Based on what I've seen in chat and on the forums, I think one place new players may be getting stuck is after selecting the "Route" button for a non-local mission.

I propose the "Route" button should cause the linked-to mission to be automatically accepted once the player arrives at the station.

The way the system is set up now, a player must consciously go through a list in order to find the reason that brought him/her to his/her current location. This may be interrupting the "flow" of some new players. Automatically accepting the mission would remove this step.

Possible ways this auto-accept would be canceled: if the player docks at a different station, selects "Route" for a different mission, logs off, or more broadly if the player sets a new nav route. I'm not sure if this last condition would be supportive to the new player or not, as sometimes a player will plot around an ion storm or jump through an empty sector to escape a pirate. The new player may wish to have his/her hierarchical objective remain in these cases.

Simple, but excellent.

What if it just accepted the mission, but requiring the player to dock there?
Then it would appear in mission log this order, to dock elsewhere, as a Next Step.

+1 Logical and elegant improvement for a messy implementation...

Kabuloso: One catch is that the mission system would need to ignore the mission's global event handlers during that "Dock with the station" stage that it would insert. Otherwise, if a mission had a global handler along the lines of "If player kills bot of type Collector, jump to stage 9", and the player kills a collector on his way to the station, the mission might get stuck or break if stage 9 required some setup steps that would have happened in the original stage 1 (e.g. spawning a specific ship) if the player had taken the mission from a station, or had made it to the station before killing anything.

Anyway, +1 to the general idea of this thread, however the devs decide to implement it.

Good idea, but the mission shouldn't be accepted outright. Instead, have the mission info dialog (that shows the mission's long description text) pop up automatically on docking. Then the player can simply click accept if they still want it and also have the option to re-read the long description.

That way there wouldn't need to be a bunch of invisible actions that result in canceling it, as well as eliminate the scenarios where the player might inadvertently cancel it by mistake.

If this is implemented, there should also be a dialog box that pops up for the case that the mission is no longer available, indicating to the player that it cannot be accepted. Perhaps the player's licenses increased enroute, making them no longer eligible, or it could be a mission that can only be taken so many times globally, or perhaps they joined a group, etc.

Good thoughts, we'll take a look.

Ideas evolve... meridian's implementation is even better.