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September 18, 2006
Mission Dropping
Positron speaks on the new Mission Dropping feature, upcoming:
There's probably nothing more frustrating to have just about cleared out an entire map, only to realize that there's a mob somewhere about still. You scour each room, but still nothing. Turns out the mob is spawned outside the map. You petition and...wait.That's one of the first things we wanted to solve with this feature.
In this scenario, we'd of course want to give the person their reward...after all, they'd done just about all the work!
Naturally, mission dropping is also useful for those missions that are either too easy or too hard...in those cases, it's not necessarily good to give players the reward. And yet the way we have tech set up right now, a player NEEDS the reward. Case in point: the Vahzilok Wasting Disease. If a player dropped that mission, but didn't get the reward, they'd have the Disease forever.
It's extremely difficult to determine programmatically whether a mission is being dropped for fun factor or bugs. It's better to err on the side of "bugs" so we decided to keep the reward. But in order to prevent people from gobbling missions like candy and getting free XP, Enhancements, etc., we placed a limit on how often.
I freely admit that it's not a perfect system; I know Posi and I are reading the boards to find ways to improve the mission dropping...so post away!
I think this makes tremendous sense. Though, honestly speaking, I think only once have I ever been in a mish where the "last missing mob" was actually unfindable or some sort of bug. Usually, with diligence (and/or help from one's friends), it can be found lurking behind a crate or up in the ceiling or something.
I think if the frequency on this got increased to every couple of days, it would not hurt the "experience" (nobody's going to farm by skipping missions every couple of days) while being quite useful.
Posted by Dave at September 18, 2006 9:33 AM
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Comments
Mal said:
What I would like to see is a revisit and overhaul of the way that contacts give out story arcs. Still, this is an excellent start. I hope they do more with it.
Posted on September 19, 2006 8:01 AM
*** Dave said:
Agreed. I think story arc missions need to be identified in some fashion; arcs need to be abandonable (is that a word?), too.
Or missions/arcs need to time out eventually -- if you're out of level range or after X days or whatever ("Sorry, Captain Fred, I had to give that mission to another hero who had the time" -- or, "Gosh, Captain Fred, I told you about those kidnap victims in that building, but that was days ago -- the Devouring Earth ... well ... devoured them."); this would be prompted for and allowed to be renewed if the player still wanted them.
Posted on September 19, 2006 11:02 AM