Two instances of breakage in the trade missions in VO:

First, trade missions disappear when you log out. They don't appear to count as failed, though, which is a relief, but if you have to relog, you lose the mission.

Second, faction gains are really broken. The amount(appr'x +7 for every trade mission I complete) seems to be based on the mission being a one-way courier mission to another in-system station.

When a mission requires you go to the next system over, or maybe even several systems away(I've had to travel up to 6 systems to deliver an item), the amount of faction increase/payment don't scale. This means that it's actually more time efficient to re-enter the station until you get a mission asking you to go to a nearby system than it is to take the extra time to do a long-distance mission, because you don't get compensated appropriately.

SHORT trade missions, that require going just to another station in the same system, are perfect how they are.

However, the time for a mission can be measured in terms of the number of jumps you have to do to get to the destination(and back, if it's a retrieval mission instead of a courier mission).

A courier mission is 1 jump in-system, 3 jumps if the destination is in the next system over, and increases 2 more jumps for every extra system that must be traversed.

A retrieval mission is 2 jumps in-system, 6 jumps if the destination is in the next system over, and increases 4 more jumps for every extra system that must be traversed.

This means that, while an intrasystem courier mission(where you just take cargo to another station) gives you +7 faction per jump, a courier mission to the next system over gives you only +2.3 faction per jump.

Or, how about a retrieval mission that makes you travel FIVE systems away? 2 + (5*4) = 22 jumps. In other words, just UNDER +0.3 faction per jump.

No wonder it's taking ~2 HOURS to get a measly +100 faction!

With 11 factions in the game, at 2 hours(and this is a GENEROUS estimate) to gain +100 faction, it would take a UIT trader(who has good reason to want high faction with everyone) approximately TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN HOURS to get up to +800 faction in the game.

I can see getting faction being something that involves some work, but what we're looking at here is FIVE WEEKS(at 40 hours a week), TWO DAYS of SOLID playing, 8 hours a day, without doing anything but trade missions.

Edited in the time needed per week.

I generally get 50-70 faction standing gain per hour... I gave up long ago on getting +600 with all factions. I also pretty much gave up on getting just +600 on Valent...

Coming from Chao, that's a pretty telling statement.

1) I agree that the trade mission rewards should scale with the complexity of the mission.

2) I think the faction gains are fine. You shouldn't be able to become OMG SUPER TRADER in anything less than a couple of months of playing (casually). Furthermore, it should be IMPOSSIBLE to get +800 for all factions. After a point, getting more standing with one faction should cause the standing with the opposing faction to drop. I mean if you're +800 with Serco, the Itani are going to be suspicious of you, and vice versa.

Why?

If I was doing combat missions for the Itani or Serco, sure I'd show up on the other's radar. However, if I'm just doing trade missions deep inside Itani space(or even in grey space, there is one grey system with an Itani base), how are the Serco supposed to know?

Your idea works on the assumption that the Serco or Itani know everything that goes on in the entire universe, which is for obvious reasons a really poor assumption to make.

issue #1 is a bug and a problem, the missions being lost on a dissconnect is annoying.

Issue #2 is not a bug, unless its because the short 1 and 2 jump missions give you TOO MUCH faction gain.

I am definitely with romikq on this one. gaining faction standing is supposed to be a slow process, it SHOULD take a long time to gain standing with everyone.

I also agree that it should be impossible to have positive standing with everyone. As to how they know. -CORPORATE ESPIONAGE- there are spys that tell them.

Gameplay wise being able to gain positive reputation with everyone is a bad idea. The game becomes more interesting if there are polar opposites amoung the factions, I dont object to being neutral with everyone, but having admire with everyone seems silly to me.

If a player has to choose between factions to decide what he/she wants, it adds another level of complexity to the game.

For example, if Corvus is a pirate faction and TGP is a trading faction, and you were required to choose between them, it would make a difference in your play style. Do you take TGP and get the best cargo haulers, or take go with Corvus in order to get more interesting pirate ships?

Dude.
We're not talking about CORP. espionage.

We're talking about factions at war.

The only factions I can see having that sort of opposition are the Serco and the Itani.

There is NO WAY according to the storyline for there to be Serco spies in Itani space or vice versa.

Your idea that faction gain is supposed to be a time consuming process is valid, but only to a certain extent.

A MONTH OF PLAYING EIGHT HOURS A DAY IS NOT REASONABLE.

The other factions, the corporations and such, have no really good reason to have such diametric opposition. They work together and against each other as circumstances change, but they aren't going to not do business with someone thought well of by other companies.

The point about Corvus, though, is well taken. But that's also flawed, because Corvus obviously has suppliers. Those suppliers must be people with good standing somewhere else, who smuggle the goods in to Corvus.

This logically indicates that high standing with diametrically opposed factions is possible.

*sigh*

Don't make me separate you two!

soltis, Either way, #2 is a gameplay dynamic, not a bug. A bug is something that does not function correctly. The reputation system functions the way it was designed to.

You may have an argument for a different design philosophy, but that goes in suggestions, not bugs.

No one is forcing you to spend the time to gain faction rep. If you dont want to do it, dont, but IMO its perfectly fine the way it is. If you disagree, thats an opinion, and you are entitled to it.

""A MONTH OF PLAYING EIGHT HOURS A DAY IS NOT REASONABLE.""

To gain +800 with EVERY faction in the game, as far as i'm concerned not only is that reaonable, since it works out to 6 months of playing 2 hours a night 5 night a week, which is casual gaming. its almost exact. Why is it that anytime ANYTHING takes time, people want to make it faster. Instant gratification is bad for a game, it leaves nothing to look forward to, nothing to strive for.

Incidentally, I gained ~1000 reputation points by trading yesterday, spread out amoung 7 factions. It took me about 9 hours total play time.

anyhow, since FM is watching i'll not be posting anything else to this thread. My advise is to just let it drop tho, but if you feel you have to have the last word, be my guest.

Actually, I think the static standing doesn't -have- to deal with the difficulty of the mission. What matters here isn't that its a hard mission or not. Thats what they pay you for, right? ( Remember, the payment should vary based on the difficulty and length / time spent )

They give you a standing increase if you succeed. They drop it if you fail. Simple. I agree that a few of the factions should be more polarized with or against eachother. This would make the game more interesting.

I do however think that trading gives too high XP for it to matter. Theres no reason to take the missions other than for standing, since the recent change to give XP for everything, and HUGE amounts of XP for that.

This might go in with the idea that you work not for XP, but for more subtle things, the liking and trust of a faction.

if it takes time to earn it. oh bloody heck, something worth striving for, spending time to get protection, weapons, items, prices and other bonuses? bloody heck, such a thing must be unknown! YOU MUST GET IT AT ONCE!

IT MUST BE FREEE!

FREE I TELL YOU!

*cough*

No, I'm quite fine with this, and I quite enjoy having something to work for in between, its a longterm goal, and as such quite wellbalanced.

"We're talking about factions at war."
"There is NO WAY according to the storyline for there to be Serco spies in Itani space or vice versa."

O_o what gives you that idea? (are there spies in real life? nopety nope... none at all I say! *ironic)

From my observations the faction points appear to be inversely related to your standing. When you have a low standing you earn large bonuses but when you get over 500 the bonuses get smaller and smaller. This is part of the game. You can adjust a dilike or neutral standing with a few hours of game play but getting to loved will take intense focus.

At -200 with Corvus Corax I was getting +7 for every mission, and +15 if I did a double. I can't say if there was something amiss here, but this behavior appeared consistant across several factions of different standing levels.

Didn't matter how far I had to go, etc., it was like clockwork.

I can see the returns being dominishing, but not to this point.

I'm not saying every mission should give +50 to standing or something ridiculous like that. I'm saying that making _one aspect_ of the game, which is currently a very BORING aspect, require that many hours is a catastrophically stupid thing to do. Chao, a name some of you might recognize, has mentioned burning out, because he's starting to run out of things to do that he enjoys in the game. He also just said the project of increasing his faction standing with _any_ faction is too much of a chore, and he's decided not to try. Does anyone but me see this as a problem?

What I'm trying to say is that gaining faction is a boring, monotonous, and inconvenient hassle. There's no good, fun way to do it, and this must be rectified. Either reduce the time it takes, or find some way to make gaining faction an enjoyable process, so that you're so busy having fun(yeah, it's a game, you're SUPPOSED TO HAVE FUN) that you don't really realize until you enter some station and see new goodies.

The idea of making people have to make choices has a lot of flaws, which are easy to see if you think things through a bit:

First, the concept of corporate spies: let's examine that a moment. The idea of a corporate spy is basically a mole, or a person who lives a double life for many years until they can gain access to sensitive information and report it back to their real employers. Moles have to be very few and far between, or the odds of one's capture become so high they're a terrible liability. Not only are they limited in number, but moles concentrate on finding the most important information and reporting it, since they take a risk with every single report they transmit home. In other words, a corporate mole will NOT be wasting their time and compromising their security by transmitting trivial little reports of which space-jockeys have been hired to haul ore. They'll be worrying about new products, transmitting schematics, mergers and acquisitions, mining and production schedules, contracts, and other important things. This basically means that corporate moles are not a factor in this sort of thing, at least not yet(see below)

Now, there are a few exceptions to what I've just said. There may, eventually, be a game-pertinent level of faction standing that basically makes you a member of that faction, or so highly esteemed that you'd be asked to do things that require a real degree of trust on that faction's part. Testing prototype weaponry/ships, for example. Or doing missions that would give your char access to truly sensitive information(maybe bringing secret orders for the next six months to the top corp spy at another faction's base). Once gameplay options of that complexity become a part of VO, I *can* see there being a reason for faction
standing polarity to develop. Basically, the reasoning would go like this: once you're being handed missions of *that* importance, you're an actual landmark on the corporate landscape of that particular faction, and begin to be worth the mole's attention. They send reports mentioning you and what sort of missions you're being asked to do, and the other faction's standing drops, until it reaches a certain maximum, where they "really like you a lot but don't trust you." This way you can still get all or most of the specialty equipment that faction provides, but not the things they don't want to be selling to people they don't really trust.

It's possible, especially if some factions actively sabotage or attack each other, that you might be given optional missions to participate in these actions, which would obviously make you very much disliked(or much less liked, at least) by the faction whom you're attacking, but this would need to be optional, and have very special benefits associated with it. I don't know if it's a good idea at all.

(Edit: I can see Corvus Prime being an exception. If you're a pirate, especially a notorious one, you'll become distrusted in all 'respectable' areas, but loved by the places frequented by other pirates, such as Corvus. The only way this is really viable, though, is if Corvus becomes a place you can get enough different things that you can still play a varied character without needing to go elsewhere, save maybe to other pirate factions)

As for the Itani-Serco thing... okay. Spying between these two, in the 'established mole' sense, is basically impossible. I can see either faction maybe having some slight ability to monitor and intercept communications from the other, but these probes and things would have to be few and far between, since the means of ingress(wormholes) are monitored, and so the Itani and Serco would both have great trouble sneaking probes and the like into their enemy's territory. The reason I say moles and such are impossible is because, at this point, the Itani and Serco are almost, if not completely different species. The Itani are pretty much genetically human, but the Serco have been engaging in genetic manipulation for so long they're pretty much something else entirely. This rules out almost any possibility of members of one posing as the other. Even if, by some means the Serco or Itani managed to make a physically convincing imitation of a member of their opponent's faction, how would that spy be inserted? To get a spy in a damaging position, they'd have to replace a member of the military, which means they'd have to find someone, extract enough information from them to make the replacement able to function, and then somehow work out a way that replacement could waltz back into the community. Even if the insertion was successful, there's another, far more bigger problem: integration. In WWII, German spies were caught in America because they forgot and held their cigarettes differently; same thing for American spies in Germany. This was true of English spies in Germany, as well, for similarly stupid reasons. These are neighboring countries. On the same planet. Who, until a decade or two ago, had had a reasonable amount of interchange in terms of cultural exposure.

Now, if spies could be give away by something so simple as how they held their cigarettes, how in the world would this replacement be able to successfully pretend to be a member of a society that has had _ZERO_ exchange with theirs for over a thousand years? Simply put, they couldn't. Especially with Serco spies in the Itani, since suddenly this pilot who was MIA and 'miraculously' returns is unable to do his meditation-thingy properly, etc. I'm sure Itani spies in Serco space would have similar troubles. Even in the psychotically, unimaginably unlikely situation where this happened, such a spy would be so incredibly valuable they would probably only report on the most incredibly high end, important, sweeping, and far-reaching pieces of information they could get.

Now, I want to stress that I don't think rewards in this game should be a trifling matter, but I want to bring another aspect of this issue to light: choice.

A lot of players like 'doing it all'. They want to pirate, and craft, and fight, and trade, and spy, and, and, and, and.

What this means is that there needs to be a way for a player to experience all of these things. Generally, this is achieved by one of two things: either making any character have the option to do anything they want, if the player works long and hard enough(so no mutual exclusiveness, really), or make it so a person can 'build' more than one char. Have their pirate and their trader/miner and their fighter. Maybe more than one of these, especially to have an Itani and a Serco fighter, etc. Some people want to see the war from all sides.

Now, we've established that we want character growth and character achievement to mean something. We don't want it to be common for people to say, "So, I reached 10/10/10/10/10 the other day..." So, this means that character growth is going to take a certain amount of time, or skill, or whatever. Either way, it means that having to make a whole crapload of characters just to be able to 'do everything' will scare off a lot of newbies.

This limits us to either making it a case of skill(Sure, this char is hard to level up, but once I'm better it will go a lot faster), or making it possible to grow any character in every way, or at least make it so that there's a lot of flexibility. Forcing certain combinations of character attribute growth is obviously a bad idea, so we want to avoid that, too.

So, what do we do?

I'm not sure what actions can be taken to remedy this, but I am flat out saying that the way things are is not acceptable.

I'd love to hear ideas(on the suggestions forum) which we can debate, but 'It's fine how it is' is not viable.

Edit: I've changed a paragraph above a bit, I'll mark where so anyone who's already slogged through this post can see it.

First of all, a mole isn't the only way to gather information, and is probably the least efficient. I can perfectly see a UIT trader secretly recruited by the Serco bribing an Itani official to give out confidential information, and a thousand other methods each nation could spy on each other.

Secondly, in a game such as this, you can't have a character who is super duper in everything. MMORPGS are based on trade-offs. You can create a great fighter, a greeat diplomat, a great trader or a great miner as your char, but not all those things at once. Having +800 standing at all factions gives you access to pretty much all equipment availiable in the universe. Some might call it the ultimate goal (although I think it would be a hindrance for pvp, and a pretty pointless goal). It should take a very large amount of time to achieve something like that. Not being able to do this doesn't hindrance your gameplay in any way.

A lot of these methods you're considering depend on a lot of cultural interchange, exposure, etc. to be viable. Total cultural isolation is a pretty huge factor.

Payoffs and bribery are more likely among the UIT and independent corps, but are you(again) expecting corp. A to expend money on buying reports of(again) space-jockey ore-hauling activities? Not bloody likely.

Once a person gains enough faction that they're participating in genuinely sensitive activities, I can see reports being made. Not before that, and I can't see some faction saying "Here, take this prototype ship out for a spin" or something equally significant unless they really, REALLY trust you. After all, if they don't trust you, they can always just have an employee do it.

Also, about being able to 'do it all,' you're making a lot of assumptions in general. The basic premise that "having more goodies will break PvP" relies on the assumption that there is some manner of underlying breakage in PvP itself, since if this increased selection of equipment increases options, without making your character some uber godling, it's not a huge issue. In fact, I think it's SUPERIOR to do things that way, so that a player can(eventually) be able to switch roles as needed, especially in a small, tight-knit clan, where they'd need everyone to be flexible to be a competitive force in various situations.

There was not a whole lot of cultural interchange betwee the US and the USSR during the cold war, yet the two nations managed to easily recruit spies from each other. Money knows no culture, there will always be greedy people in goveremnet positions who will sell infomation. And besides, the UIT mingles with both Itani and the Serco, so either side can find out anything they want about the others culture from the UIT. Besides, spies isn't the only way to gather information, they can break each others communication codes, intercept mail, or whatever. And as I said before, all nations do background checks on anyone that they choose to trust, I really don't see the Itani giving anyone a valk unless they are sure that that person is going to use it to the advantage of the Itani. If they konw that this person is buddies with the Serco, I don't think they'd risk something like that.

When I said that having +800 with all factions might hindrance pvp, I meant that you would not be able to ever kill ANYBODY in a monitored sector, for fear of losing standing with some faction.

Also, I still don't understand the point of having +800 with all factions. The only benefit is equipment and prices, but come on! Do you really need to have all the possible equipment availiable to you? People usually choose their preffered ship combination, and work towards that, so at the maximum you would need +800 with one faction to have your desired configuration.

Sarahanne thank you for explaining that, i was a bit confused about what was going on with the faction trade missions. One part of me assumed that the more faction i got, the more points i would get for subsequent missions. Sort of like how it is with licenses. But i can see the advantage of having it the other way around. But i just wish it was explained somewhere, sometimes things seem so random and weird.

Perhaps the factions could say something to you to indicate this. Something like 'look, trader, thanks for doing missions for us. But from here on out things are not gonna be so easy. admiration takes much more work than respect'. What do you folks think?

Pre-release, I was over +900 with every faction beside the 4 Neutral stars (but still over 600 with them), and nobody had a problem with that. People started to call this a bug, when the black market disappeared.

So:
1) It is doable.

2) It is a nice goal for me, because you do not hurt someone else with it. It is just a goal "for me".

3) I liked to have a database with all ships/weapons/tradegoods and was the ultimate "answering machine" if you wanted to know, where to get things. I liked that.

4) Why should _one_ lonely trader/explorer not be able to gain very good standings with the "enemy"? It happens in real life very often... Not everybody bows to a politically injected hate.

5) If your whole post is based on "do not let serco get a valk", please do not complain about serco getting Itani faction standings. just say "Serco should not be able to get Valks" (I just think, that is the reason for most of this posts, but I might be wrong with your intentions)

6) If serco are supposed to stick without valks, it would be nice to let them change to UIT and let them their levels they gained before

7) Why are you complaining about another way to play this game? I never thought there would be a post like: "please limit the gameplay". It might be better to make suggestions for additional content. not for less...

8) If someone uses a good standing, to gain an unfair advantage with it, just adress it, and make suggestions to fix it, but please do not ask for destroy the whole thing. e.g.: if someone finds a tradebug, to gain billions of money, would you ask the devs to throw trading out of the game? or to drop everys money to 0?

9) Finally I might be horrorfull missunderstanding you.

10) I pretty hope I did... so answering to your points:

"I can see getting faction being something that involves some work, but what we're looking at here is FIVE WEEKS(at 40 hours a week), TWO DAYS of SOLID playing, 8 hours a day, without doing anything but trade missions"

Some people _love_ to know that this is not easy to get, and are proud to do it also... No need to reach _every_ goal of this game in a week...

"Second, faction gains are really broken."

I agree. There should be more faction standings to earn for longer tradejobs. Or less for shorter.

"A MONTH OF PLAYING EIGHT HOURS A DAY IS NOT REASONABLE."

Oh, I hope this game serve me years of fun. not only weeks or months... So not getting the "uber-master-of-everything-and-ruler-of-the-universe"
in a month is good.

another funny thing about trade missions: the consequences for not completing them.

a. tell 'i lost cargo' to mission computer.
punishment: pay a fee. no faction loss.

b. tell 'i cant complete mission, take your cargo back' to mission computer.
punishment: 1 point of faction loss.

c. hit 'info' in station on the mission, then hit 'abort'
punishment: ------50 points------ faction loss.

===================

so, basically, corporations would rather have you lose their cargo, and pay a fee... than haveyou give their cargo back and say 'i cant do it'. .. . . . . and theyd rather have you do either of those than 'abort'... they hate 'abort' 50 times more than they hate 'i cant do it', even though its basically the same thing.

but, if your computer disconnects halfway through a mission... the mission aborts, and they dont hate you at all... they dont even make you pay a fee.

oh well. some of the 'surprises' in this game are kind of annoying.

I can agree that getting standing with everyone should be EXTREMELY difficult/too long. And that short missions give too much XP. However, scaling it based on jumps is too little. A mission across three systems is not three times as difficult as through one system. In-system should be almost as little as +3 XP. That would equate to +3 for first jump. If every calculated jump gave +1 more, that would be +5 for crossing one system, and +7 for two. I looked at +2, and that doesn't seem enough for very long missions. I would suggest +1 and for wormhole jumps +(#WH Taken +1) [first being 1].
In increasing # of systems, starting with the insystem of 1
+2 per jump: +3, +7, +11, +15,+19,+23, +27,+31,+35
+1 & +1*WH#:+3, +6, +10,+15, +21,+28, +36,+45,+55

This does not carry over to a continued mission. Break point is crossing 3rd wormhole. You get major points starting at crossing 6th wormhole. There are 6 wormholes in between Dau and Sol II. There are seven between Sol and Odia. From Itan, seven to Dau, and eight to Sol II and Odia.
To get at least 600 standing, number of jumps taken if all missions taken were of n wormhole jumps, starting with 1: 300,300,280,258,236, 217,200,186.
Differences between each jump count: 0,20,22,22, 19,17,14

This is standing, not trade XP, so no bonus or anything for being UIT. However, UIT can bring along nice cargo ships and get Trade XP along the way.

What do you all think of my system for Trade Mission standing XP?