Ridiculously overpriced mission at non-campaigned starts.

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_Skywalker_
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Ridiculously overpriced mission at non-campaigned starts.

Post by _Skywalker_ » Fri, 6. Nov 15, 17:09

Hello.
Been a while since i whipped my Skunk to race along the stardusted lanes. In times of Teladi Outpost, to be precise. So 2 days ago I noticed new updates and unmothbolled my Skunk.

Took the new Teladi Outpost start. Good, new position close to Argon systems, 3 small freighters. Wonderfull, i thought - a good start but nothing fancy, i thought rubbing my pawsand looking forward to part I always tended to overlook in X games - trade and commerce building.

Scanned several stations, bought a cargofull of batteries and started taking note of missions while Gigurum was en route.

Station protetction. Good. The hell? 400 000 nice (I thought while taking inventory of my starting weapons) prolly gonna come something nasty.
Then raced toward.... 6 fighters... only 2 reached me through ally fire and were easily swatted...
Ok, guess i just got lucky. Lets take this one - a cargo retrieval... 5 minutes later, after shooting locks off 4 crates I was paid 800 000 creds...

And it was like that all the time. All missions were laughably easy, taking barely 5-10 minutes with million+ to multimillion rewards.

Whats the point in building empire, trade fleet, scanning, buying new, tasty ultraheavy freighters if all missions are laughably easy and like 10-20 times more profitable. And there will always be an urge to get this one more mission to cover price ofthat engine upgrade, that freighter's buy, money for that cargo, etc.

Well. At the moment of that realisation I lost all will to go further. Still missing the game, still longing for it. But i keep loosing any desire to go further when I see another 2 400 000+ reward right after start of a new game (no kidding - tried Aspiring merchant and saw 2 430 000 mission staring right at my face).

So here is a request - fix the mission reward. Pleeeeease :(.
Last edited by _Skywalker_ on Fri, 6. Nov 15, 20:45, edited 1 time in total.
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Tamina
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Post by Tamina » Fri, 6. Nov 15, 17:15

Yes, thank you. +1
My concern with missions since they increased their rewards.
Yes, there was a patch that increased them from ridiculous high to insanely high.

Completly agree. Wanted to play and test a little bit with Patch 4.0 but got bored because of this.

[GUIDE]
Step 1: Easily make millions with 3 or 4 missions
Step 2: Fully upgrade Skunk
Step 3: Easily Board some capital ships
Step 4: Sell capital ships
Step 5: Profit
Step 5.5: Buy every ship or station of your desire
Step 6: Boredom
> Playtime:1hour

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Und wenn ein Forenbösewicht, was Ungezogenes spricht, dann hol' ich meinen Kaktus und der sticht sticht sticht.
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Santi
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Post by Santi » Fri, 6. Nov 15, 17:33

Reminds me of AP where money and ships just get thrown at you for the minimum effort. It kind of works in AP because there are so many sinks for the money, ships, stations, upgrades, missions, HUB, HQ.

In Rebirth it just makes the game pointless as end game gameplay is lacking.
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Post by Jaxartes » Fri, 6. Nov 15, 17:35

+1 Missions are way to easy cash.

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Post by GCU Grey Area » Fri, 6. Nov 15, 17:36

Perhaps mission rewards should be linked to game difficulty? Maybe keep current levels of mission rewards for an Easy game, then reduce rewards to say 1/2 of current levels for Normal, 1/5 for Hard & 1/10 for Very Hard.

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Post by Sparky Sparkycorp » Fri, 6. Nov 15, 17:47

Back when missions were in the order of 30k each, they were too low compared to other things such as trading profits and easy ship boarding. I supported increasing mission rewards but yeah, they probably went up a bit too much.

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Post by Jaxartes » Fri, 6. Nov 15, 18:53

GCU Grey Area wrote:Perhaps mission rewards should be linked to game difficulty? Maybe keep current levels of mission rewards for an Easy game, then reduce rewards to say 1/2 of current levels for Normal, 1/5 for Hard & 1/10 for Very Hard.
This seams like the best solution imo.

Also what does difficulty change exactly?

_Skywalker_
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Post by _Skywalker_ » Fri, 6. Nov 15, 21:51

Sparky Sparkycorp wrote:Back when missions were in the order of 30k each, they were too low compared to other things such as trading profits and easy ship boarding. I supported increasing mission rewards but yeah, they probably went up a bit too much.
Good idea. Tho IMHO even for easy mode paying 1 000 000+ for dozren fighters... well...
Jaxartes wrote:
GCU Grey Area wrote:Perhaps mission rewards should be linked to game difficulty? Maybe keep current levels of mission rewards for an Easy game, then reduce rewards to say 1/2 of current levels for Normal, 1/5 for Hard & 1/10 for Very Hard.
This seams like the best solution imo.

Also what does difficulty change exactly?
From FAQ:
Since X Rebirth Update 2.0, when you start a new game you can choose one of three difficulty levels: Easy, Normal and Hard. This setting affects two things: The amount of damage caused by the player ship's weapon fire (this includes missiles), and the amount of damage taken by the player ship when it is damaged (this excludes collision damage to the shields). Other aspects of the game, like the amount of enemies spawned within a mission, are not influenced by this.

Please note: If you have started your savegame in a game version prior to 2.0, then your difficulty level was automatically set to 'Normal', when you updated to version 2.0 (or higher). In any way, you can change the difficulty setting at any time in the game's main menu under Settings -> Game Settings -> Difficulty.
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ezra-r
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Post by ezra-r » Sat, 7. Nov 15, 11:29

which difficulty level do you play?

With hard, a 800K mission, yess.. and what do you do with 800K or even, what do you do with 2 million? buy a couple of gigurums made of cardboard?

If you play Easy, well, don't complain it is easy!

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Post by Sparky Sparkycorp » Sat, 7. Nov 15, 11:52

I've been playing on Hard ever since the beta that tested things and I've been loving the change. Will have to try Very Hard when I get a moment :)

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Post by _Skywalker_ » Sat, 7. Nov 15, 12:26

ezra-r wrote:which difficulty level do you play?

With hard, a 800K mission, yess.. and what do you do with 800K or even, what do you do with 2 million? buy a couple of gigurums made of cardboard?

If you play Easy, well, don't complain it is easy!
Normal. What does difficulty level has to do with anything here? Devs specificaly stated that it changes how hard you hit and how hard are you hitted by weapons fire. Doesn't even affect amount of enemies.

I've been playing on Hard ever since the beta that tested things and I've been loving the change. Will have to try Very Hard when I get a moment

Mrrr. Did they fix mixxion rewards?
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Post by Sparky Sparkycorp » Sat, 7. Nov 15, 12:38

Your quotes got a little mangled but I think you wrote the following.
_Skywalker_ wrote:Mrrr. Did they fix mixxion rewards?
As far as I can tell, the size of rewards for existing missions are unchanged in the 4.00 beta.

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Post by _Skywalker_ » Sat, 7. Nov 15, 12:44

Sparky Sparkycorp wrote:Your quotes got a little mangled but I think you wrote the following.
_Skywalker_ wrote:Mrrr. Did they fix mixxion rewards?
As far as I can tell, the size of rewards for existing missions are unchanged in the 4.00 beta.
Awwww :(
So still a million for 5 fighters.
*Sad kitty*
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Post by Xenon_Slayer » Sat, 7. Nov 15, 14:02

I'll look at rebalancing the mission rewards. Maybe just a sweeping change like halving them, and possibly also changing them per difficulty level. I'll need feedback on that once it's in.

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Post by ezra-r » Sun, 8. Nov 15, 12:28

Not sure what to say..

Ive started a new game at very hard and I am not getting lots of money not even through missions, most are 200K or something some a little higher, in two hours I stilld don't have Skunk fully upgraded, and I could just buy two gigurums and hire crew to board a titurel (which took me forever with not the best weapons).

Im trying to get money to build the pharma lab (OL start with pharma lab) to a med fac, which is 6million+

Careful checking so it does not make the game a grinding fest!

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Tamina
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Post by Tamina » Sun, 8. Nov 15, 12:50

Well I think the two biggest problems are Killing Cartel-Boss and Protect Station Missions.
Both tend to give you tons of money without actually needing the player to intercept in any way because stations are already killing then. So it is easy to get 2.4Mill Cr for those two pirate Fulmekron that got already destroyed upon arrival even in hardest difficulty.

Maybe get the reward based on how many ships the player actually shot down or how many damage he made to the pirate capship?

@ezra-r
When I open the black board ingame I get multiple missions ranging from 200k+ to 2.4m+ Cr.
Shady missions you get only from short range station coms tend to give waaay higher rewards.
3.something million to shoot down some civilian ships. Yeah for the price of -9Reputation that is but still.

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Post by pref » Sun, 8. Nov 15, 13:08

Isn't the problem the mission(s) being too easy? You don't have to protect anything for those - i never did those station protect missions for this reason.
Couldn't even get to the enemy in time usually. Same for some kill missions.
If it was a good 30 min fight, then probably the rewards would be fine as well.

Though these manual activities should pay less then trading with a couple of ships, and even less then the income stations produce, but it always seemed to be exatcly the other way around.

And the biggest issue is not having like 10 more points instead of that 5.5 in Tamina's post. But thats content related.

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Post by Sparky Sparkycorp » Sun, 8. Nov 15, 13:42

Overall, I think just lowering some of the higher-end mission rewards is a good plan. Those like Protect Station/Assassinate missions and maybe Diplomatic Aid (if that is the multi-million one we fly around a sector and tend to get ambushed by a swarm of fighters).

Perhaps if we board rather than kill a target, we could get the reputation boost and no cash reward? Pretty much any boarding target is going to sell for more than the mission reward so we'd not be particularly out of pocket.

Station Protection missions
This tends to have hostile fighters arrive by highway and hostile capitals boosting in to range of the station. So the capitals tend to get shot at by the station but since the Player is already in the zone, the capital shouldn't die before the Player can help.The capital is going to die in the end without much help from the Player though.

Personally, I think this is a bit more of a side effect of stations being so well-armed rather than having dedicated defence capitals. Having the reward proportional to damage dealt by player assets is a good idea and in some form, I believe this is implemented (at least in terms of working out if we fail or not).

Assassination missions
Although these targets are often in zones with stations, I think Egosoft changed them in the past to ensure the targets spawn ~30+ km away from stations so that we can get to them before they die to stations/local patrols.

So we don't tend to get much help but on the other hand, it facilitates boarding and thus additional, juicy ship rewards. Given boarding is more nuanced and slower than going for the kill once we have capitals of our own, I am not sure that is a problem.

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Post by Lord Crc » Sun, 8. Nov 15, 13:58

I think a "performance bonus" is the best approach. Have a low base payout, and then a performance bonus which is scaled (multiplier) by difficulty. Do a lot of damage, get a lot of money.

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Post by GCU Grey Area » Sun, 8. Nov 15, 14:11

Think for station protection missions overall pay should be reduced, however think it would be good if there was a bonus for each kill, as an incentive for the player to get involved (rather than leave it all to station defences).

Might also be good if final mission pay was reduced in proportion to any damage the station takes, these are protection missions after all - the focus should be on minimising damage to the thing being protected.

Also think pirates etc spawned for such missions, particularly those which pay millions, should be present in sufficient numbers that they pose a credible threat to the station - if there's only a handful of enemies that station defences can easily deal with on their own, why would they pay so much for the player to help if such help is completely unnecessary?

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