How to reduce mission reward clutter?

[khadgar]

It seems to me that as more and more potential rewards for missions are being added, there is a lower and lower chance of getting what you want. This is very heavily front-weighted, in that at the beginning of a continent, you only need 3 or 4 things right away, but there is a pool of 100s to choose from. As you progress, you open more avenues of things you need or could potentially use, while all the while be drawing from a smaller and smaller pool.

I played multiplayer on 3 different servers today, just to fiddle around, and the common complaint on all three was that "The mission rewards aren't what I want." One user succinctly put it "All the missions have those shitty personality structures instead of wind shelters, so I'm grinding enchants". I have noticed this as well. Getting started on a continent, I need the basic buildings first and foremost. Taking a look at the missions available to me, all I see are "Minor swiftening wrath power" and "banking structure" and then more "moderate swiftening wrath power". The best way I can describe this is as clutter. It's all clutter. I don't need the temporary power scrolls at all, much less at the start. I don't need a skeelbot watchtower when I don't have a residential tower, and I certainly don't want two seek resources scroll instead of actual resources!

What can be done to have less clutter in mission rewards? I have a few ideas, and I will list them below, but I want to know what you guys think.

[khadgar]

Idea 1: Gate certain things from appearing until certain conditions are met
So, you can't get a earth power boosting global 5m enchant scroll until you have the technozoologicist resident at least at level 3. You won't find a banking structure until you've found a residential tower. It wouldn't have to be "until you can use it" gates, but it shouldn't be "welcome to continent 3, here is a bunch of crap you can't use"


Idea 2: Certain missions give certain classes of reward
Secret missions buildings ALWAYS give building rewards. Secret missions in caves ALWAYS give resource rewards. World map missions can give any type of reward. Seek resources missions can ONLY give resources. Or something like that. You could divide up missions by some other lines too, even on the back end. Say, the game will only ever make 50% resource reward missions and 50% structure & power reward missions.

Idea 3: Make the weird temporary boost scrolls obtainable in some other manner.
Just removing those from the reward tables would help a lot. I could live with having useless personality structures which I've never had any desire to ever make, but those rinky dinky scrolls are almost insulting. I want magma, which will boost the power of my fireball by 50% forever, not a scroll that will boost my fire power by 20% for 5 minutes.

[Misery]

I sorta agree with this.

I havent been able to get to the ocean shallows in my current world AT ALL so far because I need ONE more freaking buoy.  Just.  ONE.
 
I've tried all sorts of things to get one.  It just isnt happening.   I've only gotten one so far on the entire continent (which is already used).

Because of this, I wasnt able to get coral at all (not yet anyway) which of course leaves some things locked up tight.

Kept looking for secret missions, kept NOT finding any buoys.   Except ONCE, and it was a damn JtP mission (needless to say, I didn't get the blasted thing).



I havent really seen any truly useless items come as a result of the missions though.  Those power boosters are stronger than they look, though in all honesty I think they should last more than just 5 minutes, particularly since you're really not going to get THAT many of them, and they do cost resources to use.   But trying one out, using the light-based Plasma Bolt with an enchant that boosted it, AND one of those item things made for a seriously stupid amount of damage.      If not increasing the time limit, how about giving another way of activating them?    Something like that would be useful, say, deep into a cave, maybe, but they'll tend to wear out on the surface because they start before you actually get there.

As the items go though, it's very hard to sometimes get the one you really want, and I think the problem isnt with the RESOURCES...... mission rewards often give you like 3 or even 5 of the same resource, making it easy to get them that way.   But they (usually) only give ONE of any given guardian scroll...... MAYBE 2 at the most.    But usually just one, and there's alot of different scrolls.


I've forgotten what else I was gonna say.

[Bluddy]

My suggestion is that each mission give you something for spells OR something for guardian powers. This way you don't have to keep waiting for the right mission to roll around -- at the end of the mission you get asked if you want the ingredients or the guardian power. It also makes the choice between helping yourself vs helping the community more obvious.

I also think that you should get a free windmill missions with each tier upgrade, so you have 5 free windmills/buoys (if this is too much, only 1, 3, and 5 could give you windmills or something.) The idea here is that you really need windmills, and this also makes tier upgrades more positive rather than just having negative consequences as they do now.

[bvchaosinc]

I would rather see some kinda of component system where each mission gives so some amount components.  Lets call them lehm and kor’neeah.  Then you can spend so much lehm and one kor’neeah to make the guardian scroll you need.  That way we only need to wait for mission time out in the cases of component needs or available type hate.

[khadgar]

I would rather see some kinda of component system where each mission gives so some amount components.  Lets call them lehm and kor’neeah.  Then you can spend so much lehm and one kor’neeah to make the guardian scroll you need.  That way we only need to wait for mission time out in the cases of component needs or available type hate.

Another crafting mechanic? Well, it would work, and it's relatively straightforward.

[x4000]

Here's what's coming to address this, possibly later today:

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Basically, missions are just not well balanced in terms of the rewards they give.  What I'd like to be able to do is tune the types of rewards that missions give in the following groups:

1. Really commonly-needed crafting materials (to be determined): 35%
2. Rarer crafting materials (anything not in #1): 15%
3. Guardian power scrolls for affecting the macrogame in major ways (wind shelters, buoys, seek survivor missions, seek resources missions): 20%
4. Guardian power scrolls for other things like continent-wide buffs, etc: 20%

5.a. Guardian power scrolls for building the basic 7 building types: 10% until such time as all 7 basic building types are found, then 0%
5.b. Guardian power scrolls for building personality buildings: 10% after all the basic buildings are found, but only if on continent 2 or greater (aka personality buildings unlocked).
5.c. If all the basic buildings found and the personality buildings are not yet unlocked, then this 10% instead gets split with 5% to #4 above and 5% to #3 above.


Given that we are giving the first four buildings to players for free on continent 1, and that on continent 2 they will have a huge number of missions available to choose from at any given time, this should work out such that people can still get what they need a lot of the time.  It also should prevent players from getting tons of stuff they don't need in a frustrating way when it comes to personality buildings.

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When it comes to missions spawned by Seek Resources, they would continue to operate under the rules of just giving resources, I'd think.  So just a mix of 1 and 2, at the same relative percentages I'd imagine.

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When it comes to secret missions and their rewards, I'd think that the overall percent chances would hold, except that we should exclude #5 completely.  That would give us more of a focus on 1-4, which is what most people are likely to need to "shore up" most of the time, I'd think.

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Lastly, with that logic we put in a few releases back about making sure that a given mission type was never more than 33% of the missions on the world map if it could be helped, I think that should attempt to do it by mission category instead -- so all JTP missions count as one for these purposes rather than having each variant potentially being able to fill up the world map still with 99% JTP missions of some variety.  I think that is still biting some people pretty hard.

[khadgar]

Those numbers sound good in theory, but I guess we'd have to see how it pans out in practice. Hopefully, by the time you get to continent 2 or 3, you'd have enough simultaneous missions unlocked that you'd always be able to find at least one or two offering something that you "want".

[x4000]

That's the idea.  And the other part of it is that, numbers like this can be tuned.  The main thing is having things categorized and structured at all, and then balancing appropriately.  Being swarmed with personality buildings immediately goes out the window with this, for instance.  Which is actually good because I want those to be moderately hard to come by anyhow, so that there is some actual challenge to getting them to line up in an optimal fashion with the NPCs you rescue.

[Hyfrydle]

Sounding very good bu I'm still having real difficulty finding NPC missions both in caves and buildings this has especially been a problem on my second continent.

Need NPC's to use powers and can't find the ones I need anywhere.

[Wanderer]

Sounding very good bu I'm still having real difficulty finding NPC missions both in caves and buildings this has especially been a problem on my second continent.

Need NPC's to use powers and can't find the ones I need anywhere.

Caves can be tougher, but since the improvement in above ground buildings try townhouses in abandoned towns and ice age buildings in thawing areas.  Their size usually lends them towards secret mission rooms without being ruins-level of aggravating to get through.

[x4000]

NPC rescue missions are unrelated to any of the other kinds of missions for the most part.  They have their own special types of nodes that seed only rescue missions aside from general secret missions.  The idea isn't that you're overflowing with settlers all the time, but I'm not saying there's not some adjustment that might still need to be made there.

But either way, the frequency of NPC rescue missions really isn't affected by this either way.

[Hyfrydle]

Yes I realise that but I'm still having real difficulty finding any npc missions. All the secret missions I find are anachronism or jtp. I will try again this evening and hopefully my luck will change.

[x4000]

Yes I realise that but I'm still having real difficulty finding any npc missions. All the secret missions I find are anachronism or jtp. I will try again this evening and hopefully my luck will change.

If it's a secret mission, odds are very good it's not NPC.  You should be able to tell right from the dungeon map that it's a rescue node.  When you hover over it it says "rescue mission" instead of "secret mission."  Also it's a very slightly different color.

[bvchaosinc]

Why don't you just stack secret mission with a rescue the dude we need to cast seek npc, then tank the odds that you get an npc rescue back down to normal or lower,  Since you then can in theory just cast find npc when you want new guys.