Discussion: Increase Mission Completion Rewards Significantly

[EmperorSteele]

I think the issue is Time Ratio.

I COULD start my character off doing Mathew Hashbey's arc, and after an hour or so, be level 4.

Or I can do a DFB in 10 minutes and end up at level 6 or higher.

Per Ivan above, Katie Hannon takes like 20 minutes. ASF is a solid hour, more if you're on a less-than-stellar PuG. I love almost everything about it, except the run time, and the fact that since it's a TF, people just want to blitz through and don't care about the dozens of easter eggs, lore bits, and side-missions. Of course, since the more interesting bits of it are literally TIMED, I get the anxiety to get through it all. Yes, the ASF rewards are generally much better, but you have a non-0 chance of getting an acc/mez enhancement and feeling like you've utterly wasted your time.

This is why the ITF is popular. It's just 4 missions, and doesn't require you to do much except mindlessly murd- er, arrest(?) everyone from point A to point B, and even then, half of them can be skipped. We're all old and busy and may not have the time or energy to take more than an hour to do something.
 

[Lunar Ronin]

On 9/27/2024 at 1:09 AM, Shin Magmus said:

     Unfortunately, the overall playerbase will keep doing the same things they are doing regardless of changes to rewards.  People will do content that is easy to play and easy to join, and avoid content that takes more thought or effort.  People will also default to what is familiar to them regardless of reward output.

 

- Example 1: MSRs give 33% of the reward merits they used to pre-nerf and are painfully slow and repetitive besides.  The time-to-reward ratio is objectively higher on a bunch of random TFs when speedran, and only the most extreme outliers of reward efficiency (TinPex) achieve similar or higher popularity.

 

- Example 2: Aeon SF gives a random reward table with one of the most lucrative items in the entire game, as well as having fundamentally very profitable consistent reward when ran on Advanced Mode.  Yet ASF is extremely underplayed, with very few speed ASFs ever being ran, and most people not engaging with the content at all (filling a ASF as the one leading is so fucking slow).  The content is "new", "different", and "requires more effort" than the lowest-common-denominator stuff that is more popular.

 

The "problem" is that not everyone likes to speed run.  I've speed run.  A very good friend of mine was one of the top speed runners back on live, and the first couple of years of Homecoming.  I'm by no means the fastest, but I've kept up, doing a regular +2 difficulty ITF in something like thirteen minutes, and the LRSF at +3 difficulty in something like seventeen minutes.  The thing is though, I tend to quickly get bored of speed running.  It's fun every now and then, but I find that it takes the flavor out of things.  I much prefer steamrolling/kill mosts.  Just my point of view, I very well know that YMMV.  Sure, you get more rewards by speed running... but rewards on Homecoming mean little, considering how easily you can fully slot a level 50 character with Hami-Os, purple IO enhancements, winter IO enhancements, etc.

 

I like the ASF.  It's one of my favorites.  It also has three major problems.

 

• It's red side.  Red side is the best side for sure and the side that I mostly play, but the majority of the player base avoid it like the plague.  Back when I played on Excelsior, I used to have trouble getting people for the LRSF on occasion and would sometimes have to do it with only three or four other people.  I remember a few LRSFs took over 45 minutes to get four others.  That was on the most populated shard, back when Homecoming had more players.  The advanced mode ASF?  LOL.  Good luck with that.
• The majority of the few people who do play the ASF speed run it, for the D-Sync enhancement like you said.  This can be a problem, because the few casual players who are brave enough to join a PUG ASF for the first time tend to join a speed run ASF, and are completely lost by the end of it and have no idea what just happened.  So they get turned off by the ASF and don't want to do it again.  I personally know quite a few people that were in that situation.
• There are crazy people like me who will happily run the ASF (even advanced mode ASF), as a steamroll/kill most.  I personally hate speed running it.  I feel that the SF loses a lot by skipping 90% of it.  The average kill most/steamroll ASF takes two, two and a half hours.  The average advanced mode kill most/steamroll ASF takes three, three and a half hours.   I'm a physically disabled recluse with no children, I have plenty of time for that.  But most people don't.  The ASF really should have been split into two SFs, like the Positron TF.

 

 

 

 

[Spaghetti Betty]

It's kind of hard for me to have a solid answer to this, mainly because the proposed issue stems from a solution that was introduced due to the root cause of said issue that is being proposed. Words are difficult!

 

A lot of that legacy contact stuff (and even some of the newer contacts, e.g. Twinshot, the KR arcs) is a drag to run in a team. No amount of reward is going to change that. That's why things like DFB, DiB, the revamped TFs - and to a further extent, why iTrials are the way they are - were introduced. It was to give very clear cut content for any group of thumbed beings (and cats) to smash their keyboards at to gain decent rewards in a reasonable timeframe!

 

It would be a little funny to double back and try to incentivize making players run content they think is boring and/or contrived!

Edited October 1 by Spaghetti Betty

[ivanhedgehog]

8 hours ago, Spaghetti Betty said:

It's kind of hard for me to have a solid answer to this, mainly because the proposed issue stems from a solution that was introduced due to the root cause of said issue that is being proposed. Words are difficult!

 

A lot of that legacy contact stuff (and even some of the newer contacts, e.g. Twinshot, the KR arcs) is a drag to run in a team. No amount of reward is going to change that. That's why things like DFB, DiB, the revamped TFs - and to a further extent, why iTrials are the way they are - were introduced. It was to give very clear cut content for any group of thumbed beings (and cats) to smash their keyboards at to gain decent rewards in a reasonable timeframe!

 

It would be a little funny to double back and try to incentivize making players run content they think is boring and/or contrived!

That brings to mind a problem. My wife and I start the (for example) frost fire arc. we do the kill x number of outcasts. Talk to contact. he gives me the "rescue cops from trolls". she gets the stop bombs in cave mission. we finish both, and then he gives me the one she just finished and her the one I did. so much for being a team.

[Luminara]

19 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

That brings to mind a problem. My wife and I start the (for example) frost fire arc. we do the kill x number of outcasts. Talk to contact. he gives me the "rescue cops from trolls". she gets the stop bombs in cave mission. we finish both, and then he gives me the one she just finished and her the one I did. so much for being a team.

 

One of you abandon the mission and speak to the contact again.  In all cases where missions are offered in a random order, you can synchronize with one or more other players by doing that.

[Mopery]

I am all in favor of getting more of the stuffs.

[ZemX]

9 hours ago, Spaghetti Betty said:

No amount of reward is going to change that.

 

Synapse, Manticore, and Citadel are all zone-hopping kill-all adventures.  Synapse even has creaky old patrols in it and perhaps the worst phoned-in copy-paste missions in the whole game and yet, for double merits and/or TFC badge progress, people will do it.  So rewards DO work.  Not just saying that. 

 

Also, important to note, the goal is not for everyone in the game to drop what they are doing and go run mission arcs.  If boosting rewards a little encourages even a few radio teams to diversify, then it was worth it.  This is about making unused content a bit more attractive.  Not changing the whole world.

 

Granted, I've no idea how tedious this might be.  It might involve hand-editing hundreds of mission reward tables or something, in which case...  tough sell.  But if not, then it might be worth doing.  Or maybe it can be scripted.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Spaghetti Betty]

11 minutes ago, ZemX said:

Synapse, Manticore, and Citadel are all zone-hopping kill-all adventures.  Synapse even has creaky old patrols in it and perhaps the worst phoned-in copy-paste missions in the whole game and yet, for double merits and/or TFC badge progress, people will do it.  So rewards DO work.  Not just saying that. 

I could argue this is the symptom of a different problem, and that's that all of the goody two-shoes heroes are too afraid to hop over to redside and get Invader instead!

[macskull]

15 hours ago, EmperorSteele said:

It's just 4 missions, and doesn't require you to do much except mindlessly murd- er, arrest(?) everyone from point A to point B, and even then, half of them can be skipped.

The ASF is the same way - even on 4* difficulty you can skip the vast majority of it and still get done in less than half an hour.

 

Sure, you could end up with an acc/mez but you still get the merits out of it and you might get lucky and land one of the 20m or 400m inf enhancements. A speedy 1* LGTF is probably the most efficient way to do that these days though, even though I almost never see them forming.

[Excraft]

Not against the idea in general, but will say I don't think it's needed. 

 

For me, story arc rewards could be increased a hundred fold and I still wouldn't run them outside of absolute necessity.  Some story arcs can be fun, but most are extremely tedious and boring.  The content gets very stale, very quickly and much of it is a relic from the commercial era of the game.  Story arcs are filled with loads of Fedex missions, glowy hunts, or arbitrary timers to keep you in front of the computer playing longer.  Just the other day I ran the Chapter 4 arc for Croatoa to unlock Katie Hannon as a contact so I could run her TF.  The last mission in that where you're sitting around waiting for the 15 minute timer to run out while you kill the occasional minion or two is a good example.  It's poorly designed content in my opinion, and increasing the rewards isn't going to entice me to run stuff like that more often. 

 

Those who like and enjoy running story arcs can do so to their hearts content.  Those who want speed through and just level running TFs and iTrials can do that.  There's something for everyone here and that's a good thing.

[Owl Girl]

increasing mission rewards will only encourage the speed runners to speed thru those arcs without giving the other players the time to appreciate those arcs in the first place. I won't be mad about more merits but increasing co rewards would also make it easier to accidentally out level contacts for those that are interested in the slower story driven approach, no?

 

no point to trying to trick people into following the story if they just wanna get Incarnate power ASAP.

Edited October 1 by Owl Girl
very rare Owl Typo

[ivanhedgehog]

3 hours ago, ZemX said:

 

Synapse, Manticore, and Citadel are all zone-hopping kill-all adventures.  Synapse even has creaky old patrols in it and perhaps the worst phoned-in copy-paste missions in the whole game and yet, for double merits and/or TFC badge progress, people will do it.  So rewards DO work.  Not just saying that. 

 

Also, important to note, the goal is not for everyone in the game to drop what they are doing and go run mission arcs.  If boosting rewards a little encourages even a few radio teams to diversify, then it was worth it.  This is about making unused content a bit more attractive.  Not changing the whole world.

 

Granted, I've no idea how tedious this might be.  It might involve hand-editing hundreds of mission reward tables or something, in which case...  tough sell.  But if not, then it might be worth doing.  Or maybe it can be scripted.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I solo Dr Q on wst weeks