In conjunction with my other mission editor thread, I'd like to hesitantly offer another idea, which I'm not sure would actually be a good idea, but worth mentioning all the same. As it is now, missions are always received from the mission boards. But it would be nice if missions could appear at other places as well, such as when clicking the Bar tab, when entering the station, when going into the commodities tab, perhaps even when in flight, etc.

This idea is also, of course, taken from Escape Velocity. I'm not sure it this would work in an MMORPG, but I do know would give VO a much more flexible and surprising "quest" system than most other online rpgs, where quests or missions are handled by a very static system - given by gaudly coloured NPCs with ugly exclamation marks above their heads, etc. And it would, together with the mission text syntax system in my other thread, allow us to produce extremely personalized and unique missions.

I like your idea (probably because I loved EV) of being able to receive missions in the bar. I imagine a window just popping up when you enter the bar describing the mission (in a very RP fashion) and asking if you'd be interested. These would be shady missions on the wrong side of the law or secret military ops.

I think before this happens we would need to add some features to the bar. Basically another reason to go there besdies chat and receiving secret missions. Maybe a little gambling game like in EV. Whatever it is, it should be something that less than perfect citizens would do to go along with the mission content. In other words it should be like "oh, people who do this activity would probably take this kind of shady mission, so I should sit in the bar and wait for someone there, because my kind of pilot is going to be in a bar".

And of course the text box that pops up when you enter the bar would be like:

A man in a dark coat sits next to you and leans over. He says "I'm looking for someone to bring these crates to Corvus. Know anyone who might be interested?"

Yes, this is the whole reason why there is a bar. This sort of thing has been planned for a very long time. Persistent NPCs who can serve various purposes, give out information or special missions. Unfortunately, I'm not exactly sure when it will be implemented. Good idea though :).

It would be cool if the bar was tied to the black market in some way, too. Obviously you can't drag an illegal ship in there and pass it under the table, but small items like information gathered during reconnaisance, or something. The big stuff would of course be traded out in deep space away from view.

You could get the keys to ships, or to the storage bin where guns are kept...

Yes, I definitly need a valk delivery boy

Please make a switch to turn off all these annoying npc triggers that are going to be harrasing me while i'm trying to hunt player pirates. i don't want to take a mission, i don't want to hear about a mission, and i don't want to know what mission was being offered by the npc i just boomed.

thx

oooh, that's what we need... NPC chat bots!!! that can hook into mission and radar interfaces!!