined:
Part 1: Take out space defense force - Kill several medium ships in orbit
Part 2: Surface scan for base location
Part 3: Take out air defense force - Kill a few small ships in airspace over base (Eagles/Sideys)
Part 4: Bombing run with mines to take out anti-air defenses
Part 5: Land, deploy SRV and destroy ground based defenses (Skimmers, Goliaths)
Part 6: Locate beacon and scan to obtain Covert Intelligence packet
Part 7: Get back to ship, take off and evade/kill interceptors (SLFs)
Part 8: Fly back to questgiving station (self-destructing/suicide/getting killed nets ZERO payout and a mission fail due to loss of Intel packet)
Given that you're basically a private military contractor utilizing his or her own resources a payout of ~$50-100+ million is not unreasonable, depending on combat rank/reputation. When you think about how much money governments spend on private contractors like Blackwater for VIP escort, and then scale that up with interstellar travel and high ticket items like spaceships, it's clear mission payouts, ESPECIALLY ones involving combat are woefully inadequate.
From my post on Exigeous's video:
I think FDev should allow Mines to work as bombs in planetary environments, include a bomb trajectory indicator on the HUD when Mines are the active weapon group, and allow you to entirely blow up enemy base defenses in one or two passes.
I'm not sure payouts are even an issue really, considering the expense of ships, outfitting and insurance. I believe the real issue is a lack of interesting gameplay, where you have an infinitely large sandbox, but no toys and very little sand.
Probably the easiest way to balance missions and payouts would be to allow players to only take ONE of each mission type, with a maximum of five missions taken at any one time, and increase payouts across the board, especially for combat related goals. Or even better a single mission that is several missions combined:
Part 1: Take out space defense force - Kill several medium ships in orbit
Part 2: Surface scan for base location
Part 3: Take out air defense force - Kill a few small ships in airspace over base (Eagles/Sideys)
Part 4: Bombing run with mines to take out anti-air defenses
Part 5: Land, deploy SRV and destroy ground based defenses (Skimmers, Goliaths)
Part 6: Locate beacon and scan to obtain Covert Intelligence packet
Part 7: Get back to ship, take off and evade/kill interceptors (SLFs)
Part 8: Fly back to questgiving station (self-destructing/suicide/getting killed nets ZERO payout and a mission fail due to loss of Intel packet)
Given that you're basically a private military contractor utilizing his or her own resources a payout of ~$50-100+ million is not unreasonable, depending on combat rank/reputation. When you think about how much money governments spend on private contractors like Blackwater for VIP escort, and then scale that up with interstellar travel and high ticket items like spaceships, it's clear mission payouts, ESPECIALLY ones involving combat are woefully inadequate.