Dev Notes #20 - Mission System

Hi everyone!

Thanks for all the feedback and to hear all your concerns. We take them seriously and we hope that you will be happy with this new system in the end.

Here are some answers to your questions plus a small teaser :D.


Will these changes be calypso missions only or will monria missions be impacted in 3 months as well ? Or does monria count under 'other planets' and comes later ?

Monria will not be in the first release.


Also, if I understand this correctly during the year long grace period you will only be able to finish your current stage on any iron missions. You will not be able to advance past that point.

Correct.


Ok I have a question for the developers. Are you going to take advantage of this change in the mission structure to introduce space hunting missions and maybe, (pretty please) the long overdue cargo missions? The recent change in space PVP suggests to me that space hunting missions are in the pipeline.

Space creatures will be included in the first release of the Hunting Challenge.


Dennis would it be possible to have the opening post edited to reflect what was in post #165?

It is now updated.


I find this disturbing that MA wants to get rid of NPC interaction.
Did any one say they wanted to automate their game so they don't have to go have a conversation, or have the choice to start a mission or not?

This is not true. We will still have other types of missions that might be more specific to a location or more advanced objectives. Now with the Hunting Challenge we know that every player will have access to the previous know Iron Missions for all creatures so that we focus on creating better and more interesting missions.


It has always been annoying to me that some hunting missions can be starting from the terminal, some I have to track down an NPC and some don't even exist yet. Without any clear indication of which one is which.

This should be a great new edition to the hunting system and much needed imo.

This is one of the reasons why we are doing this.


Please MA, think about this, it would be a fair way to change the mission system, without making a lot players unhappy. I don't think , that MA love to make a lot ppl angry, and in same case loosing trust to the player base.

We don’t want you to be unhappy with the new system and the transition from the old. We will have a look at this again when we are closing in on a year after this release to see what actions are necessary to make it feel fair.


I am mainly wondering if we got missions still not done, like say Warlock Stage IV, 30,000 Killpoints. If we finish it during grace period, will we automatically start on Stave V, 60,000 kp in new system with new reward, or will we start on Stage I, of the Warlock new mission system, like 1200 killpoints?
Is the planned release still on schedule? Will it come at latest, if going by what you have said on first post, Q3 2019, which means dead line is 30th September?

After the release and during the grace period you will not be able to start the next part of the chain. The first stage of the new system is available on the release as soon as have it unlocked.

We are on schedule for the release which is at the end of September if all goes as planned.





Please keep the feedback coming as well as suggestions what you would like to see in this upcoming Codex.

Happy hunting!
 
Hi everyone!

Thanks for all the feedback and to hear all your concerns. We take them seriously and we hope that you will be happy with this new system in the end.

Here are some answers to your questions plus a small teaser :D.


Space creatures will be included in the first release of the Hunting Challenge.

Happy hunting!

WOOOHOOOO!!! :eyecrazy::eyecrazy::wtg::wtg:
 
Monria will not be in the first release.
.
.
.
Space creatures will be included in the first release of the Hunting Challenge.
.
.
We are on schedule for the release which is at the end of September if all goes as planned.





Please keep the feedback coming as well as suggestions what you would like to see in this upcoming Codex.

Happy hunting!

Hello Dennis,

is there a plan on when other planets/moons are supposed to follow calypso ?
Will they all wait until the 1 year grace period is over or are they supposed to come shortly after calypso during the grace period ?

Furthermore when introducing space missions, will you adjust spawns for those mobs that are currently still way to scarce or not to be found ? eg dropships/locusta
 
Will there be big changes to the rewards? I like grinding missions that give attribute tokens. If they remove these, I will have waaaay less motivation to play. Does anybody know? If it was said somewhere in this thread I apologize but I am too lazy to search 37 pages.

Thanks, guys!

:shower:
 
After the release and during the grace period you will not be able to start the next part of the chain. The first stage of the new system is available on the release as soon as have it unlocked.

If I read this right then those who already have all the mission active won't be able to do anything after finishing the current stages, until the end of the grace period.

Even though for most it won't be a problem because they have plenty to do, their options will shrink with each finished mob. And I can imagine that some people may run out of missions entirely, both the high rollers who cycle a lot and the newbies who will have all challenges on stage 1 on the Day X but go through them fast as they skill up.
 
If I read this right then those who already have all the mission active won't be able to do anything after finishing the current stages, until the end of the grace period.

Even though for most it won't be a problem because they have plenty to do, their options will shrink with each finished mob. And I can imagine that some people may run out of missions entirely, both the high rollers who cycle a lot and the newbies who will have all challenges on stage 1 on the Day X but go through them fast as they skill up.

I think he means that the new system is active at
release and each mission/stage is activated as
soon as you shoot the first mob for each mission.
 
To Dennis.

If this vu is imminent (later this month) is there any chance at all that we can have the private chat channel issue fixed first.
You have already said in an earlier post that there would doubtless be bug fixes, tweaks etc as the mission system changes come in, hence doing just Calypso until you feel you have it right and stable.
Since it takes some channel moderators such as myself literally hours to re-invite people to channels after every server shut down, maintenance, VU and bug fix, I am personally dreading these changes no matter how interesting they sound (and yeh happy to hear space will get missions) Please note I yet again lost 3.5 hours doing invites today. I have literally lost days if not weeks of my life to this bug, yet seems your team are unable to give a few hours of their time to fix it.
If no fix to the lists then the real question will be whether I and others will ever see the changes or rage quit after the 2nd or 3rd reset in a few days.
 
If I read this right then those who already have all the mission active won't be able to do anything after finishing the current stages, until the end of the grace period.

Even though for most it won't be a problem because they have plenty to do, their options will shrink with each finished mob. And I can imagine that some people may run out of missions entirely, both the high rollers who cycle a lot and the newbies who will have all challenges on stage 1 on the Day X but go through them fast as they skill up.

No, man.

E.g. you have active feffoid V in the legacy system and in the new system "hot af fef mission stage 1". Every kill counts for both (with respective counting mechanisms, maybe one is per kill and the other per killpoint). Once your legacy fef V is done, you will not be able to start legacy fef VI, it will not exist anymore as an option for you, but continue with the new "hot af fef" chain, from the point you arrived at by shooting. Legacy missions will not interfere in any manner with the new system, they will be parallel.
 
If this vu is imminent (later this month) is there any chance at all that we can have the private chat channel issue fixed first.

It is off topic yet important and I can say that we are doing our best to make sure that the fix will be in the September release.
 
One short thing, Dennis, with apologies if it was mentioned already. If the new mission will also have attribute tokens, all good. If not, put some thinking into the unavoidable rests here and there. Even better would be to simply change the attrib trader to also take fractions, I realised too late I am not actually interested and I remained with fractions around.
 
One short thing, Dennis, with apologies if it was mentioned already. If the new mission will also have attribute tokens, all good. If not, put some thinking into the unavoidable rests here and there. Even better would be to simply change the attrib trader to also take fractions, I realised too late I am not actually interested and I remained with fractions around.

That can be abused for all missions that are repeatable: simply play for a while, say you want to quit mission, you get parts of the final reward and restart the mission.

Example: Mission is to do 10k kill points on that one mob, reward is 5 PED of Evade. So you kill around to get the first 2k, quit the mission and get 1 PED of Evade.

Seriously? Who'd ever attempt to finish missions then? That would take some of the fun away! I mean they could apply some function there, say you get 25% of the reward after half of the goal.

At least until now the idea was to get the reward after you managed to do the entire thing. It's also a reward for persistence. :wise:
 
@Dennis, there is a potential headache with discontinuing the irons on Arkadia: Access to the Warehouse instances/missions rests on the irons of four different mobs completed through all stages. Other planets may have similar setups. The planet partners have been informed and involved in this development before it was made public so they are able to make contingency plans without undue stress, yes? Or does it only affect Calypso for the time being, until things are settled? (Or did I miss a piece of information regarding this?)
 
@Dennis, there is a potential headache with discontinuing the irons on Arkadia: Access to the Warehouse instances/missions rests on the irons of four different mobs completed through all stages. Other planets may have similar setups. The planet partners have been informed and involved in this development before it was made public so they are able to make contingency plans without undue stress, yes? Or does it only affect Calypso for the time being, until things are settled? (Or did I miss a piece of information regarding this?)

I think this might be in reference to what you′re concerned of:

Planet Calypso will be the first planet to introduce the new mission system. The other Planet Partners will transition to the new system soon afterwards, once any issues are resolved and any necessary tweaks and adjustments are implemented.
 
One huge wish(dont know if anyone written it yet?) I have is that I want to be able to see maps and missions on ALL planets, ALWAYS!
Like now I would like to plan witch missions I want to complete, then I have to travel to Ark to see my missions there.
As with maps its hard to help friends who asks for locations and you have to explain rather than just make a waypont and sent it.
Missions and maps shuld be in tabs for diffrentplanets imo.
?

I just want go bump this so MA can see it again. ?
 
I think this might be in reference to what you′re concerned of:

Ah, yes, maybe I expressed it poorly. It says there "soon afterwards", which seems to indicate that the decision is made and the delay is only for sorting out technical issues that might arise. But on Arkadia, it would literally pull the rug from under a part of the storyline, since these irons are not isolated from the rest. People are worried and turn to the Arkadian developers and the Advisors team and we don't know what to answer them. Hence the core of the question above is, have such things been considered and discussed with the planet partners well before going public with the announcement.
 
Hey MA... maybe the contribution be a good system, but... pls, put the % of contribution, not a simple red progress bar like robots event in fort lahar...

% of contribution help us to know the number of mobs must kill to obtain the complet mission, the % point for every mob and more...

pls, MA: % + red progress bar
 
One question - sorry if I missed it or it already came up - say I'm already on stage V of an old system mission, something like 5/10000 kills... can I abandon this mission and then be able to pick up the new revamped mission?

Thanks in advance.
 
After the release and during the grace period you will not be able to start the next part of the chain. The first stage of the new system is available on the release as soon as have it unlocked

Oh my.. I didn't get that part on first time.
I thought we could finish a MISSION during the grace period, not ONLY a mission STAGE. :mad:

Farewell to all good rewards I planned to get.. :(


PS: Before people say it, yes it was said in first post, but I still work on my English.. :dunce:
 
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Space creatures will be included in the first release of the Hunting Challenge.

@Dennis: When setting the mission rewards for space creatures, please keep in mind that the only attribute used in space professions is Intelligence. So space skills and intelligence tokens are the only usefull rewards from space creature iron missions. Especially if there is repeatable missions.


Furthermore please keep in mind the gunner profession lvls still do not impact gun turrets (even a lvl0 gunner shoots for full damage) , this has been broken for many years now and it would be nice if you could fix it alongside of introducing irons for space creatures. Make hunting in space actually USE the professions that were created for it. Thank you for your consideration.
 
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Farewell to all good rewards I planned to get.. :(

Are we even sure yet the mission structures and rewards are going to (drastically) change? In the orginally post they make it sound very similar (Atrox stages and whatnot).

:confused:
 
@Dennis: When setting the mission rewards for space creatures, please keep in mind that the only attribute used in space professions is Intelligence. So space skills and intelligence tokens are the only usefull rewards from space creature iron missions. Especially if there is repeatable missions.


Furthermore please keep in mind the gunner profession lvls still do not impact gun turrets (even a lvl0 gunner shoots for full damage) , this has been broken for many years now and it would be nice if you could fix it alongside of introducing irons for space creatures. Make hunting in space actually USE the professions that were created for it. Thank you for your consideration.

@ Dennis
As the new missions are contributions based, will pilot be included in a space kill as well as gunner(s)?
Pilot contribution would be very difficult to assess, a pilot that moves the stable gun platform during the shooting can in fact be having a negative impact every bit as much as a positive contribution, but getting the gunners to the target, then waiting for them to execute the kill, would likely be seen by the system as not contributing.
Also what about repair crew that are assisting in keeping a ship afloat during a hunt ?
Will crew need to team ?
Teaming to include pilot/gunners and repairers would not be possible under current system as on an MS could easily exceed 12 people
or will space be treated as 'shared loot' and how would this sit alongside the new non-lootable space including most of the training/hunting grounds ?
This could lead to problems with ships interfering with other hunts. Spacewars ?? PK'ing.. wow we could even see a pirate or 2 :)
 
Are we even sure yet the mission structures and rewards are going to (drastically) change? In the orginally post they make it sound very similar (Atrox stages and whatnot).

:confused:

It depends on what you mean by "drastic".
Everything is relative.
Something "drastic" for you, may seem only "necessary" for others. :)

Anyway, what's for sure is that they're going to change. :yup:
 
@ Dennis
As the new missions are contributions based, will pilot be included in a space kill as well as gunner(s)?
Pilot contribution would be very difficult to assess, a pilot that moves the stable gun platform during the shooting can in fact be having a negative impact every bit as much as a positive contribution, but getting the gunners to the target, then waiting for them to execute the kill, would likely be seen by the system as not contributing.
Also what about repair crew that are assisting in keeping a ship afloat during a hunt ?
Will crew need to team ?
Teaming to include pilot/gunners and repairers would not be possible under current system as on an MS could easily exceed 12 people
or will space be treated as 'shared loot' and how would this sit alongside the new non-lootable space including most of the training/hunting grounds ?
This could lead to problems with ships interfering with other hunts. Spacewars ?? PK'ing.. wow we could even see a pirate or 2 :)

These are interesting points with immediate relevance to MA's intentions for the new mission system regarding any kind of group effort. I am tempted to think that the dev team has not given space mob issues much consideration, but given that healing and scanning appear to be a part of your new system, repairers and pilots could theoretically be there too.
A lot depends on how you build your affect tree for mobs which are killed (who has had an affect on the kill) and whether only real decays can be considered in your new system. There may easily be more than twelve people more or less involved in the killing of a space mob, especially if you introduce higher hp mobs as many of us hope.
As I see it, both repairers and pilots could find it difficult to find developer consideration, repairers because the repairs may be at any time and people on board ships are not even considered to be present in space; pilots because it is hard to know how they have helped with any kills.
Please pass this on, Dennis or others, and give us some feedback when the time comes. I appreciate this is a tricky one and I do not intend to be critical here if you share information with us. At other times I know I can be critical, but I repeat that I consider this one to be tricky for devs and balancing teams.
 
It depends on what you mean by "drastic".
Everything is relative.
Something "drastic" for you, may seem only "necessary" for others. :)

Anyway, what's for sure is that they're going to change. :yup:

If they take away my attribute token rewards there will be HELL to pay!

(Think chin quivering.)
 
To MA/Dennis:

If I finish say stage 3 of atrox and start stage 4, but do not kill any atrox on stage 4 before the new mission system is implemented, will it then be locked? That is, do I need to have at least 1 kill in a stage to have it "unlocked" to be able to finish it during the grace period?
 
If they take away my attribute token rewards there will be HELL to pay!

(Think chin quivering.)


This concerns me as well. I, and I'm sure many others, have attribute token rewards saved up over the years that we've strategically planned to turn in at a later date.

This may be a dumb question with an obvious answer, but to Dennis/developers, will we be able to turn in attribute token rewards that we've earned/saved up from the old mission system even after the one year grace period has ended?
 
That can be abused for all missions that are repeatable: simply play for a while, say you want to quit mission, you get parts of the final reward and restart the mission.

Example: Mission is to do 10k kill points on that one mob, reward is 5 PED of Evade. So you kill around to get the first 2k, quit the mission and get 1 PED of Evade.

Seriously? Who'd ever attempt to finish missions then? That would take some of the fun away! I mean they could apply some function there, say you get 25% of the reward after half of the goal.

At least until now the idea was to get the reward after you managed to do the entire thing. It's also a reward for persistence. :wise:

Fractions of attributes, man. Right now I have in storage 55 agility tokens, 35 strength tokens, 16 (wtf) psyche tokens, 25 intelligence tokens. I can't use them because the attribute trader only takes 100 tokens, so I should look for missions giving 45 agi, 65 strength, 84 (lol) psyche and respectively 75 intelligence tokens. Which I decided I simply don't want to do, because if I do a mission I preffer fully skills rewards. In same time, I already did the missions for the tokens I have, it's not something undeserved.

So, is something which should be resolved particularly if the new system will not have attrib tokens as rewards. Which we have no clue about as of yet.
 
........

You really need to find a way to transfer progress from current missions to the new system. This is unacceptable.

MA Answer:

As the systems are not compatible this is not possible. They will also have more ranks/steps than the previous Iron Mission chain. As the rewards are different too, where you can choose from a larger selection of skills, we feel that it is better for everyone to start from first rank to gain the most benefit from it.

Are you really saying this and believe in it?

If you are at 50% in one Mission - Stage one to end of mission chain then you should be at the exact point in the new mission chain.

This isn't Magic it is simple, easy and quickly done.

PS: The amount of accounts does not matter as there is something called a computer who is very good at repeating the same task again and again and does this very fast. So convert one Mission chain from one account is the same as doing it on any other account. And if you have the formula to convert Atrox Mission from old to new chain it can be used for every Kill Mission too, same with Kill Point Mission, once you have the conversion working for one mob the others are using the same formula with maybe different values.
 
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