Yes, if we do use some sort of flag or toggle, we'll try to ensure that it's dressed up to have some contextual sense. And I'll be considering the various alternatives suggested in this thread. No promises, of course, but we have plenty to consider already, so that's good.
I may be late to the party, so if this has been suggested already, count this as my +1 to that:
How about using the power decals as the toggle? The powerplay trailer showed us a Patreus decal, and it was very disappointing to find out you don't get a decal for your chosen power. If we all got the corresponding decal (and of course lost it when we defect or leave the power), the presence of the decal on the hull would identify any ship as operating under that power's flag!
Hello Commanders!
Just another update for you folk.
The clear consensus is that a return to the old system of merit rating, even with the addition of favours, would not be wanted. So, going further down this line, I want to pose another question for you to consider: merit decay is present specifically to reward Commanders who put in more effort over time than their peers. This is true, even in the current implementation, even though you don't actually compete.
So my question is: would you prefer to see the merit system mutate into something like the favour system, rather than have both active at the same time (I think something along those lines has cropped up a couple of times)? Before you respond, have a think about what would be gained versus what would be lost: the system would be simpler, but less dynamic. In essence, it would likely be a little more like a XP bar/resource.
I would in fact welcome such a system. It would facilitate both sides, basically. If you do enough every week, you can afford to always have a particular rank active; if you do less, you enable it only some of the time, i.e. when you can make the most of it, for example in order to purchase power equipment, or cash in a large amount of exploration data with the rank bonus. In fact, this would finally make stuff like the exploration bonus viable. An explorer could first earn enough merits for rank 5, then go on their huge expedition, upon return spend these merits to get rank 5 for a week, and sell their data with the bonus.
Now, whilst I'm reflective mode
Clearly, everyone wants missions. Understood. So do we! It's a matter of timing.
Sandro, it would really help if we got at least a balancing pass over the 1.3 mission overhaul without going into deep changes, just a few examples what should be addressed, imho, from the top of my head. Basically, just stuff to tweak the numbers; read these all as "imho" please.
- Illegal missions (piracy, smuggling, assassinations vs clean targets) should spawn primarily from illegal factions (pirate gangs, mafia etc.), and only rarely from legal corporations or non-extremist political parties.
- Delivery missions, i.e. the type "We have 10 tons of vegetables here that need to reach Hutton Orbital within the next 5 hours.", do not really scale up for larger cargo amounts. I can just as well go around in an FDL, of all ships, with some 20 tons cargo space, and be no more effective than a Python with 200, the missions rarely spawn with amounts of cargo large enough to warrant the bigger cargo bay (and the corresponding payment). Also, generally the payment for these missions seems rather low, while smuggling pays decently, these legal missions could really get a boost by just letting them spawn into higher cargo numbers with higher payments. Like, you could smuggle 10 tons of illegal drugs for a payment of 200k, or you deliver 100 tons of legal medicines for a similar sum. At the moment it is more like smuggle 10 tons illlegal goods for 200k, or 10 tons of legal goods for 10k.
- Combat missions should spawn only within a system that the faction operates in. If the HIP 12345 Candy Corporation has a presence in HIP 12345 and HIP 67890, and they send you to fend off some pirates, the mission shouldn't send you to HIP 11111 where the company has no business whatsoever, but either of the two systems where it is actually present as a minor faction. This would have the effect that more often than not a combat mission takes place in the same system, so you can cash in any extra bounties from the targets right where you hand in the mission in the end; at the moment, it seems these combat missions can send you everywhere except the current system.
- Assassination missions also work great as bounty hunting missions, when they happen to spawn with the right parameters, which is very rare, sadly. If these would just spawn much more regularly with wanted criminals as their targets, and would tell you what faction they are from, that would be a huge boon to bounty hunting, not specifically with regards to the money you can earn (RES still are king probably), but the way the profession can operate, i.e. like an assassin, but on the side of the law.
- Similarly to smuggling missions, illegal assassinations, where the target is not a known wanted criminal, should primarily be issued by criminal factions and possibly extremist political factions, whereas regular corporations and moderate parties would usually give you legal assassinations, i.e. an actual bounty
hunt, against a wanted gangster.
