This has been an absolutely MISERABLE experience

Richter Belmont

Richter Belmont
Missions - especially Spec Ops-like missions - need a serious overhaul.

This single mission took me nearly three days to finish, and I regret ever even thinking about trying Spec Ops missions.

  1. They pay absolute JACK for the fact that you will incur a serious bounty on yourself, plus a pretty high notoriety (4 in my case). All this locking you completely out of the system you do these missions. Which is kinda weird, since a lot of these missions target in-system factions. This means you won't be able to rearm in the same system, and oftentimes not even in some systems near the target one, since the same factions could operate in adjacent systems.
  2. The absolute WORST part about this was that there were literally NO targets for me to complete the mission in a time I would even remotely view as "worth it". Like I mentioned, it took me something like 2.5 days to finish it, and the miserable part was that the best way to find targets was to relog over and over and over again at a Nav Beacon. This resulted in something nearing 100 relogs.
THIS IS A HORRIBLE DESIGN

I will never touch these missions again.

For me to even consider it again, this exact mission would have to pay at least 100 million credits. I will not do this mission for 50m. It is simply just not worth it, and the time I lost doing this (because I do feel obliged to finish missions I accept, and I consider myself very grind tolerant) was nowhere near "well spent"; I did not have fun at all.

  1. There is literally zero variety in terms of what is a pirate and what is civilian. This just seems like extreme laziness on FDEV part. Civilians I found for this mission all behaved like a normal target with "Wanted" tag. They just aimlessly started to fight back and not even responded with any lines of text. I literally felt like I was just hunting pirates who were basically just punishing me for shooting at them, since I got a bounty incurred and I was "the bad guy".
Why would anyone want to do these missions when killing pirates feels literally the same, and yields INCOMPARABLY better rewards?
 

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g0oglyeyes

g0oglyeyes
Honestly, some of the available options don't make much sense from an authority-power-fantasy point of view and only exist for roleplay purposes. Exhibit A would be the "Spec Ops" and "Wetwork" missions, which are clearly marked as illegal. It says it pays 50 million in 1 go, but requires you to gib 50+ clean civvies. It's simply not worth the grief unless you're executing these missions in an anarchy system, which is possible in theory but I've not personally found. It wasn't enticing for me when the best I could afford was a Vulture and it sure didn't sweeten up any further now I own a fleet carrier and billions in the pocket.

As far as I can tell, these are pretty much there as FDev's way of saying "cOmE tO tHe DaRkSiDe" but you also plainly see that they did not commit to this flavor of play. The fines, bounty, notoriety, and detention system all serve as a way to reinforce playing clean. For pirates and scoundrels to truly be viable as an alternative profession, a parallel system needs to be in place that actually rewards having a gigantic bounty tagged on you. Notoriety should give access to exclusive modules or ships, black market discounts and bonuses, etc.

For example, everyone knows that selling on the black market cuts your revenue by 25% off the top (and that's before factoring in overhead). Increasing notoriety should alleviate this penalty, and actually see a huge margin (say, +200%) when capped out at notoriety 10. Remember that while this seems excessive, actually maintaining notoriety 10 takes effort as it decreases by 1 per hour of in-game time. Also, to take advantage of it fully you will be stacking trade as a pirate while being hunted. This is but one suggestion. There's plenty else that can be done to make the ol' cops n' robbers dynamic more engaging. I just don't think FDev will be able to commit resources to it for the foreseeable time being since they have already announced that the ongoing project is player colonization.
 
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