Ranking up the real way.

[Bacalao]

This evening I ranked to Rear Admiral in the Federal Navy Auxiliary and picked up my shiny (matte black) Corvette, it was a great feeling. I did a lot of missions, never spammed charity, stopped by 17 draconis one time by accident and took a few courier missions into the bubble, Tun is just a rumor on the forums for me, so, I have some thoughts on the current state of missions. If you don't want to read below you can feel free to bask in the awesomeness of the Federal Corvette....my Federal Corvette.

Spoiler

1st: I like them, I like the variety out there now, there is always a large variety (with a few exceptions) of things to do on the bulletin board, no matter where I go. There are some that are broken (anything mission specific that you have to find), which is a shame because those hostage rescue missions are really tempting.
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2nd: they need work, and I have a few simple suggestions. Click the spoiler if you dare.

Spoiler

• More missions....let me state that again, MORE MISSIONS! The biggest problem with missions is how few there are. I've been working out of a station with a population of 5 million people and there are usually only about a dozen missions available. This needs to be rectified somehow. I don't care if they just want to throw up 50-100, or if they want to tab it out, or let us query for more, I don't care, but we need more missions. Moving 4 tons of grain for 10k isn't so bad, if there are 15 other missions on offer to go to that station and system. And if you do it this way it gates it well based on ship capability and player advancement (advanced players in T9s and Anacondas can take a bunch, new players in Haulers and Sidewinders can only fit in a few). It also adds a huge amount of life to the galaxy because it will feel like there is stuff going on. It also makes staring at 0:06 20% of the time more worth it when I get to turn in a bundle of missions rather than just one.
• Let me take any mission that rank or rep doesn't lock me out of. I often see missions I want to take, but I'm in a ship that can't get it, and by the time I get back, it's gone. Let me accept them and go back to pick up the cargo, leave the clock running.
• Let me move cargo between ships, this relates to the previous point, I see a juicy mission in my python to move 60 cargo 75Ly, I like that, but I'd rather do it in my Asp, because of the 75 light years, but I can't go get my asp, it's in the system next door...so let me move the cargo between ships please....PLEASE!
• Link missions more elegantly. It would be much more interesting to take a 10k (elite rank required...) courier mission for trade data if I got to my destination and found that turning in that missions led to 15 trade missions becoming available as opposed to it having some inscrutable effect on the BGS and eventually leading to missions.
• Mini community goal missions: you need me to move 6000 tons of mission specific Beryllium from A to B, I have 4 hours to do it, the more I move and the faster I move it, the more money I make, the more rep I get, losing it to death or pirates carries heavy consequences.
• More missions for large landing pads. Seriously, well over 90% of hauling missions moving more than 50 tons are going to outposts, where are the missions to move 300 tons of something to a big station? In fact, most hauling missions with good payouts are python exclusives...that's pretty limiting for ship choice to do missions in. This could also be solved by letting me complete missions in stages, if I'm in my Asp and you want me to move 180 tons, can I take it in two trips? Please?
• More rep based consequences, being allied with a faction doesn't so much give you access to more missions, as giving you access to the occasional really good mission. I'd like to see more of an effect for nurturing my relationship with my factions than I'm currently seeing. By having allied status I'd like to see a dramatic uptick in the number of missions I'm trusted to complete as well as having access to the occasional high value mission.
• Rank based missions need to fit the rank required more adequately. In some cases you need to be elite to get that "kill 90 pirates for 5 million credits" mission, but mostly an elite mission vs a competent mission is: Elite= kill 10 pirates for 500k, competent= kill 10 pirates for 150k, it's just a better payout for the same work. Make elite missions elite: elite opponents, elite payouts.
• Lay way off on showing me what I can't do. I understand that some players want to see what they are "looking forward to", but at 17% tycoon, there isn't any hope of me taking any of those elite ranked trade missions any time soon, so either get rid of them, or tone their number waaaaaay down. A reminder now and then of what I will be able to do is fine, a constant slap in the face with what I can't do yet it is tiring.
• Let me say "GO AWAY!" to the "follow my wake" guys, from supercruise please.
• Smuggling and trade missions have some nice en route consequences from pirates and cops, expand on that for kill pirate and assassination missions. If I get a kill pirate mission I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility to be tracked down by a hit squad because the pirates found out I took a contract to wipe them out, the higher the rank required for the mission, the higher the rank of the hit squad.
• Make mission abandonment/diversion worth it. If I am moving 120 tons of narcotics 60 Ly for 2 million credits, an offer to abandon it or take it somewhere else for 20k....not tempting.
• Let me decide who I'm working for, if the system I'm in needs food, let me decide who I'm going to turn it in to. Trying to rank up can be frustrating when there just aren't any missions for a federation faction, and I mean none, but tons for the independent factions. If I can take a mission to go get food or meds or whatever and then give it to whoever I want, that would allow me to work with the BGS and my factions much more effectively. Having minor faction specific missions is okay, but I'd like to see a large selection of missions that I decide who I'm working through.
• More bulletin board feedback, if I go do a few missions for faction XYZ, I'd like to see them giving me more work to do. Honestly the opposite seems to happen, and I'd have to point at "BGS is broken" or just too easily sated.
• MORE MISSIONS!

Anyway, that's enough for now. Overall it was a good experience, I made some money (more than people let on), learned a good deal about the BGS and felt the part of a federation pilot working for the federation (when they'd give me work) and the influence levels of the systems I work in really show it.

 

[Kayin]

Great post. Missions are incrementally getting better and that is encouraging. I hope to see more improvement on missions with each patch.

• Let me say "GO AWAY!" to the "follow my wake" guys, from supercruise please.

I've started typing back to the NPCs in the console. I don't even care that it's AI. I would LOVE to have a middle finger gesture somehow built in lol. I hate those guys especially when they follow me from system to system. I've actually followed a few of them to give them their chance to talk to me - and promptly blew them up only to have them come right back in the next system. They're like cockroaches.

 

[Troa Barton]

I like everything you're proposing, especially the "mini CG missions" for large cargo orders.

 

[DCLXVI your God]

Very good suggestions, OP.
Hope someone in charge read this and get inspired.
Thank you!

 

[smiths121]

Very nice post Baclao - have some rep.

I really like the linked mission idea do mission X opens up for that visit to the station missions Y and Z. We have multi-part missions now and this would be a fine direction to take these in.

I somewhat agree with more missions to allow mission stacking (just watch the I was interdicted 20billion times threads appear again). At the moment I tend to pick up a mission a visit to the station compared to 2-3 in 1.4. We are having to re-prioritise how we affect influence for our faction in the BGS, traditionally we used missions as our primary tool, now we have to balance out with other activities as there are not enough. Part of me is "cool" now you have to work and think for the BGS. The other part of me is "Meah", now you have to work and Think about the BGS - it will never take off.

I think being able to move cargo between ships should be implemented. What you propose is to also be able to store cargo, I can see some undesirable consequences of this outside of mission cargo. I think it would work for mission specific cargo only though, but implementing this without the other would cause a mass nashing of teeth.

Anyway well thought out and presented set of improvementsand ideas , even if I do not 100% agree with all of them!

Simon

 

[Bacalao]

Very nice post Baclao - have some rep.

I really like the linked mission idea do mission X opens up for that visit to the station missions Y and Z. We have multi-part missions now and this would be a fine direction to take these in.

I somewhat agree with more missions to allow mission stacking (just watch the I was interdicted 20billion times threads appear again). At the moment I tend to pick up a mission a visit to the station compared to 2-3 in 1.4. We are having to re-prioritise how we affect influence for our faction in the BGS, traditionally we used missions as our primary tool, now we have to balance out with other activities as there are not enough. Part of me is "cool" now you have to work and think for the BGS. The other part of me is "Meah", now you have to work and Think about the BGS - it will never take off.

I think being able to move cargo between ships should be implemented. What you propose is to also be able to store cargo, I can see some undesirable consequences of this outside of mission cargo. I think it would work for mission specific cargo only though, but implementing this without the other would cause a mass nashing of teeth.

Anyway well thought out and presented set of improvementsand ideas , even if I do not 100% agree with all of them!

Simon

If they made missions very stackable, intentionally the way I invision it then influence effects and rank increases would need to be adjusted accordingly, otherwise things would get very volatile. They'd also have to work on the interdiction frequency, though it is already very infrequent for legitimate hauling missions. I also enjoy working on the BGS without missions, but I don't feel like there is enough effect on the bulletin board from what I'm doing to be noticeable, it doesn't feel alive enough. If I go kill 100-200 pirates (on my own, no mission), I feel like I've poked the BGS pretty sharply with a stick, I'd like to see a reaction, perhaps missions to take out authority vessels from the local (or neighboring) mob, or a few missions to kill pirates, I've started to make a difference in the system, maybe the ruling faction wants to see that trend continue.
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I'd very much understand a limitation on locking it up to mission specific cargo to be stored, I suppose there are potential consequences to allowing cargo to be stored (though I don't think it would be that bad, even with rares). It isn't really about being able to store the cargo, so much as accept a mission to move 200 tons, and complete the mission incrementally. I wouldn't be able to take cargo, and then put it in storage at any station, only take part of the mission cargo, turn it in at the dropoff and then go back and get more, or transfer what I have between ships (when the receiving ship has room to receive it). If I don't get all the cargo before the timer runs out, I fail, at least partially. Imagine taking a mission to move goods and then having a cargo ticker like from the commodities market or power play pamphlets of how much you want to take at that time available from the bulletin board mission interface.

 

[EDbubba]

This evening I ranked to Rear Admiral in the Federal Navy Auxiliary and picked up my shiny (matte black) Corvette, it was a great feeling. I did a lot of missions, never spammed charity, stopped by 17 draconis one time by accident and took a few courier missions into the bubble,

What rank were you before 1.4 completely changed the ascension methodology? This can have a huge impact on how much "work" it is.

Prior to 1.4 I was already an Ensign in the Federation (for the Dropship), but I had completely ignored the Empire, and based on experience of going to Rear Admiral (giving up after Lt. Commander after losing all bounty hunting missions in 1.5, and reverting to the login-logout "mini-game" at Tun), it would be a pointless exercise to try to get to Duke in the "legitimate" way since that would probably be doubling my already 750 hrs. playtime, in the past year!

Starting from zero, you're probably looking at somewhere near 1,000 missions to ascend to the highest rank (the last two being irrelevant for now). No matter how you slice it, a thousand missions is going to get extraordinarily tedious, there simply isn't enough variance in the mission types to sustain that kind of interest.

Ranking also utterly ignores other things you might want to do that should have an impact on your favoured major faction, such as trading, exploring bounty hunting, etc. The game does not revolve completely around Bulletin Board missions, and those that think it does are missing a major amount of self-guided gameplay.

 

[Muetdhiver]

All good stuff OP. +1.

More missions is a big one IMO, tab it by professions and for the love of god, put some actual exploration missions, not the
Junk courrier missions we have now. Missions as :

• Find and scan 12 terraformable water worlds in sector XYZ, bonus payment for every earth-like found.
• Rescue lost explorer and recover the survey data. Said guy is 10K lyr out, but mission pays 10-20M for the data cache. Chain the mission : when finding the guy, get the location of several earth-like worlds, or super-giant stars of whatever other interesting objects. Better still : get a mission to find and recover samples from a scientifc outpost he established in some other sector => loot FSD boost materials + bonus payout.
• Maybe UA related missions, like searching for UA transport wrecks, getting information about a lost science outpost near barnacles and so on.

An other thing that would be nice is rare trading related missions, like timed deliveries for an exclusive auction or whatever.

 

[Bertrand Du Guesclin]

Well done for your achievement!

I really like your suggestions, repped.

The one I most agree with is the first one, about having more missions. When I see a sytem with 8 billion people in it, and I see 10 - 20 missions per station, I can't help but wonder : "what are the other 7 999 999 800 people living here doing ? don't they need anything ?"

And even if every mission was given by VERY large companies with several millions of employees each, 20 missions per system just isn't a realistic amount.

So yeah, we need thousands of missions per board, with tabs and sorting options.

 

[nazartp]

Ha, just the tread I was looking for. My biggest gripe with the current ranking process is that the simplest task - donate money - has the highest effect on ranking. We are trying to rank up in the NAVY. Personal experience: two kill 19 pirates missions worth about 300k each fails to move the counter by one percentage point. One donation of about 12k does. Utterly ridiculous. My suggestions:

1. Reduce the mission number requirements for ranking - mind-numbingly high number of missions just pushes people into charity donations. Balance that by increasing mission difficulty at higher ranks.
2. Separate influence on factions from influence on rank progression - combat takes precedence, i.e., CZ, assassination and hunting missions should bring significantly more reward to the rank progression, while charity, trading, etc, should affect the faction influence more. The tie between faction influence and ranking results should be through availability of the missions. Better relationship - more lucrative, progression wise, missions. You start as a postage boy, then you are trusted with cargo, then they'll allow to protect themselves, etc.
3. Ranking missions themselves should be strongly tied to the rank in terms of difficulty. Yesterday I got my Rear Admiral rank by delivering a message to a system 4 ly away. Ideally, (wishful thinking) progressing to truly leadership ranks should put you in a command of a wing to combat superior opposition forces. After all in real navy one does not send an admiral with a message. I think in an effort to cater to various paths within ED, FD took a step back from older ranking missions which were specific per rank. Right now the whole host from delivery, to fetch, to smuggle, to kill are available.

 

[Bacalao]

What rank were you before 1.4 completely changed the ascension methodology? This can have a huge impact on how much "work" it is.

Prior to 1.4 I was already an Ensign in the Federation (for the Dropship), but I had completely ignored the Empire, and based on experience of going to Rear Admiral (giving up after Lt. Commander after losing all bounty hunting missions in 1.5, and reverting to the login-logout "mini-game" at Tun), it would be a pointless exercise to try to get to Duke in the "legitimate" way since that would probably be doubling my already 750 hrs. playtime, in the past year!

Starting from zero, you're probably looking at somewhere near 1,000 missions to ascend to the highest rank (the last two being irrelevant for now). No matter how you slice it, a thousand missions is going to get extraordinarily tedious, there simply isn't enough variance in the mission types to sustain that kind of interest.

Ranking also utterly ignores other things you might want to do that should have an impact on your favoured major faction, such as trading, exploring bounty hunting, etc. The game does not revolve completely around Bulletin Board missions, and those that think it does are missing a major amount of self-guided gameplay.

I was a chief petty officer before 1.4 hit. I agree it is a lot of missions, and to do it quickly takes an enormous amount of focus and grinding, but over time it does just happen so long as you take missions. You're looking at less than a year to "complete" that part of the game if you just do a few each night. I suppose a year is a long time, but I play ED more in a month than I do other games in a year. I also agree than combat bonds, bounties, exploration data and trade (both profit and purchases, more for meeting high demand and buying high supply than just raw profit) should play a role.

 

[Bacalao]

Ha, just the tread I was looking for. My biggest gripe with the current ranking process is that the simplest task - donate money - has the highest effect on ranking. We are trying to rank up in the NAVY. Personal experience: two kill 19 pirates missions worth about 300k each fails to move the counter by one percentage point. One donation of about 12k does. Utterly ridiculous. My suggestions:

1. Reduce the mission number requirements for ranking - mind-numbingly high number of missions just pushes people into charity donations. Balance that by increasing mission difficulty at higher ranks.
2. Separate influence on factions from influence on rank progression - combat takes precedence, i.e., CZ, assassination and hunting missions should bring significantly more reward to the rank progression, while charity, trading, etc, should affect the faction influence more. The tie between faction influence and ranking results should be through availability of the missions. Better relationship - more lucrative, progression wise, missions. You start as a postage boy, then you are trusted with cargo, then they'll allow to protect themselves, etc.
3. Ranking missions themselves should be strongly tied to the rank in terms of difficulty. Yesterday I got my Rear Admiral rank by delivering a message to a system 4 ly away. Ideally, (wishful thinking) progressing to truly leadership ranks should put you in a command of a wing to combat superior opposition forces. After all in real navy one does not send an admiral with a message. I think in an effort to cater to various paths within ED, FD took a step back from older ranking missions which were specific per rank. Right now the whole host from delivery, to fetch, to smuggle, to kill are available.

I strongly agree with your #3, I want the rank up mission to feel like a culmination of all the effort it took to get there, have me take out an imperial capital ship, or decimate a conflict zone or assassinate some high ranking imperial officers or something.
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I think the number of missions feels right (it should be a difficult, long process to get to the upper ranks), but I think there just aren't enough missions. The worst feeling is looking at a bulletin board with no one wanting you to work for them other than independents. I also believe combat missions are meant to affect your rank more than anything else, but it seemed to me that they didn't do as much as I expected, however, I also did notice that I would sometimes see a big bump in rank from something innocuous and so I think sometimes it just takes time for the update.
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For example. I turned in a 2.2 million, 900k and 300k pirate kill missions and a 150k assassination mission at a station, all for federation minor factions, but only saw a 2% increase in rank....needless to say, I was discouraged....I grabbed a secret courier delivery for 10-20k. When I turned in the secret delivery mission I got a 5-6% increase in rank.
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I think it just took time for the missions I turned in to tick over. Sometimes I also think you go from 1.1% to 2.9% with a combat mission but it looks like you just went from 1-2, and then you do a delivery and you go from 2.9-3.1 and it looks like it gave you the same for a much faster and smaller mission.

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

All good stuff OP. +1.

More missions is a big one IMO, tab it by professions and for the love of god, put some actual exploration missions, not the
Junk courrier missions we have now. Missions as :

• Find and scan 12 terraformable water worlds in sector XYZ, bonus payment for every earth-like found.
• Rescue lost explorer and recover the survey data. Said guy is 10K lyr out, but mission pays 10-20M for the data cache. Chain the mission : when finding the guy, get the location of several earth-like worlds, or super-giant stars of whatever other interesting objects. Better still : get a mission to find and recover samples from a scientifc outpost he established in some other sector => loot FSD boost materials + bonus payout.
• Maybe UA related missions, like searching for UA transport wrecks, getting information about a lost science outpost near barnacles and so on.

An other thing that would be nice is rare trading related missions, like timed deliveries for an exclusive auction or whatever.

We're thinking along the same lines. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=221803&p=3382806&viewfull=1#post3382806

 

[nazartp]

I think the number of missions feels right (it should be a difficult, long process to get to the upper ranks), but I think there just aren't enough missions. The worst feeling is looking at a bulletin board with no one wanting you to work for them other than independents. I also believe combat missions are meant to affect your rank more than anything else, but it seemed to me that they didn't do as much as I expected, however, I also did notice that I would sometimes see a big bump in rank from something innocuous and so I think sometimes it just takes time for the update.

I do not challenge the length of time to complete the process - just the sheer number of repetitive missions. I think we are speaking about the same thing, more or less. I'd rather do a mission that would would take me 5 hours to complete than 30 of 10 minutes each. Add complexity and variety. And I really think charity donations should provide little to no benefit at all. Those, I think, cropped up around 1.2. The first ones were the 40k and 4 million donations to "the war effort."

 

[Eminor]

Good suggestions - agree with the more missions (and more mission varieties).

Spoiler

• Missions involving cargo scanning

1. Rival needs commodity X to meet a deadline; make sure their expected shipment of commodity X doesn't reach station Y.
2. A batch of illegal good X is expected at X at Station Y at time Z, find out who the courier is.

• Missions involving using the discovery scanner / missions for explorers
• etc...

 

[Kalisti]

Great suggestions bacalao