2020 PvE Overhaul, Phase 1: Current State and NPC/Mission Reworks

[St.Denis]

Good, reasons to buff trading routes then.

Money is so easy to make, with trading, if that is what you are trying to achieve. Buffing Trade Routes will just make in stupidly easy.

Also with the plethora of Trade Events that are now turning up, it is just exsaspirating the situation where people don't need to/will not trade anymore.

Trade will just be, except for Events, done by newer Players trying to get all the 'shinies'.

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'I would like to be half as clever as some people like to believe they are'
Life is full of disappointments, it is how we handle them that helps to define us, as a person

[Lythrilux]

People have complained about the lack of Traders so that they can pirate them. I believe that this kind of payout will reduce people needing to trade even more.

I didn't trade because it's boring. I did missions because it's fun. Missions were nerfed before previously with the insistence/belief that it would force people back to the lanes. It didn't. We just stopped logging in to make money entirely.

These missions are really fun and making money from them is even better. My only suggestion would be to introduce more means of counter-play or incentives for hostile IDs to intercept missions, as with credit cards removed it's a bit diminished right now.

If we want to make people Trade, Trading needs to be made more fun. Profit isn't really the issue, and I don't think nerfing missions is a good idea. A quick skim of the playerlist shows that missions are a massive benefit to the playerlist right now.

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[St.Denis]

If we want to make people Trade, Trading needs to be made more fun. Profit isn't really the issue, and I don't think nerfing missions is a good idea. A quick skim of the playerlist shows that missions are a massive benefit to the playerlist right now.

Wasn't Jump Trading popular in its day? It increased the Playerlist.

I am sure that people said that it avoided Player Interaction, even though the contrary argument was that it was a Group thing and therefore wasn't avoiding interaction.

Now, I see people saying that PvE is popular and increasing Server Population. Yes we can have 20 groups in 20 different Systems (say 2-3 people per group) keeping the population up.

How is this any different?

Can't quite remember the names of people who were against Jump Trading for these same reasons............can you?

And no, I didn't involve myself in JT, other than a couple of times, but gave it up because it was boring.

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'I would like to be half as clever as some people like to believe they are'
Life is full of disappointments, it is how we handle them that helps to define us, as a person

[Redcroft]

Is there a way to make new missions?
Imagine some trader mission haul "x" items to "y" and you get some good money for mission and somemore for the items.

[Lythrilux]

If we want to make people Trade, Trading needs to be made more fun. Profit isn't really the issue, and I don't think nerfing missions is a good idea. A quick skim of the playerlist shows that missions are a massive benefit to the playerlist right now.

Wasn't Jump Trading popular in its day? It increased the Playerlist.

I am sure that people said that it avoided Player Interaction, even though the contrary argument was that it was a Group thing and therefore wasn't avoiding interaction.

Now, I see people saying that PvE is popular and increasing Server Population. Yes we can have 20 groups in 20 different Systems (say 2-3 people per group) keeping the population up.

How is this any different?

Can't quite remember the names of people who were against Jump Trading for these same reasons............can you?

And no, I didn't involve myself in JT, other than a couple of times, but gave it up because it was boring.

Jump Trading as an activity was about avoiding interaction whilst making profit in the most efficient way possible. Taking missions put you in a vulnerable position where you can be attacked by players. It's not the same thing.

If I look at the playerlist and see a bunch of people in Delta doing missions, I can log in and likely ambush their mission operation before they have time to pull away and hide because they will be mid mission and in open space (and also potentially damaged).

It was nigh-impossible to catch Jump Traders because they don't put themselves in a vulnerable position (if they did, no one would jump trade). As soon as something logged in they could immediately begin to jump whilst still being right next to a place they could do worst-case scenario. Likely the coordinates would put them near their sell point (otherwise it's a game of guesses for where they end up) and that is near-unreachable with a hostile ID also.

Is there a way to make new missions?
Imagine some trader mission haul "x" items to "y" and you get some good money for mission and somemore for the items.

Elite Dangerous style trade missions would be very cool.

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[jammi]

Is there a way to make new missions?
Imagine some trader mission haul "x" items to "y" and you get some good money for mission and somemore for the items.

Unfortunately Freelancer's native mission systems are very restrictive, with a lot of it being hardcoded. Other mods have worked around it by binning base missions entirely, and rebuilding an artificial job board through FLHook, but this comes with its own set of issues.

I believe new mission types can be added, but they're more or less restricted to variations of go there, shoot that.

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News article library, feedback and content requests.

[sindroms]

Well, if you make the X that needs to be shot only be damaged with a Y weapon, you can make resource gathering or research missions.

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[Hubjump]

I didn't trade because it's boring. I did missions because it's fun. Missions were nerfed before previously with the insistence/belief that it would force people back to the lanes. It didn't. We just stopped logging in to make money entirely.

This shouldn't even be an argument because it's a true fixed statement.
Some people actually like to have a game require more than 5% of their attention as to achieve many things like a more earned feeling of progression which of course is subjective hence we just stopped logging instead of subjecting our selves to the boring mental self harm of trading in a game we want to be actively playing. We want to occupy our time actively. Trading is fine if you're working as you do so but for the players who want to occupy our selves more fully, we resorted to missions.

And this is how we have pvp whore veterans like my self who just use what we have and don't trade even if we have the means to do so. It's just that boring.

Atm I'm occupied with a different game entirely but I am keeping a close interested eye on this PVE overhaul.

Also I wanna +1 the research idea. More options is nearly always better.

[jammi]

Well, if you make the X that needs to be shot only be damaged with a Y weapon, you can make resource gathering or research missions.

Funnily enough, I was asking about making anomaly hunt missions yesterday, with the general idea being to offer them on research stations and spawn NPCs with a % chance of dropping scidata. While technically possible, it's currently on ice due to some other changes that are being discussed that could impact the relevant mechanics.

The unreleased Broken Bonds mod used to do the same thing for asteroid mining. Their 'roids were technically NPCs that you needed a mining laser to destroy, using shield damage types. That would also work for resource gathering missions.

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News article library, feedback and content requests.

[Lythrilux]

Some things from testing:
Seems like the meta is to do these missions in a group of more than two. At the very least there's really not any reason to do these with 4 or more people, as the profit begins to considerably decline.

Also Anti-Nomad missions as Core are so much harder yet less profitable than others. I had heard that the system was going to be tweaked on and individual basis considering region and sub-class so I was eager to see changes, but these seem to be just as hard as before (post-nerf). The player economy is too volatile to consider the remains from loot as a consistent source of income, and the Battleship missions are so rare and the Cruiser/BC ones are much more common yet their remain drops are pretty much worthless.

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