100% Agree. Missions should be more than just reverted: They should be improved. Factions whose NPC's don't carry any valuable loot, need something added. Difficulty needs to be more reliable, for example Difficulty 43 missions should ALWAYS spawn battleships, for players who have arranged a group and are intentionally trying to encounter them.
Since mission farming requires the most expensive ships and equipment, and the most cooperation between players, it should be profitable. It shouldn't give money slower than someone solo mining in a mere freighter, to be split between the entire group.
Now that the war is over can this very simple change please be looked at? Kaz had cool ideas, yes, but I think I speak for most people when I say there's no reason to wait for a grand and arduous rework when there's a more immediate problem that can be remedied with a more immediate 'fix'.
(04-23-2019, 09:24 AM)Lythrilux Wrote: These changes were neither good nor well thought out. And let's the honest, Antonio's thread which was the driving force behind these changes ONLY analysed Corsair missions in Xi, which people +1 without really reading into the issue in depth. So the dozens of other faction/system/ship mission combinations recieved sweeping changes when the problem was with a specific instance.
And the funny thing? Xi is still great. Legates just swapped to nightmares, and whilst it's a bit more inconvenient now, it's still doable and profitable. Meanwhile missions elsewhere got shat on; factions with only access to light battleships especially (they can't use quad nightmares, hurricanes are the only way they can do missions, and they cost a huge amount of now). Let's be real: there has been a noticeable decline in system activity since these changes, and have we really seen traders flock back to the lanes since the changes, as it was implied missions were "literally killing" trading? No, we have not. The issue with lack of traders was unrelated to missions, and are part of a wider issue. Killing another form of money making and activity isn't going to fix that.
Please evert difficulty changes, revert hurricane price hike, and anything else that was changed in the feverish misguided pursuit of nerfing missions. Balance Xi INDIVIDUALLY if it's required, instead of applying sweeping changes that render missions inconvenient for some, and non-viable for everyone else.
All infinite CMs on NPCs really accomplished was making missions equivalent to Ore Mining, albeit with a prohibitively high startup cost.
Why Ore Mining?
Like Ore Mining, the mission running ship is in a fixed location, having an effectively gimped pvp loadout (The 200k Mortars are decidedly mediocre when fighting other large shippies; at their optimal engagement ranges, the Cerb is a far better option)
Despite all the changes, the mission NPCs are still around as threatening as the floating asteroids, you just have to shoot them a bit more with guns. The removal of missiles as a truly viable option took a very large portion of planning out of the equation, to the point where the optimal mission running configuration is Cerbs + Sledges + Repair Ship + facetank until the other guys die.
Actually, let's talk about Repair Ships for a moment. They're powerful to the point where if I was asked if I wanted another Dread or a Repair Ship on a mission farming expedition, I would take the Repair Ship every time, for one very simple reason: The Repair Ship is tantamount to godmode, and so long as my hull stays at 100%, I can stay in the field longer whilst the Repair Ship flies back home to take another mission, then will probably be almost back to RV with me after I've mopped the floor with the first wave of mission NPCs but took a few scratches.
But here's where things get entertaining. With the focus being pushed in favor of "fight NPCs gunso", that means that I can actually stay in the field longer because I do not need to resupply. Like I said, they took out an interesting dynamic in terms of group mission planning. "Do I go home to restock or do I risk it all for more Credits quicker?"
I must point out that all the fun the guys and I had mission running under the "new" system was in spite of the mission change, not because of it. EK sliding Nightmare barrages were absolutely glorious and had a cinematic quality to them (because only scrubs ran Hurricane)
Spreading out the NPCs actually accomplished the mission nerf the devs really wanted. Stuff like this was legitimately broken because the NPC caps were clipping into each other. Compare to this, where the NPC caps, being too spread out for a Torp polykill, are far more time-consuming to kill. The addition of infinite CMs at that point was just frantic last-minute "how can we make missions suck", and it showed.
Sometimes you just want to do something other than trade for cash. Sometimes you don't want to pew pew others and deal with any salt or drama that will come from it. Having a variety of things to do ingame helps keep people interested in the game instead of getting bored or burned out and moving on.
With the age of this game it should be all about making things simple and more accessible rather than the tediousness of the current PVE.
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Instead of continuing to tease people about this, I will instead confirm that the impending patch does have some seriously good PvE features incorporated. These are just a starting point, and further changes will be incremented through hotpatches and future releases. You'll see what exactly has changed very, very soon.