Currently, missions are often very pointless. The worst type of mission possible is a mission where you have to be less useful to your team, in order to perform a disinteresting task, in order to get a reward. Ideally, missions will put you into positions that matter, to do useful things. Toward this end, things like tuning antennas or sitting around a drill lack meaning. That said, there is are some varyingly easy truths to fixing this: Take every relatively useless or weak mission, and grant them an actual beneficial effect to that team. Your faction is operating the drill? Everyone on the continent gets +50% nanite income while you are in control of it. You have an intelligence mission poking antenna? Grant your faction a display of where all hostile vehicles are for a minute. Convoy? Only triggered when a zone is cut off, refills the Cortium of the zone entirely. The problem right now is that they are a simple achievements list, and that often lacks actual meaning, the actual core idea of stretch yourself to changup and do different tasks is fine - good even, it just needs to be attached to things that ideally matter. Most basic missions atm fit this criteria as do the training missions, but by allowing some attached effects (even selfish ones, like replenish all your nanites), you can allow the mixups to matter in a way that frankly is not that difficult.
Those rewards are not necessary but they are really cool idea. Not sure if I get the last part about "selfish awards" but for me this is just discusson about usefullness of drilling, etc during alerts, so players actually help their empire while doing them. Speaking of Convoy - it could priotitize cut off facilities but should also trigger normally and the empire-reward cannot be cortium related as there may be no friendly base. Maybe f.e. discount for nanite refill of utility for either whole Empire or closest 1 or more) facilities to the destination of Convoy. Also check my suggestions for this mission: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps2/index.php?threads/missons-improvement.255529/ Courier misson could grant bonus for facilities he visits and they should be near battlefront (also check my advices in link beneath). And missons like Sunderer Spawns or Transport (check advices in link) are technically usefull so they do not need this award.
A quick fix would be removing any objectives the player has no control over directly or add more that do reward individual achievement or activity. Want me to scale towers around the map to activate beacons? Fine. It is out of the way but I can go waste some nanites and a few minutes for the lulz at least a few times anyway. Take out someone with a bounty? Doable. Normal gameplay typically covers this. We need more like this. Hell, even mushroom collecting as a daily would at least be something. X amount of Knife kills. Maybe a trifecta of get a main, sidearm, and melee weapon kill in a single life. Things of this nature drive me to get more creative with how I approach the game. Spawn a sky whale, wait around for people to pile in, pray they don't drop out in weird locales as I fly to a hot zone, and hope those that stick around for the journey are murder machines so I can get the transport assists I need to get a whole 4000 xp. Hell no. This would be like having a mission where you need other people to deposit cortium for you to complete the task. Your success is in the hands of others who have no horse in the race. The transport assist and platoon lead missions both seem out of place in the list. You are reliant on other people joining you on your solitary quest to get a small reward that isn't split. With redeployment being what it is in the game and transporting outside of well coordinated outfits boiling down to spamming /yell in the warpgate so you can get a bit of experience does not compel others to take their time and spend it in your quest for personal empowerment chasing carrots on sticks. I understand the intent is to get people to group up and play together but the execution is off.
I honestly think personal should be things that you have direct control over and help your faction in the war. Missions that pull people from front line combat are bad. (so ones like redploy kill X, or medic training are good but convoy and drill are bad.) Also I think there should be alert based missions, that have no daily limit but they only appear in an alert and the missions available change say every 10-15 min. These missions would be things related to your empire winning the alert. With completion of these missions by your faction giving a reward to the whole playing faction.--These would be things along the lines of capture a base from faction X. Save a base from faction X. Capture base Y. Lets say capture xenotech labs (requires it being next base on lattice to appear) all players in the faction online get 100 ISO-4. Defend xenotech labs for X minutes all players in the faction online get 100 ISO-4. Capture Mesa sky dock faction gets 10% air discount. Capture a base from VS get 25 certs. Perhaps this would be a better way to pull people out of the biolab farm and get good fights.
absolute first thing that needs to happen is remove the cost for taking missions. many people don't even know that when you accept a mission it steals certs! some of them cost around 80 certs, just to accept the mission, and if you don't complete it you're just losing 80 certs and getting nothing.
Could you elaborate and provide evidence, please? Because never have I heard anyone complain about somethin like this, nor did it ever happen to me. Honestly, that sounds more like a bug than anything else, IF it's the case at all.
after more digging it appears to be missions that offer campaign points as rewards that are known to do this, and it is intentional by the devs (wrel confirmed on twitter) apparently it is supposed to let you know that its leaching your certs when you accept the mission, but it doesn't currently display the cert cost.
I dont even...... Ive always wondered if i was too harsh saying the developers of this game are incompetent, but that just shows how clearly incompetent they are. As if he then asks 'why is it not showing the cost' Just turn your ******* game on you ******* insect....
Okay, thanks for proving that. WHAT THE ACTUAL F*CK? But it explains why I haven't encountered it, campaign point missions are usually annoying. Still, why is this a thing? It makes no sense.
Without revamping everything there are two things i would like to see that i think would improve things 1. At the very least, people should be able to select what kind of missions they would like to see. For example if you mainly play Medic there should be a mission menu where you select Medic and get mostly Medic missions. 2. Some sort of veto system where you can select X amount of missions you never want to see offered. If i literally never run squads i dont want to see the squad/platoon leader missions for example.
My strategy in improving missions is to forget they were ever introduced. Open world sandbox MMO is what's fun to me, though I understand others may want to have missions too. Just glad alert rewards were partly reverted so we can actually have motivated fighting for continent control. Nothing worse than having huge overpop on defense but everyone's off chasing nonsense while the enemy dies on point of boredom, and vice versa. No clue what they were thinking - or inhaling - splitting up the game so far off the main big reason to fight and squad play when alerts kick off.
Glad I only took one of these missions so far (didn't even have time to complete it, was too busy trying to hold and defend Lattice with my platoon) Another thing that should happen: Any Vehicle based missions should double the Survivability of the vehicle you completed the mission in for 20 minutes or double your Carrying capacity if it's an ANT mission. That would justify the crazy Cert Sinks.
