It's kind of strange how the profit from an escort mission is so finicky. Sometimes because a convoy just happens to be carrying alot plasma cannon Mk II's, your cut of the profits for that mission is... not so much to brag about, while other times you score big for doing just about nothing. Some details are in this thread. Welp, I've got a starting idea, and the suggestions forums have been pretty hot as of late, so hopefully something interesting will abound of it.

Convoy missions would be worked out in tiers based on the estimated value of the goods on board. Something like I, II, and III would probably be enough. Players could have a little more control, since they could choose to guard a "rich" convoy, or a "poor" convoy. The upside to going on a richer escort mission is of course the better pay. The downside is on these types of missions, losing the cargo would be a much more terrible things, and so one's reputation (faction) would be on the line, whereas your employer's might not be so hasty to fault you if the convoy you lost was carrying smelly shoes.

These suggestions were moved from the General Test New Escort Missions thread:

vIsitor; "@momerath:
You could solve the problem rather easily simply by only having convoys go from places that sell x or y widget at a relatively low price, to (friendly) stations that actually need such items. For example, a mining station would naturally sell ore, and a manufacturing station would naturally have a demand for ore, etc.
This would go a long way towards the planned dynamic economy, I should think
P.S. You already have a 'Top Trade Items' thing in the news, why not use that as a reference?"

avirulence; "Hehe Surbius, I had the same problem yesterday and reported that to Momerath.
On the rewards: When profits are low, is there a standard amount of 1000 credits? I did an escort from deneb to eo and got 35000 credits and from eo to setalli and got 1000.
This is not a solution for the low profits problem, but perhaps you can add something that makes it more 'exciting': Give escorts a percentage of profits, say 25% and give an indication of how much that will be before the mission starts (that makes sense, taking a mission before you know what you will make doesn't really). On top of that, when you encounter pirates or hive bots, for every kill you get a higher percentage of profits (maximized at the amount it is now, or slightly higher)
I thought mission rewards were based on how dangerous a route was? Perhaps you should vary profit shares based upon how the last time went when that faction sent a convoy on that route.
That would certainly make it more exciting, especially if you give a classification to the mission:
*Piece of Cake --> standard payment 10% of profits
*Normal --> standard payment of 15% of profits
*Dangerous --> standard payment of 20% of profits
And make the *Dangerous escort mission restricted to the more advanced players (based on combat, light and heavy weapons licenses, or perhaps on Hive hunter/ Pirate hunter medals)
I think it is important that people want to keep on taking these kind of missions and for that, we need more variation. After the first couple of times I took an escort mission I got bored, since they are all the same. When you have different classifications for escort missions you can also incorporate pirate threat into this mission system:
-Easy: 1 out of 10 convoys gets attacked by 1 or 2 pirates
-Normal: 1 out of 5 convoys gets attacked by 1 or 2 pirates
-Hard: 1 out of 3 convoys gets attacked by 2 or 3 pirates
When players take the Hard escort mission, in the corvus stations new missions should appear: Bring us the cargo from that convoy!
Of course, most of these suggestions would only apply to grey space convoys, but I think that in nation space there could be other threats: think of elite attack squadrons that have as a goal the disruption of Serco trading. Send a couple of valks/ibgs after a Serco convoy in Serco space, making nation space trading a little bit more exciting. (I known nation space should be safer, but still, there is a war). I'm sure that those missions (the elite attack squadron missions) would be very interesting to the ones of us in a military guild. (Vise versa, itani convoys could be attacked by serco prom/svg squadrons)
Momerath, you were talking a while ago about having strike force missions for players, wouldn't such missions provide the ideal goal: to eliminate the attack squadrons before they can destroy a convoy. This strike force mission would be separate of the escort mission of course, which is good, since this would provide more variation already.
As a counterpart for these nation space missions, we can have a pirate hunting squad mission in grey space: think a 'viper guild mission': "Sign up now and rid the universe of a severe threat!" In this mission, you should track down pirates whose location is known at the time of taking the mission and whose destination has been revealed by a spy or something..
Let me know what you think..
--aVirulence"

Another topic to be watched by the Player Contribution Corps.

I agree that listing the potential value on the mission when selecting it would be good.

Rewards need some adjusting. Getting cash up the wazoo but hardly any faction. Did a 2 jump escort mission last night and go over 600,000c but only 3 faction points. (from +158 to +161)

As escorts are the only way to raise abysmal standing for non-nation factions, I'd prefer the pay to be substantially cut down and the faction standings gain to be substantially enhanced.

I'm still recovering from -998 Tunguska. I'm at -971 now, all done by those f*ing escorts, one miserable point at a time.

Killing bots in an area with non faction stations could possibly help to increase standing with them, perhaps?