yeah they are boring. how would you improve them?

1. make 3 medals. 1 for all itani systems, 1 for all serco systems, and 1 for all grayspace/UIT. 1 medal = some benefit, 2 medals = more benefit, 3 medals = big benefit.

2. add missions for the rare ores.

3. add missions that require you to prospect in certain sectors, preferably ones with arklan guardians and dentek assaults. add excitement and danger.

4. bonuses. you get more mining xp & more credits for these:

speed bonus-find roids faster
distance bonus-find roids in the same system, no wormhole jump.
non-station bonus-find roids in sectors w/o stations
botlesss bonus-find roids in unmarked bot-free sectors
mass bonus-find bigger roids

give the missions some story line. Just saying go here pick this up and bring it back is pretty dull. Maybe at the very least tell me a purpose.

maveric7911 is entirely correct. It's not what you are doing. It's why you are doing it.

I could brainstorm up some prospecting missions involving things I don't see suggested here, but I'd prefer to keep my story ideas secret so that if the devs ever do decide to use any of my ideas then the first time everyone else encounters them the story will be entirely new _and you won't know how it will turn out_.

So as an excercise, why don't we post our ideas for prospecting exciting missions in the form of a question?

@ Celebrim
Are you so special that you have the ear of the devs with out the use of the suggestions board?! If so, how and why?!

Well, the Devs do have email. And there's the bug reporter. And Celebrim does have a long history of posting substantial, well-thought-out suggestions for features and content.

In short, if the Devs want to take Celebrim up on his offer, they'll let him know.

i agree with Celebrim. the problem is with the perpous for the mission. if they were a good sorce of standing, or if they had a storyline that made me care that station X needs ore Y, than i'd be more likely to take prospecting missions.

PS: Celebrim has posted the best thought out sugestiones that i have seen, so i'm certan he could write some storylines worh concidering if he put his minde to it.

/drags thread back on-topic

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you mean, Celebrim, but:

"Our mining vessels are too slow to make lots of jumps - can you find _one_ sector for us that has X rocks with Y ore?"

"Our current mines are being exhausted/overheated - can you find X asteroids in this system with Y ore that are at 10 degrees?"

Although I don't think that's what you meant by "in the form of questions". The above two are just some slight variations on the basic mission but require you to pay a little more attention. Right now my biggest problem with prospecting is that it's too easy; I usually do it while trading for money, just go around scanning random rocks as I fly in and out of systems.

Well, not exactly, but certainly on the right track. Those are interesting questions.

I'll ask a few questions, to give you the idea:

"Our competitors seem to have found a new source of high grade ore. Can you find out where it is coming from?"

"Our prospectors in sector X-1 are disappearing. Can you find out why?"

"Our mining drones in system Xyzzy have been coming back empty. Can you figure out what the trouble is?"

The idea here is that question is rather broad. You aren't told _exactly what you need to do_. Instead, you are asked to accomplish some indefinate goal and its up to you to figure out how to do it. You also don't know starting out whether the solution is going to lead you to combat or some other problem. In fact, I can create (randomly) missions with the same intros that have different solutions and story lines. Just because the last mission of this type had a particular solution, doesn't mean the next one will.

I'm not saying that simple missions are bad. In fact simple 'bread and butter missions' are good (for several reasons) and we need alot more choices in them at any given time, but before missions are going to be compelling some of them need to start having some story like elements.

I like those, but they strike me as more scouting/adventure missions than prospecting; I understand that that is sort of the point. I would definitely like to see more open-ended missions in that vein. But I would also like to see more focussed missions that are really prospecting/mining related, maybe some of them being tied to commerce. If I had any specific ideas right this minute I would post them.

I like all of those ideas, especialy the speedy prospector one. I miss times missions :( If they ever come back, i'll be doing trade missions for the fun of it rather than for the slow building of xp and money.

Very ture, GameJunky. I would like to see those Mining missions be worth more XP, 75 just is not worth the time or the trouble of doing them, looking for 30 roids that have a certan type on ore just takes toooooo long for the pay off.

Syberfly out: I live for the One, I die for the One.

I have the ear and the heart of one of the Devs and he doesn't listen to me all the time either. The Devs will do what they want, when they get to it.

However they do listen to good ideas that are detailed and implementable. Many times I've had a "good idea" only to be told by Ray that while it was an interesting suggestion it would take a complete redesign of program code i.e. it wasn't going to happen.

If you want to plan mission you also need to conisder what are the conditions for success or failure and the consequences.
Planning for every possiblity can make it difficult to write a bug free mission.
And we know there are players who will try everything to see what happens if they do X.

>However they do listen to good ideas that are detailed and implementable. Many times I've had a "good idea" only to be told by Ray that while it was an interesting suggestion it would take a complete redesign of program code i.e. it wasn't going to happen.<

They always talk about how this is going to be constantly evolving, but if they are unwilling to sometimes go backwards instead of forwards, your just going to be suck with something thats "OK", but with a million patches on it. Sometimes small steps backwards can mean leaps forward.

gamejunky, i really like the idea of 'timed missions'! that really adds an element of urgency to it. prospecting, yes. but trade... woohoo now we are really talking.

Trade missions used to be timed.

well, did people like it?

it was good ;)

Yes the timed missions where good, it gave you a bouns on xp and credits if you completed them on time.

The mining missions could have a progresive xp added to them, but start out with a lower amount of roids to find and add more with each mission along with XP.

Syberfly Out: I live for the One, I die for the One