Jump to content

PTS changes are great but what about missions?


Zeddrick

Recommended Posts

I've been trying out the PTS and the changes look great.  There's more there than I was expecting there to be and the PvP changes look like they really will change the meta which I'm excited about.  But one of the things I was hoping for in this release is something which would place more limits on the (currently ridiculously large) amount of quanta which can be made by farming missions.  The speed changes do place some small limitations on mission running but they don't really do anything at all to address the current imbalance and the container changes might actually make bulk mission running even easier and raise the limits on what can be done!

Currently on the PTS the speed changes stop at about 2Kt and a speed of 20K, which is about the mass of a single package and 2/3 of the current speed limit.  That means that all mission running is limited to 2/3 of the current speed regardless of whether the player is running 1 package or 200.  As on the 'real' server, if one is running missions there is absolutely no reason not to make the mission ship bigger and take more packages, the only limit being the number of packages available to take.  There are some speedbumps at certain sizes but generally speaking if, for example, I'm running 50 packages and someone comes along with another 10 for me to run there's no reason not to make my ship a bit bigger and take those too.

 

At the moment the worst abuses of mission running are probably being limited by the impending release and the threat of a wipe.  People with beta accounts can run a lot of packages but people paying a sub probably don't want to spend too much subscription money doing it in case that money turns out to be wasted.  After release, I think mission running is just going to turn the whole thing into a pay-to-win game with peoples earnings only really limited by the number of subscriptions they want to pay for.  Since this is the last major update before release, time is running out to fix it!

 

Personally, I've been playing with 6 accounts.  After release I was originally planning to buy 6 of the 1-year subs and continue to do the same thing.  However, with missions being the way they are there is a different option available.  With the same upfront cost I can just buy 2 1-year subs and spend the rest of the money on 25 1-month subs I never intend to renew.  Now I have 25 characters for mission running.

But mission running is boring and a lot of work, right?  So instead of running all those missions I can just find a mission runner and offer them 1/2 the reward to take my packages for me.  This is a complete no-brainer for them -- the reward is about 100mil/mission and all they need to do is make their ship a bit bigger to take it so it's money for almost no downside.  Now all I have to do is pick the missions up and turn them in at the other end.  Depending on the setup there might be some shuttling of the packages to/from a station too.  I've been running some missions and am fairly certain that turning in one set of packages and getting another set ready can be done in about 40 minutes using 2 computers and a third GFN session running autopilot.  So 40 minutes of effort gets me about 100 mil after paying the mission runner their share.

But why stop at one mission?  The mission system lets me take as many missions as I like,  so I can just find 5 mission runners and get them all to take my packages at the same time.  Now I'm making about 500mil every time for about 3 hours effort.  And if the mission runners can find a few more people like me they're all making similar amounts on each run.  It's probably too much to suggest I can get 5 sets of packages taken every day and keep up the 3 hours of work per day it would take to turn them in, but it's certainly not unrealistic to suggest I can get 15 runs in a week done and make around 1.5 BILLION every week.  So my 25 1 month subs are going to let me pay-to-win to the tune of around 6 Bn quanta.  

What can I do with 6Bn quanta?  At 100mil for a high end PvP ship I can troll around and do as much PvP as I ever want without much risk and without needing to care about alien cores/autominers/whatever.  But instead I could, perhaps, go straight into endgame industry content (after 4 weeks), buy a 3-line warp beacon factory and pay someone to boost it.  Then I can easily make 800 mil every month forever (assuming too many others don't do the same).  Or perhaps DAC will be introduced and I can spend 2.5Bn on 25 DAC so I can do the same thing again for a second month?  This type of thing will push the price of DAC right up so the only people who will be able to buy it for quanta at all are people doing this kind of thing and it will introduce a second way to pay-to-win -- buy DAC and sell it to the people doing mass mission runs.

There are probably a bunch of people thinking "Don't tell them that I'm making loads of money from missions", but IMO the system is completely broken and this will eventually break the whole game because why bother with empire building, civilisations, etc when it's so easy to just farm massive piles of money.   And it's because:
- being able to take multiple missions at once lets the alt-farmers multiply up their earnings but is not really useful to small-scale players
- no real cost to taking more packages means every mission runner just goes bigger and bigger over time and ends up taking packages for other people
- missions are not tied to the player driven economy at all, allowing them to flood the game with quanta and cause inflation if too many are run

Some suggestions for easy ways to balance this without making massive changes to the game:

- Make it so each character can only have one Aphelia mission at once.  In my example above that would really hurt the ability to make money.

- Make it so most (75% for example) of the rewards for missions are paid in items rather than quanta.  These could be 0-mass 'schematic licenses' or something which are required to build the new items and consumed in the process.  Perhaps they could even be required to build some existing items too.  Different missions could give different sets of items so it's not possible to just run the one mission that gives the one item you need.  Since adding players increases demand but adding alts does not this would mean that as more alts run missions the rewards go down, encouraging people to do something else instead.  It would also make it possible to alter mission rewards by controlling the market, optimise results as the 'best' mission changes over time, etc and this is what a player driven economy is actually supposed to look like.  It could also be set up such that if everyone runs the 'big' missions the smaller ones get more and more valuable as they're needed to make the smaller items, etc.  By making the smaller missions have higher % cash payouts one could reward individual players while not rewarding alt farms (as the shorter runs spend a greater % of time logging in/out).

- There needs to be some 'cost' to making mission ships bigger and adding more packages.  I think a good cost would be increased risk of PvP, because more packages should mean a larger organisation which should in turn mean a greater need to protect things.  One way to do this would be to slow ships right down to 2K/s if they get really big, but that would be really boring for the mission runner and force people to run them AFK.  Another would be to have a probability for ships to be briefly (30 seconds at a time, say) detected on radar at ranges higher than 2su.  This might look a bit like the recent PTS bug did.  Make it so that the range ships can be detected from *and* the probability of detection go up as the mass of the ship goes up, so a 10kt hauler will probably never get detected but a 200kt one will light up like a Christmas tree from 75SU away.  That would mean that large loads need protecting, small 'ninja' haulers can get through blockades and medium sized hauls can chance it, getting through sometimes and providing red meat for the PvPers on other occasions.  Lots of different types of gameplay could come out of this -- blockades/taxes, white-knights and pirates might all have some fun here.

This turned into a longer rant than I meant it to, but I think this is something which really needs to be addressed before launch so we can have a sustainable game.  Wipe or no, if people can make 6 Bn back in the first month then the game economy is going to have huge problems as players need to choose between:
- have a lot of alts and do missions
- run a lot missions for a lot of peoples alts
- buy DAC for $$ and sell it to mission runners
- be poor

And I'd like to see a more balanced and interesting game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Its almost as if the mission system is only in it's first iteration and it's almost as if they let somethings slide for way to long. Remember when we could warp with a docked cargo pod, and get the missions done in minutes, or remember when we could use VR? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, space_man said:

Its almost as if the mission system is only in it's first iteration and it's almost as if they let somethings slide for way to long. Remember when we could warp with a docked cargo pod, and get the missions done in minutes, or remember when we could use VR? 

Agree, but these things were fixed, and the way it is now is the way it is on the PTS, which has the last update before a full release.  Stuff which is unfixed now has a good chance of staying unfixed for a release unless we highlight it and it will come under a lot more pressure when we're in the release game than it has up until now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 4/5/2022 at 5:35 PM, Nayropux said:

Completely agree, with the caveat that if missions are appropriately nerfed the game 100% needs wiped.

 

Not sure being jelly of others is any reason to wipe.

 

Today it is missions, yesterday it was schematics, last year it was mega nodes, in the NDA days it was REDACTED... In two years from now there will be another long list of things people did to push an advantage to the max.

 

I hope people stop trying to think they can win at game that has no win condition and just play and have fun. 
 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Easier solution. Each Aphelia misson containers reduces max speed of the ship by 2%.  So 5 containers max speed is now 18k. 10 containers 16k. 25 containers is 10k. 

 

With the increased range of radar should make these missions that much riskier. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...