Suggestion: Difficulty indicator for missions

[peteuplink]

Elite Dangerous is a nice relaxing game, but just occasionally I'd love for it to feel a bit more action packed. Sure, I get a small number of interactions with NPC's. But, most of the time, my gameplay consists of take mission > fly to destination > hand in mission with very little of anything going on in between flying from point A to B. So how about having missions of various difficulty that the player can select from the mission board? I know we already have the missions ranks, so choosing a merchant trade missions when you're ranked mostly penniless means more risk, but in my experience there doesn't seem to be much difference between on or the other. If the game doesn't spawn an NPC to interdict you, then the mission doesn't have any challenge.

So I'd like to suggest the following change:

The player chooses mission from the mission board as usual, but now they're colour coded to indicate how risky they are.

Green are milk runs, easy with a low risk of interdiction. Low pay.
Yellow are medium risk, longer distance with a moderate chance of interdiction. Medium rate pay.
Red are high risk with a high chance of encountering combat or interdiction. High rate of pay.

That way the player can sort of decide whether or not they want an action packed session or a relaxing session based on the missions they take. It also takes some of the lottery out of missions, which for me always seem to fall on the no interdiction milk run side of things.

it certainly would inject a bit more adventure into the game.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

While I actually like this idea, all it would take is for FD to actually add some "weight" to the Rank of the mission, making Elite missions actually hard, and Harmless missions a milk run.

Like you said, a side from the difference in pay, Harmless to Elite missions can be identical in terms of difficulty. I almost never get a hiccup in any mission, regardless of rank.

So rather than colour coding the mission titles (which looks a bit too gamey to me, sorry!), maybe simple add a small rank icon and text to the end (or beginning) of the mission title...?

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[peteuplink]

Yeah, a rank icon would work just as well. I just went with the colours ideas as it's been used in RPG's for a while to denote which missions are above or below your current level.

Like you said, though, there doesn't seem to be a heck of a lot of difference between a Harmless mission and a higher ranked mission aside from the amount it pays out. The mission do have some red text that says "enemy ship may be sent against you" but they tend to be rarer than hens teeth... I play the game a lot, and have done ever since beta, but after about an hour or two I'm looking for something else to do beside fly from point A to point B. So I figured making mission ranks actually mean something would be a good change.

 

[BurntJello]

Missions are already "ranked" in the mission details, but I support the idea of showing it in the list.

(as has already been pointed out, to bad the "rank" doesn't mean much currently)

 

[The space tyrant]

Plot twist: every mission ranked as ... "dangerous"