My main point was to clear up the long-believed myth about reputation and naval progression. I think the proposed model can give players who want to achieve certain ranks some idea about the amount of work needed so they can make a better decision whether they want to dedicate to the rank grind. I'm not sure whether the current scale of progression is too big. It would take a player like me, between casual and hardcore, more than half year to reach the highest rank in ONE faction, if that player starts after 1.3.01 and doesn't use fast-track method. It may sound okay in the big picture if FD expect players to hang around for more than two years, as I don't think there will be higher ranks in the future updates.
It's definitely a good thing that people now at least have a measure for how much time they can expect to put into it. And, under other circumstances, I might not even consider half a year of doing a mission here and a mission there to be excessive. But the thing is, it wasn't like this for the first
seven months after the game's release. It was changed to be like this after many people had already taken advantage of the old, trivial naval progression. In essence, it's another veteran bonus, and another 'screw you' to new players who missed the easy window and also lack the funds to do the fast track method (assuming that won't be patched out).
Now, for my part, it's not too big a deal. I
am a veteran, and while I didn't do the naval progression in the easy window (I always assumed it was a placeholder, given how superficial it was, and I didn't want to lock myself out of the
real naval progression once they implemented something interesting), I do have the means to do the fast track method if I want to. But what if I was a new player, who didn't have 30 million to spare? Why should they be forced through a half-year grind which a large portion of the player population were allowed, for over half a year, to go through in a week or less? If the change was less extreme, and especially if it was a change towards harder, more involved and interesting missions, rather than simply
more of them, it wouldn't really matter - that would count as an improvement, a missing feature finally implemented. It WAS too easy before (hence why I assumed it was unfinished), but this way of progressing is exactly the same as before, still technically easy, just far slower and far, FAR more boring. It's the kind of change I'd have expected back during the beta, but not in the released game. And it's another one of those 'percieved injustices' that others have posted about on this forum, that do a great job at just making people angry and disillusioned.
So, what should they do? If you ask me, rip out the entire system. All of it. Then hand-craft a set of long and involved progression missions for each rank, with a set of requirements to be able to get each - these could be based on Pilot's Federation rankings, faction reputations, number of
recently completed missions (to show that you're an active supporter), and/or many other things - and if there was a little grind involved in meeting the pre-reqs, that would be ok, but not six months worth. But the main barrier to progression should not be meeting the prerequisites, but being able to complete the missions. At the higher ranks, they should be long, involved and difficult. I wouldn't mind missions that took several hours each and posed a real risk of failure due to the opposition involved, or caused you to tank your reputation with an opposing power due to the actions you had to take. Remember the missions from Frontier? You had to photograph secret installations, bomb bases, and complete other actually difficult tasks to get the medals.
Obviously, plantary missions are out for the time being, but we could have:
- Missions to gather close-range photography on well-defended installations, where you'd need either a mastery of stealth or evasive flying to get in and out in one piece
- Missions to sabotage capital ships by delivering a specialized limpet mine to a specific subsystem
- False-flag assasination missions where your target is in a well defended convoy, where your ship is fitted with a fake transponder to play out two other factions against each other
- Missions based on the existing conflict zone and RES mechanics but with power-specific goals and opposition, and spawned specifically for the progression missions
- And anything else the imagination can come up with
In short - make it interesting, make it relevant, make it feel like you're actually taking part in a cold-war faction struggle. Right now, it's still the same placeholder system we have had since naval progression was first implemented, it's just been changed to severely disadvantage anyone who is late to the party.
