Why is the Mission system so static?

[TheSisko]

Missions for Powerplay? Nope.

Missions to retrieve lost SLF crew? Nope (yeah, I know, in the Beta we can buy them back via the rebuy screen but still).

Missions for the new BSG states in the Beta? No, according to what I've read in the Beta forum.

Does the current system makes it that hard to add new mission types? Does it need to be replaced with something more......flexible and dynamic? Will we get new missions for Space Legs? Will I stop asking questions?

 

[ThatSmileyGuy]

While i would not cross my fingers for any official response i'd love to have aforementioned ideas implemented. Buying back crew kind of dumbs down having more of them for me 'just in case'.
These are not necessarily new ideas but ones i, personally, would like introduced.

Have a thumbs up cookie.

 

[TheSisko]

While i would not cross my fingers for any official response i'd love to have aforementioned ideas implemented. Buying back crew kind of dumbs down having more of them for me 'just in case'.
These are not necessarily new ideas but ones i, personally, would like introduced.

Have a thumbs up cookie.

Thanks (yum!)

Yeah, I'd love a search and rescue mission to get back a lost crewmember, the proposed fix to buy them back just feels, I dunno, easy? Its like a quick fix instead of coding a mission type/template for it, which would be 10x better for immersion and gameplay.

 

[Tikanderoga]

That would require some handcrafted missions, and we all know this game doesn't cater to that. You get your cookie cutter missions and you have to be happy with that.

I'd love to see the smuggle missions back. Or even better, smuggle Thargoid stuff. Paid a lot, damaged a lot, I failed, I had fun.

 

[Jmanis]

I'll come back to this later, but a key limiting factor is the ~100 mission limit for board generation, the incredibly large amount of mission types it needs to offer, and the relatively low impact states have on the core type of mission available.

Short version; we need boards for mission sub-types like trade, combat, criminal etc. just like we do for the passenger boards.

Additionally: the lack of state specific activities with the new states was a big concern i flagged in beta.

Essentially, they just cause some market effects, and (apparently) have some consequences of you don't do basic activities (bounty hunt or trade) which are available regardless of state. I get the feel it's FDs attempt to make negative states such as famine/ lockdown, rather than rebalance player activities for causing negative states.

 

[metatheurgist]

Because they thought it'd be better to spend resources on squadrons, fleet carriers, pmfs, powerplay and other multiplayer guff instead of improving basic game mechanics.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

It didn't use to be. See 2.1-2.3.

The way they had it implemented though resulted in zero mission in certain economies and I'm sure noobs complained.

When they turned off mission stacking by increasing the target distance, any purpose to check the board at another station vanished.

The only purpose to the mission board right now that I can tell is to get allied with minor factions and increase the rewards. I really miss in bubble exploration. I spent hundreds of hours making lists of potential candidate stations for stacking mission types and had a blast finding my personal gold mines. It actually worked too, as in you could find them. Wasn't just placebo.

EDIT: Somewhat recently I did some sampling to see if I was just incorrect about today's mission board. There's so much overlap in what is spawned per economy + government permutation there's no value in the notion anymore.

 

[Soron Silin]

My take on SLF crew is that you are buying insurance (in the same backward way we do for the ship) that installs an extra escape pod. So if you pay then you did have a pod and if you didn't, you didn't bother. In the latter case there would be nothing to search and rescue. In the former, your NPC wakes up on a station just like you do.

That's not to say there isn't a place for it, but I don't quite see how it would work. I think a lot of players would just want it like in the beta; they wouldn't want the fiddle and grind. If that's an option, then how do you justify another option where you have to go out and scoop them?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

It didn't use to be. See 2.1-2.3.

The way they had it implemented though resulted in zero mission in certain economies and I'm sure noobs complained.

This, basically.

A "dynamic" mission board system which responds more strongly to BGS states, markets, nearby systems, local events, etc. than the current one does will inevitably lead to some systems and some factions within systems getting better missions than others on a permanent or semi-permanent basis.

The losers from that will complain louder than the winners will be happy.

Simultaneously making the missions meaningfully dynamic while at the same time keeping a reasonable selection for the players who don't care about the dynamism but just want to do a couple of a certain type of missions is going to be very tricky.

And the more dependencies it has on local conditions, the more chance of really weird outcomes in at least some of the 20,000 systems at least some of the time, which can't possibly be tested for in advance but the size of the player base guarantees will be found within weeks.

Same problem with making the economy sim more detailed and dynamic.
Players: the economy sim should reflect supply and demand more realistically. What we have now is boring.
Frontier: okay, we've enabled basic supply/demand effects on prices for core gems so their prices vary depending on how many have been sold.
(Mostly other) Players: nerf! doom! this is terrible! How am I supposed to afford to use A-rated Cutters as bookmarks now?!
Actual dynamic supply and demand would make the trade system an unprofitable mess for most casual players.

 

[Jmanis]

A "dynamic" mission board system which responds more strongly to BGS states, markets, nearby systems, local events, etc. than the current one does will inevitably lead to some systems and some factions within systems getting better missions than others on a permanent or semi-permanent basis.

But this is already well and truly the case with the current system (and always has been, since 2.1 dropped), and FD have been constantly firefighting these cases, and there's heaps of permanent conditions around the galaxy... not even in outlier systems, just smack in the middle of the bubble where the conditions are right.

 

[Garand1987]

While i would not cross my fingers for any official response i'd love to have aforementioned ideas implemented. Buying back crew kind of dumbs down having more of them for me 'just in case'.
These are not necessarily new ideas but ones i, personally, would like introduced.

Have a thumbs up cookie.

Yeah the buy back is kinda too basic I think. I had suggested in the beta that to involve the player more, or even other players you could go and retrieve their pods or post a reward on a separate mission board for other players to retrieve for you (not unlike the systems most wanted list that currently exists.)

 

[govny]

Will I stop asking questions?

maybe you could ask your question to the dev team.
sorry but Your post make no sense.

 

[Nasc]

Why is the Mission system so static?

Been rubbing its feet on the carpet.

 

[Marklar_]

I've never liked the mission system, it's basically just a bunch of fetch quests. It's better than it used to be, but I'd love to see a real quest system with a good story and long mision arcs.

I miss the old fed/imp faction missions where you had to kill an NPC with the ship you were trying to get rank for in order to get that rank, that was cool.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

This, basically.

A "dynamic" mission board system which responds more strongly to BGS states, markets, nearby systems, local events, etc. than the current one does will inevitably lead to some systems and some factions within systems getting better missions than others on a permanent or semi-permanent basis.

The losers from that will complain louder than the winners will be happy.

Simultaneously making the missions meaningfully dynamic while at the same time keeping a reasonable selection for the players who don't care about the dynamism but just want to do a couple of a certain type of missions is going to be very tricky.

And the more dependencies it has on local conditions, the more chance of really weird outcomes in at least some of the 20,000 systems at least some of the time, which can't possibly be tested for in advance but the size of the player base guarantees will be found within weeks.

Same problem with making the economy sim more detailed and dynamic.
Players: the economy sim should reflect supply and demand more realistically. What we have now is boring.
Frontier: okay, we've enabled basic supply/demand effects on prices for core gems so their prices vary depending on how many have been sold.
(Mostly other) Players: nerf! doom! this is terrible! How am I supposed to afford to use A-rated Cutters as bookmarks now?!
Actual dynamic supply and demand would make the trade system an unprofitable mess for most casual players.

A learning curve means you just have to learn it..

All of elites dumb status quos are the result of absense of knowledge.... what about this:

Vet players: Elite isn't hard, theres just no tutorials in the game.
Frontier: Okay, well just turn the system off.

Still they've flipped this year so theres just a backlog of systems to describe and to undo the mess they made when they were designing by social media reviews. Ive never played them, but i can imagine the game systems in those empire building rts arent trivial. I can't imagine they don't have tutorials.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Still they've flipped this year so theres just a backlog of systems to describe and to undo the mess they made when they were designing by social media reviews. Ive never played them, but i can imagine the game systems in those empire building rts arent trivial. I can't imagine they don't have tutorials.

I think there's three big differences, though:

1) A proper economic-management / city-builder / 4X game has an interface designed for doing mass operations and comparisons - things like multiple windows and subwindows, menus, mouse control, overviews, alerts, etc. You can collate and focus on the information important to you. In Elite Dangerous that view space is largely taken up by flying the spaceship, and the interfaces are optimised for joystick/controller (and at the very least have to work with one) while being readable at the lowish resolutions of VR.

2) Most of these games do have tutorials and also campaigns with carefully done difficulty curves, which gradually introduce all the aspects. In Elite Dangerous, sure, they could do a tutorial or two about how the mission system or economy worked ... but then you'd basically be thrown into highly competitive multiplayer.

3) It doesn't matter too much if an edge case or two gets left in a single player game - if you can bring down an economy by building three shoe shops too close together, it would be a bit strange but people would quickly learn not to do that. In Elite Dangerous people would be building shoe shops all over the place. See for example the mess that Planet Zoo's multiplayer economy has ended up in.

If Frontier released an economic/fleet management game set in the Elite universe, I'd probably buy a copy. But I don't think bolting it on to a spaceflight game will work. (It probably depends if you liked the X series or not, and I didn't)

 

[Jmanis]

... See for example the mess that Planet Zoo's multiplayer economy has ended up in.

Coincidentally, this is virtually the state void opals (and consequently, the rest of of the game) are in right now, which is why that's getting fixed. Funny read btw...it's warthogs, all the way down!

 

[Jmanis]

I've never liked the mission system, it's basically just a bunch of fetch quests. It's better than it used to be, but I'd love to see a real quest system with a good story and long mision arcs.

Unfortunately, you'll never get that without a major overhaul of the entire mission system. It's not simply a case of "adding some long missions with good story".

 

[Dommarraa]

Unfortunately, you'll never get that without a major overhaul of the entire mission system. It's not simply a case of "adding some long missions with good story".

Thinking another rewrite would make any meaningful difference is pretty delusional.
#1. Make missions match States + tip offs. "This change will allow scope for fantastic new functionality"
#2. Chain missions. "This change will allow scope for fantastic new functionality"
#3. Wing missions. "This change will allow scope for fantastic new functionality"
#4. Separate mission servers. "This change will allow scope for fantastic new functionality"

And I am sure there was another one, but I can't remember what it was supposed to do.

 

[Jmanis]

Thinking another rewrite would make any meaningful difference is pretty delusional.
#1. Make missions match States + tip offs. "This change will allow scope for fantastic new functionality"
#2. Chain missions. "This change will allow scope for fantastic new functionality"
#3. Wing missions. "This change will allow scope for fantastic new functionality"
#4. Separate mission servers. "This change will allow scope for fantastic new functionality"

And I am sure there was another one, but I can't remember what it was supposed to do.

.... ok? Genuinely unsure what your point is with that... but I'll give it a crack, edit inbound...

I won't go in to bat for Wing missions and separate mission servers, they're certainly not changes I would've suggested.

State-related missions, tip offs and chain missions should provide great new functionality. FD just seem completely loathe to take full advantage of the systems those mechanics offer, and I really can't understand why.

Though realistically, none of those really have much to do with why it'd take an entire overhaul of mission mechanics to make "long, story-based quests" work. Most of the player base don't seem to understand the current limitations.