As it is now, the Assassination mission gives very little reward, very large faction standing penalties, and is pretty easy. It's supposed to be a high level mission, but it doesn't fit that very well.

I'd suggest giving a much higher reward, as befits a high level mission. 1000 combat XP at the least, possibly as much as 5000. It should also give a much larger faction standing boost than it does now (especially as it will make the player KOS with the other nation, and the player risks losing standing if he fails the mission). It should also pay at least twice what it does now.

Or course, it needs to be more challenging than it is right now (it's so easy right now it's not even funny), in order to be deserve its reward. I'd suggest changing the target of the assassination. Rather than any one station guard in each of the other nations, it should be one specific Marshal (and there should only be one target for the mission, not two). The mission should NOT tell the player where the Marshal is, finding that out is part of the mission. Also, unlike the station guards, the Marshals should not move away from the station to attack KOS players. That should both make the mission more difficult, and also address another aspect of the current mission that bothers me: why does my nation want me to go kill random station guards? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Marshals are make much more sense, maybe even have part of the mission description be "*Marshal <So-and-so> has placed numerous bounties on people in our nation. Go and express our extreme displeasure with him."
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In fact, that'd be a cool way to determine if the assassination mission is available: have it so that for each 3 bounties that Nation1 sets on Nation2 characters, Nation2 offers an assassination mission against Nation1. So if Itan has placed 3 bounties on Serco players, there will be a Serco assassination mission to kill an Itani Marshal. If before the Marshal is assassinated Itan places another 3 bounties on Serco players, a second assassination mission becomes available, and so on.
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Corvus should also offer assassination missions against Marshals of all three nation factions.

I'd also like to see mutually exclusive Assassin badges for the three nations (and Corvus, if Corvus offers Assassination missions). That is, there should be three (four, with Corvus) seperate Assassin badges, one for each nation, with seperate rewards, and characters should only be able to earn ONE of these Assassin badges. They should require successfully completing 25 assassination missions, and should give access to a new weapon (each faction with an assassination medal should have its own weapon for the medal).

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Also, there should be a counter-assassination mission. Whenever a player takes an assassination mission, then the station that the targetted Marshal is at should offer the counter-assassination mission. For each player that takes the counter-assassination mission, the rewards for successfully completing the assassination mission doubles. The objective for the counter-assassination mission is to kill the player on the assassination mission - but the counter-assassination mission should not tell who that is.
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Yes! This would be really fun.

Dear sweet merciful Go...Devs! That would be a GREAT first use O' zee new editor!! LET IT BE :D

the counter-objective part will be exploitable, unless the punishment for failing is pretty steep. :-(

Eh, true. I hadn't thought about that. See, in my head nobody uses exploits, so they don't matter. Too bad it's not like that outside my head. I'd still like to have the counter-assassination mission, but it would need to give a much smaller bonus to the assassination mission upon a successful assassination, and it would need to give a penalty for failing the counter-assassination mission.

Like if you fail your demoted fro some time and can't get the mission again for like 3 days or some thing. You failed your nation and all that after all.

Or you could lose faction.

Bumpsy, 'cause I wants it, my precious....

Yarrrrrrrr. Sound great

Hi,

assassination is an intresting mission. The way how to finish the mission should be different for different targets.

Here is a bunch of possibilities. You can:
1) simply ambush the convoy and destroy everything. (brute force for teams)
1a) with special equipment destroy only the targets ship in the caravan (mines or pumas on the caravans route, rocket, XXLong range sniper cannon, jettisoned cargo explodes on targets ship)
2) construct a fake message to lure the target to a quiet place and ... *grin*
2a) construct a fake message that causes that the guards (or nearest bots)attack the target.
2b) with fake documents became convoy guard and kill
3) deliver a spec package to the target (poison, bomb, NPC commando team)
4) deliver a spec package to destroy the whole base where the target is

A simple delivery looks dull but if you have to deliver the package to a well guarded fortress then it could be very hard.

Regards,

Darkwood

Yeah. Or, you know, the OP's suggestion. Which is, of course, exacltly like yours...