The penalties for failing a mission are too onerous

[Penumbra]

So I had a mission to disable a power plant, managed to get into the plant by murdering a few techs so they wouldn't witness me, but then got caught while waiting for the power to go down so I could nab the power distributor thingy. Not sure how to complete this mission without murdering half the base first, but whatever.

So I wake up in a cell a few systems away, but I can't get a shuttle to the mission site, probably because my ship is blocking the pad, so I shuttle to a spaceport nearby. I get there and find I still have a bounty, so first try going to another station but it's the same story. I hand myself in again, only to be spit out in the same station. I still can't get my ship because the port doesn't have a shipyard. I'm now trying to land on a port on the same planet as the mission, and hopefully I can either get my ship transferred there or maybe I can recall it?

This system really needs some work. I've spent more time travelling by Apex than I spent on the mission, maybe I should have gone on a slow and time-consuming stealth murder spree?

Also, a 3600 Cr bounty for killing 3 people? How about making the power tool discharge a non-lethal takedown? Or introducing some non-lethal weapons? I don't see the immersion in murdering a bunch of people just to sabotage a power plant, surely there must be a way to do this without killing?

Update: waiting 5 mins for my ship to be transferred at a cost of 39k Cr. 10 times the amount I paid in bounties for killing 3 people... FDev please have criminals' ships transferred to the prison with them....

Update 2: so I still have a 3500Cr bounty, despite going to prison and handing myself in again. So I fly to a system with an Interstellar Factor and they don't have any record of it... (edit: relogging fixed this, gg FDev)

 

[Zac Cocken]

Thanks for the feedback, it's been noted.

 

[alexzk]

I don't see the immersion in murdering a bunch of people just to sabotage a power plant, surely there must be a way to do this without killing?

Well...problem is, they WILL die for sure without power on that rock. So stealing their generator you do kill them no matter now or a bit later. That's why they so "over react".

 

[who?]

Important to note - your ship won't stay on the planet if you die. Just like your ship auto-launches into "orbit" when you travel too far away in the SRV, if you die and get transported away your ship won't just sit there. (Probably for technical reasons - everything in the game is either managed by a player in the instance or procedurally generated; if Cmdrs leave ships lying about the place there's no trivial way to track them all. Also for gameplay reasons - you don't want players leaving ships on pads in PG/Open and potentially blocking them for other users).

Best approach would be to go to a station with Inter Astra (big stations, not outposts) and transfer the ship there, or take an Apex to any planet surface and recall the ship there.

 

[Penumbra]

Important to note - your ship won't stay on the planet if you die. Just like your ship auto-launches into "orbit" when you travel too far away in the SRV, if you die and get transported away your ship won't just sit there. (Probably for technical reasons - everything in the game is either managed by a player in the instance or procedurally generated; if Cmdrs leave ships lying about the place there's no trivial way to track them all. Also for gameplay reasons - you don't want players leaving ships on pads in PG/Open and potentially blocking them for other users).

Best approach would be to go to a station with Inter Astra (big stations, not outposts) and transfer the ship there, or take an Apex to any planet surface and recall the ship there.

Well, evidence suggests otherwise, as when I booked the shuttle I chose where my ship was as the destination, which turned out to be the same planet the mission was on, and the only port that was blocked was the one where I had the mission.

 

[ratava]

In my case, the apex shuttle was magically replaced by my ship when I took a taxi back from prison. (Got caught trying to clone a profile. Cost me 600cr in fines and 30000 in taxi fares. We need more training missions, I had no idea what I was doing!)

 

[Grumpy Tanky]

100% agree...

The fines are game destroying for me... I own ED, Horizons and now Odyssey, when I bought ED back in 2014, this is not what I paid for...

It's as bad as real life, like parking ticket bad... and now I have zero reason to play this game as the penalties are far, far too steep.

The servers crashing and CTD have cost me over 400,000 in game credits... On top of that I got fines for doing nothing wrong on legal missions... I didn't steal anything, I didn't clone ID's all I had to do was pickup a legal object in a crate, boom fines... Give your heads a wobble...

For me this is over a week of grinding to pay off in-game fines. I play solo and can't commit to 8 hours a day of grinding... How is this fun for any sane human being... I may as well go work overtime at my real job and use that time making real money... Because both are equally "fun", but at least the real job pays real money which I can then use to go to the pub...

After this poo there is zero incentive to play this game as the penalty is far too high and outweighs the fun factor by a million percent...

Boooooooooooooooooooo... A million thumbs down... Boooooo!

 

[Sgt Pepper]

A lot of this echoes my experience.

I'm all for having to learn and 'git gud' but the problem is the game doesn't feel it gives you the scope to really practice and hone your gameplay, one slight mistake can result in death and botching the mission.

The fines and bounty system seems ridiculous, I paid some off at the prison, only to find they're still outstanding in my transactions tab.

ESO handles this far better, when one first commits a crime there will be "heat", the duration of which depends on the severity of the crime.

During this time, you are kill on sight as far as guards are concerned but it decreases if you get to a safe spot and wait it out.

Once the heat dies down, the bounty is still there but now I can walk to any guard and pay it (there are other options but for sake of comparing to EDO, this is the really relevant method).

Making fines and bounties easier to pay would help.

Having things be more forgiving would be nice too.

Let's take guard scans, example. Easy to miss a guard requesting a scan. Instead of them turning hostile in seconds, have them run up to me, point their gun at me and shout "Hey, I told you to stop!"

If I continue to run then, okay, it would now make sense for them to turn hostile.

Or, if I am caught in a low level but off limits area? Maybe have the guards escort me out, at least the first time I am caught there.

And yes, non-lethal options are definitely required.

 

[Giftmacher]

I do wonder how we ended up with a game release where all the first tier weaponry and armour is terrible, the missions you need to go on to upgrade set a whole army on you and then fine you a number of times over. This of course assumes you can get a mission within 21k lightyears of you. It's just bizarre to do most of the mission, have NPCs turn up and swarm you resulting in jail, 100k in fines and >20k in transport fees because your ship needs retrieving.

I think this bugs me more than the actual bugs. It's not even a learning curve if you have no hope of getting the gear to survive. Catch 22 was meant to be satire.

 

[Salen]

That was my problem with ground missions as well.
The first time I did some ground missions, I got 3. The first one was a simple pick up some stuff, and go. Mission 2 though was another pick up some stuff mission, but this time, the Crate #11 didn't spawn; 1-10 spawned, as well as #12, but no #11. So I left to go restart a settlement. At which point a bunch of badguys showed up, and I was forced to leave because they were gunna kill me otherwise. So I abandoned the 2 missions, and got fined 100,000 cred each. The second mission only was paying 50ish-k in credits, but because a crate didn't spawn, it cost me 100,000 bucks.

Only way I do ground missions now is with an SRV, because otherwise you get overwhelmed being solo.

So much for ground legs and ground combat. "Use the ship-carried Humvee and mow them down with the 50cal on top" doesn't exactly scream "new gameplay" in Elite.

 

[Djerk Ard]

So I wake up in a cell a few systems away,

Not immersion breaking at all, at all. This takes around 5 to 10 seconds to happen. The trip back, around five minutes. For all those asking for flight time reductions, this is definitely the way to do it.

 

[Penumbra]

Well...problem is, they WILL die for sure without power on that rock. So stealing their generator you do kill them no matter now or a bit later. That's why they so "over react".

Well, you make a fair point, although I'd have thought there'd be some emergency protocols in place for such a situation on any base. There's usually enough energy cells around to keep a few people alive until Apex arrives

My problems with the missions is the steep difficulty curve. I'm sure there's lots of mods I could equip later to make the job easier (I'm guessing some sort of stealth cloaking might be waiting down the engineer grind...?) but I feel there are too many hostiles for a start, 10 is way too many, maybe 3-5? I had one mission at a military base where 2 dropships flew in with about 6 hostiles each, to add to those already there, and they kept on alert with shields up all the time (in a no-fire zone) so I just had to run in and run out with no time for exploring and looting. Why on earth don't the bases defenses help out once you've powered them back up? Then the number of hostiles might make sense.

An alternative might be just to excuse mission runners from the no-fire policy, seeing as we're there to help out. Slapping us with 100k fines for shooting seems off when most of the scavs I've encountered don't have more than 20k bounties and they've done plenty of shooting already!

Then there's the zero tolerance policy on scans and trespass - I like @Sgt Pepper's ideas above, especially there idea of having some sort of cool-off period when you can make yourself scarce for a while and reset the aggro.

 

[Dimensions]

I've been trying out scavenger and restore power missions, and I think the problem is the AI is very overtuned compared with the Phase 3 version of Alpha. So dying a lot doing missions seems to be the norm. It's quite a frustrating experience and not fun, which is a pity as the gameplay is pretty good. Either player weapons were nerfed, probably to accommodate engineering, or the npcs were made tougher including having the psychic ability to know where you are even when you don't. Stealth kills help when the stun doesn't bug out and totally fails to do any damage presumable acting as if their shield is up when it isn't. This in turn aggros the npc and the whole base.

 

[Elkarus]

So I abandoned the 2 missions, and got fined 100,000 cred each. The second mission only was paying 50ish-k in credits, but because a crate didn't spawn, it cost me 100,000 bucks.

Same. A 100000 Cr penalty for a mission around the same reward!? just what!

And I completed a thread 0 'legal mission' that I had to collect something from a crate in a building with high authorization level. I'd abandoned it if it wasn't for the penalty. I had to copy an authorization, sneak to the building and open the crate and leave... It worked well but it could go so wrong for a mission of ~50k Cr...

 

[Marzyx]

I'd hazard a guess that the mission payouts are so low and fine/bounty numbers are so high because they intended to adjust them later, based on player feedback. They did adjust a lot of payouts late last year, and before then many things aside from mining didn't pay particularly high amounts either. The rewards credit-wise for on-foot missions currently aren't that far off of what they were in the alpha, and nowhere near as large of a range as on ship missions get.

That said, the numbers definitely feel imbalanced currently. Just imagine how long it would take to fully fit out, or even just buy a medium or large ship at these rates. An Asp Explorer is 6.6mil. A cutter costs over 200 mil base. I'm not sure I've seen a single Odyssey mission pass 400k payout yet, including the ones to
Colonia from the bubble (a distance multiplier somewhere must not be on, nor a mission distance limiter with how many we're getting that far off). At the very least it would make more sense for the fine to be 50k if you lost the item failing the mission, and 100k if you abandoned it with the item still in your inventory (essentially stealing it), and setting the sale price of it to a bartender at 25k (currently 50k), or 18k if it's illegal/stolen (black market 25% cut). The fine is partly there to deter exploits, but with how messed up the credit economy is already, it's entirely possible to spend more than that 100k on just ship repairs and re-arm in some cases, or get that in less than 30 mins in a stock Cobra. And that
murdering a clean ship is only 5k.

Odyssey in it's current state may as well be a poorly-executed, paid, early Beta. Which is ridiculous considering full price, it's $70 total for the base game and expansion, with micro transactions.

 

[Tobias Indigo]

I just tackled a Power Up mission. On the way I got a message to say there were Scavengers there and would I kindly get rid of them. It also said this was optional with an extra reward so I thought if there’s a only a few I can dodge them and just get on with powering up the settlement , except when I landed it said there were 10!!! So I lifted off and landed a few 100 metres away and took a Scarab, (you can’t use a Scarab if you’re docked on a proper pad)
I knocked out the Scavengers with the Scarab. Doing this showed another example of the unresonable weapon power the NPCs carry around the settlements. They were quickly knocking off my shield and reducing my Scarab hull faster than normal skimmers and turrets do.

Anyway, I got on with the real job of getting the power up, which was a bit tough given this settlement was on the dark side of the planet and it was one of the PWR buildings attached to and entered via the CMD centre. Having wondered around the CMD centre in the dark only helped by my one candle power flashlight, I found it and did the job and up came the lights, I had a peek in a couple of lockers in there and then went out to the entrance of the CMD centre to be confronted by two of the skimmery things and a bunch of commandos shooting like a firing squad and chucking grenades into the entrance. I thought this was more Scavengers but no, when I finally succumbed the redeploy screen said I had been done for trespassing. Trespassing, TRESPASSING??

I’d got rid of baddies in the shape of scavengers, because I was asked nicely to do so, and helped the settlement by turning the lights on. For my trouble I was fined 100,000 credits (the mission was worth about 230,000), lost my optional bonus and didn’t get to keep the couple of bits I got from the lockers. To cap it all I had to pay APEX in the detention centre to take me back to collect my ship AND I lost my scarab.

Finally on missions. The other day I looked at a another mission to do a power up and realised it was 21,000ly away. Er..pardon? My Cutter will jump 36ly a go. On a good route that’s about 650 jumps. If I could do a jump a minute (yea right!!) that’s over 10 hours. All very well except the mission timed out at just over 8 hours. And, it was worth a measly 320,00 ish.

This mission stuff needs some more work methinks.

 

[Archonsod]

I'm all for having to learn and 'git gud' but the problem is the game doesn't feel it gives you the scope to really practice and hone your gameplay, one slight mistake can result in death and botching the mission.

The CZ's are a nice risk free way to practice combat. Generally it's not the combat that's the problem for the most part in my experience though (beyond the sometimes ridiculous scaling anyway). It's more the way the AI operates - scanning is excessive. Stand at one end of a corridor where a cop is patrolling and they'll scan you each time they pass more often than not. I can understand the guards being a bit more jumpy around sensitive areas like the power or control hub, but when it's the local bar you'd think a single scan if that would be sufficient.

ESO handles this far better, when one first commits a crime there will be "heat", the duration of which depends on the severity of the crime.

I think I prefer the way the regular ES games handle it; the guards will only use lethal force once the bounty on your head passes a certain threshold. Below that they'll give you the option of paying it off, turning yourself in or trying to resist arrest. It's a bit ridiculous that you can be allied to the settlement one minute, then have everyone trying to gun you down the next just because you got handed a 100Cr fine for trespassing. Though it's equally silly that a guard will hand you a 100Cr fine and then immediately try to kill you to begin with. Why not give me a chance to pay up first?

That said, the numbers definitely feel imbalanced currently. Just imagine how long it would take to fully fit out, or even just buy a medium or large ship at these rates. An Asp Explorer is 6.6mil. A cutter costs over 200 mil base.

Yep. What makes it worse is that it's pretty easy to earn 1 mil in even a low intensity CZ, where Apex will pick you up and drop you off for free and there's absolutely no penalties for dying. Take any other type of ground mission on the other hand and you're lucky if they offer you 200k, even for illegal or riskier missions, and not only do they take a lot longer you're risking far more if you fail (not only the deluge of fines and bounties, but potentially even your ship if it's a military base). It's a shame really, the various missions are quite enjoyable, but as things stand if it wasn't for the fact I need to find mats to upgrade my gear I wouldn't actually bother with them; I can make more money quicker and far more consistently in the Frontline CZ's.

 

[Rageweaver]

Yes, this thread. My experience so far is that the solo experience is largely a penalty. Level 1 mobs seem ok to deal with but as soon as I strike 2 chevron mobs I get shot in the face so easily and I have Grade 2 Dominator suit. In one engagement I got one shot from a NPC sharpshooter! I'm wasting so much time retrieving my ship and apex hoping across the galaxy. I'm sure it will be easier when we grind out engineered gear but boy howdy the road, at this time, is long and costly. FDev please remove/reduce the financial penalty and just make it a faction rep penalty instead and can we just respawn in our ship in orbit or nearest station (with our ship) rather than some remote penal facility. Please, please think quality of life when designing your systems! I'm playing the game but not having much fun right now.

 

[CC | Zefninja]

Yes, this thread. My experience so far is that the solo experience is largely a penalty. Level 1 mobs seem ok to deal with but as soon as I strike 2 chevron mobs I get shot in the face so easily and I have Grade 2 Dominator suit. In one engagement I got one shot from a NPC sharpshooter! I'm wasting so much time retrieving my ship and apex hoping across the galaxy. I'm sure it will be easier when we grind out engineered gear but boy howdy the road, at this time, is long and costly. FDev please remove/reduce the financial penalty and just make it a faction rep penalty instead and can we just respawn in our ship in orbit or nearest station (with our ship) rather than some remote penal facility. Please, please think quality of life when designing your systems! I'm playing the game but not having much fun right now.

Not nitpicking your post, but it does give a good base to detail our experience for NPC combat solo or teamed up. We have no issue killing NPCS even the rank 3 ones HOWEVER the one criticsm is the grenade throwing accuracy of the NPC's. they are able to lob grenades incredibly far and very accurately.

The only balance I would like to see is an algorithm for grenade accuracy the further you are from the NPC in terms of engagement distance.

 

[Sgt Pepper]

I'd hazard a guess that the mission payouts are so low and fine/bounty numbers are so high because they intended to adjust them later, based on player feedback.

I must admit, I thought the payouts would be based on the new mercenary rank but it seems that is just based on killing stuff, completing non-combative missions doesn't increase that rank and lead to better payouts for foot-based missions. Seems I was wrong.

I think I prefer the way the regular ES games handle it; the guards will only use lethal force once the bounty on your head passes a certain threshold. Below that they'll give you the option of paying it off, turning yourself in or trying to resist arrest. It's a bit ridiculous that you can be allied to the settlement one minute, then have everyone trying to gun you down the next just because you got handed a 100Cr fine for trespassing. Though it's equally silly that a guard will hand you a 100Cr fine and then immediately try to kill you to begin with. Why not give me a chance to pay up first?

Ah, that's right, not played Skyrim for some time so couldn't recall what system they had, I am more familiar with ESO, which I currently play.

Either way, Bethesda have implemented two different crime and punishment systems, both of which are way ahead of what we have in this game.