Missions seem to work out nicely

My impression is quite positive.

The system seems relatively smart in picking a place where people would fight anyways and it really seems to attract a lot of of unorganized players and organized platoons at the same time.

The system immediately launched an attack mission on a nearby enemy outpost after a defense mission was successful. That attack was quite a disaster, but it made people try and gave them some orientation what to do and where to go.

I would say the design intent to bring people together and cause intense fighting has been met.

What are your experiences?

Thumbs down

It feels like this:


It just picks the closest base on the frontline and highlights it.
It only really was implemented for new players; and can't really be called a "system" as for now.


If you can open the map (first thing a player should learn), and just look at the frontline, this:

...is pointless, really.

By default, "what do I do now" is follow the zerg.

I don't like it, mostly because I like to go tank hunting and I'll often cross several hexes in only a couple minutes.

BOO-DOO-DOOP
Sunderer to the north.
BOO-DOO-DOOP
Okay it's down. There's a Vanguard in the hills, let's sneak behind him.
BOO-DOO-DOOP
BOO-DOO-DOOP
Okay light him up.
Good job. There's another Sundy over there. Let's go blow it up.
BOO-DOO-DOOP

As a regular squad/platoon leader, I dislike that it hides necessary information (base timers, points owned), as this leads to confusion, and I dislike that it gives something squad members something to fixate on that isn't their squad leader. It feels like I'm fighting the UI to try and do things instead of having it help me.

I'm waiting to see what the squad stuff they eventually implement is; however, I dislike the current implementation. I understand that it's the foundation build, but am uncertain why they decided to throw in the bits and pieces on the live server, instead of constructing it piece by piece on PTS as seems prudent. I get that "eventually" we're getting the other stuff, but the reality is that we're going to be playing with this system for at least a week, and likely longer.

But for a shortlist:

Pros:

-Sort of helps new players (helps when it works by providing some direction)

-Helps new squad leaders organize their squads (usually new guys aren't confident enough to split people up, and they don't know the strengths and weaknesses of their squad members well enough to do it effectively).

-15% fight bonuses are nice

Cons:

-It's based on the IA system, a system which is notoriously nonfunctional

-It encourages zerging by sending lots of people to highly populated fights

-It sends new players to places where they have no chance of fighting by themselves (and older players will decide to fight somewhere else), so new players can wind up being told to go to a base where they're being farmed

-It hides the capture timer information from non-mission bases

-It is detrimental to organized squad/platoon play by...

...a) Telling you where to go

...b) Trying to make you stay at a fight until the capture timer goes through

...c) Giving a big glowy icon that rewards exp, which attracts squad attention to a place where you might not want them

...d) Encourages farming (better to stay in the mission area and farm than redeploy to the next base or drop and prep the next one in terms of exp gain) over smart play

-Since you have to be close the mission area to receive the bonus, it incentivizes vehicles to camp spawnrooms instead of fighting in the open field.

-It takes up a great deal of screen-space and isn't empire-colored (Everything I see is red--and the weird green color doesn't mesh well)

-Doesn't appear to prioritize alert goals (Hey [DUDE], can you move your platoon over to take Splitpeak and start pushing towards Onatha since it's a biolab alert? Sorry [BRO], mission says to take the Kwhatee lane!). Not super-necessary, but with new squad/platoon leaders it could cause issues.

Not sure if you are wildly exaggerating, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. The sound and animation only plays on new mission assignment, and the primary way a mission assignment is re-evaluated is when you change regions. You should not be getting mission re-assignments as rapidly as you describe and I have not gotten them anywhere near the frequency you describe when running with a platoon for many hours last night.

If anyone is experiencing mission reassignments that quickly, please indicate the situation that resulted in this and I'll look into it. It is not the intent for them to change that rapidly and they should be fairly stable and only changing when you relocate or facility state changes. Even then its not a guarantee that the mission will change, most of the time you should be getting the same mission so it shouldn't be playing any sort of sound or animation in that case.

Flying in a lib or ESF. It happens exactly like that.

I was looking at his killboard for yesterday and it looked like he spent the entire time as infantry or in a Magrider.

For aircraft we can adjust the delay between crossing regions and mission re-evaluation. It's currently 20 seconds which resets everytime a region border is crossed. If you're getting that rapid change then I would speculate that you are crossing region borders between lanes and hanging around in each region for more than 20 seconds. I will try changing it to 30 and see if that alleviates the issue.

I'm noticing the opposite thing more, which is that I often am in a base and sometimes have already flipped the point by the time my mission updates to capturing it, and other times I get frequently changing defense missions triggered by hostile aircraft moving across friendly territory if I am at or nearer the warpgate instead of the front lines.

I wasn't wildly exaggerating. While driving around in a Magrider, I got constant mission updates while maneuvering around, about five in the span of a few minutes. I was in a two man squad, with me as the captain and my friend gunning in my tank. I may or may not have been unknowingly dancing between the line where several hexes intersect, since I wasn't watching the map.

Any more information about the mission updating after you captured the point? Were you in a squad (if so, where was the squad leader at the time?)? Were you the one capturing it?

Defense missions should only trigger if there are more than 5 players in the facility area (not the region) and there was at least 3 kills recently in that region. I'll look into tuning this a little bit to reduce false positive chance, but there's always going to be a chance of a false-positive. If that happens it should fix it self fairly quickly (which would result in a rapid mission re-assignment). But that's still an edge case and shouldn't be something you see regularly by any means. I'll spend some time lurking at a warpgate and see how often it happens.

Did that occur while fighting at one base or was it something you were constantly experiencing at many outposts throughout the night? Could be the region borders was a bit funky where you were fighting next to a lane. If you were skirting the fight as magriders often do, it is entirely possible that could happen.

It was at one area. If my memory is correct, this is the area where it happened:

Looks like you may have wandered up into the lower-right hex of Moss Ravine, which may have given you a mission appropriate to that lane as opposed to the West Sungrey/NC Arsenal lane.

I'm going to up the region delay for ground vehicles to help mitigate this and bring it to about 18 seconds (up from 10). The hard part is figuring out whether you intended to go to Moss Ravine or to Sungrey/NC arsenal. We have a delay there assuming that if you are intending to go to a place you'll stay in the region, and if not you'll move back to the other one.

Edit: the upcoming "lock mission" feature would also help alleviate this, as you could just lock the mission to whichever place you wanted and then it wouldn't matter if you changed regions. Until then the timing is the best I can do to lessen this happening.

Thank you for your time and insight.

I disagree with the observation that it just picks the most obvious front line fight. Several times during an Amp station alert last night, it kept picking the Bastion which the map right above this clearly shows is no where NEAR the lattice connecting to any amp stations. Infact the only people on the continent were there for the alert and lanes pertaining to it, so the population per hex (especially with regards to organized platoons) didn't seem to be part of its "logic"

Hence why most people I heard opinions from last night in-game, all had the same opinion that its not doing anything at all yet and could have stayed on the Test Server for a while longer.

I can understand why it is an important feature for newer players, or players who simply require something to give them a sense of direction.

That being said, I play this game for the sandbox element. I do as I please at any given point, as do most people I play the game with. I've put over 1000 hours into this game. I know how it works, I know what I want to do, and I know all the options I have.

I don't need this, and neither do any dedicated players to this game. We understand how the game plays out and can make our own decisions. What this system does, for us, is to distract us and take more space on the UI. That is it at the moment.

Even when you implement phase 2 of the Mission System I don't see why I should have to deal with this on my screen, trying to tell me where to go. If you make it reward me for fighting at a mission objective, then that's great, but that still doesn't mean I necessarily want it there.

I'm not against the idea of missions. I don't mind them being in the game. I do mind them applying to me when I don't have any use for them. Just let me, and the rest of the experienced players in this game who don't want them, just turn them off. Just a UI option "Missions: Enable/Disable" and a checkbox. That's all. I don't think I'm being unreasonable.

I love the potential of the system. As of now it just highlights the most obvious target which will only help the newest players... that by itself is a good thing though.

I am interested to see what will be done to implement it with directives, resource revamp and continental lattice. This could turn out to b a very good system

Just remember people this is the 1st iteration and will be expanded upon if I remember the info from FNO correctly

Make it so you can disable it, I don't think I need some silly mission system telling me where to go after playing since launch

Indeed, I'm interested to see how future developments play out. At the moment though, it's basically a training wheels system--very helpful for new players, but fairly superfluous for older players, and it'll likely be awhile before we see the deeper system.