Forums » Suggestions
Cargo missions
Well. I think that cargo missions in first 4 levels are quite good balanced (since you have to sit about 2 - 3h to get to lvl4.
But after that reciving 300pts for flying to the other side of the universe is just not enought. So i suggest that pts for trading missions if you have level above 4 sohuld be tripled (900pts instead of 300)
You can ofcourse do it by some gradient (ie lvl1: x1.0, lvl2: x1.5, lvl3: x2.0, lvl4: x3.0, lvl5: x4.0 etc)
But after that reciving 300pts for flying to the other side of the universe is just not enought. So i suggest that pts for trading missions if you have level above 4 sohuld be tripled (900pts instead of 300)
You can ofcourse do it by some gradient (ie lvl1: x1.0, lvl2: x1.5, lvl3: x2.0, lvl4: x3.0, lvl5: x4.0 etc)
I agree that the xp you get for cargo missions is pretty low, but I do not think it should be higher just because your level is higher. Instead, I think the XP should somehow relate to the difficulty of the mission. Getting the same 100XP for delivering cargo to the sector next door and for collecting and delivering cargo from the other side of the universe (had several 1->3 missions yesterday) does not feel right. I'd suggest the XP goes up in the same way the time limits for the missions go up - with distance traveled, or maybe with the difficulty of the path (going from 6-10 or 13 is much more dangerous then going say from 4 -> 9).
I think we are all spoiled. It should take you longer to advance from 3 to 4 than it does to take you to advance from 1 to 2 (much less 10 to 11). Otherwise, everyone is going to plateau really quickly and you might as well not have an advancement system.
If you'll remember my 'discussion XP system', I assumed all missions gave you 1 XP regardless of difficulty. The reason for that is it lets the designer accurately predict how quick advancement will take place. As a designer, you want to be able to say, "Ok it takes 30 minutes to finish a mission, and it takes 3 missions to go from level 3 to level 4", so getting to level 4 should take about 3 hours and a little worth of gameplay.
What should change is not the award, but whether you qualify for it. If you go around subjectively assigning awards to a system, it makes it really hard to balance the game, and you have the risk of something like we had last night with the basic combat mission bug where a mission is actually trivial but gives high rewards and people monotonously perform it because its the 'best' thing to do. That drives people from the game.
If you assign missions a difficulty, then you can say, 'Well, after level 3, this mission gives 0 XP, so we know that within 2-3 hours n00bs are going to be forced by the game to move on to the next sectors to find harder missions.'
Ultimately, with all this information you can ask questions like, 'Have we provided reasonable routes for advancement?', 'Will a person always be able to find useful missions?', 'How long will it take to find them?', etc.
If you'll remember my 'discussion XP system', I assumed all missions gave you 1 XP regardless of difficulty. The reason for that is it lets the designer accurately predict how quick advancement will take place. As a designer, you want to be able to say, "Ok it takes 30 minutes to finish a mission, and it takes 3 missions to go from level 3 to level 4", so getting to level 4 should take about 3 hours and a little worth of gameplay.
What should change is not the award, but whether you qualify for it. If you go around subjectively assigning awards to a system, it makes it really hard to balance the game, and you have the risk of something like we had last night with the basic combat mission bug where a mission is actually trivial but gives high rewards and people monotonously perform it because its the 'best' thing to do. That drives people from the game.
If you assign missions a difficulty, then you can say, 'Well, after level 3, this mission gives 0 XP, so we know that within 2-3 hours n00bs are going to be forced by the game to move on to the next sectors to find harder missions.'
Ultimately, with all this information you can ask questions like, 'Have we provided reasonable routes for advancement?', 'Will a person always be able to find useful missions?', 'How long will it take to find them?', etc.
the current difficulty with the cargo missions is that the combat missions offer (or offered with the buggy infinite xp) a much faster upgrade route. I would also like to see more missions listed on the choice roster (i'm sure it's coming) and the ability to have more than 1 mission at a time. (i'd love to go through a list of about 8 to 10 missions and pick out 2 or 3 "deliver this datapad/bot plans/etc" missions.