For the mission team: difficulty scaling

[Ehli]

Inspired by Gimbutz's comment:

Give us further specific examples of old mission mechanics you liked (ideally in a separate thread) and we'll add them to our ever-growing brainstorming session.

Likely this is already in JIRA/github/whatever, but to be sure:

In X3 the mission difficulty and rewards were depending on your fight (and trade) rank. I really liked this, because it kept doing missions interesting much longer. Can we have something similar in X4?

Besides giving more to do when you already have a shipyard & multiple capitals, it also would add to the immersion. It feels awkward asking the CEO of E-Corp with multiple fleets of capital ships to repair a satellite or kill an S ship for a few creds or a single inv item. While the first one is difficult to scale up, the latter would be (using fight rank, standing, total net value, etc).

[LandogarX4]

+1 !!!

[Mycu]

Inspired by Gimbutz's comment:

Give us further specific examples of old mission mechanics you liked (ideally in a separate thread) and we'll add them to our ever-growing brainstorming session.

Likely this is already in JIRA/github/whatever, but to be sure:

In X3 the mission difficulty and rewards were depending on your fight (and trade) rank. I really liked this, because it kept doing missions interesting much longer. Can we have something similar in X4?

Agree that mission rewards and visibility should depend on player level.

[taztaz502]

upscale the rewards too, one basic shield mod isn't worth any mission

now 10-15 exception mods would be a nice mission.

[Slashman]

I think you are going to butt your heads against the fact that nothing is spawned into the gameworld that does not absolutely have to be and there is your answer to harder mission difficulties.

They will not spawn a fleet of destroyers just to apply the correct difficulty to your mission because they would need to come from somewhere. We all need to keep this in mind when we talk about missions because everything else will be birthed from this.

[jlehtone]

They will not spawn a fleet of destroyers just to apply the correct difficulty to your mission because they would need to come from somewhere. We all need to keep this in mind when we talk about missions because everything else will be birthed from this.

This.

X2/X3R had missions that were about "your rank". The trouble was that some were "above" and therefore you were not allowed to take them. Missions were rare to begin with the undoable offers decreased that further.

X3TC/AP had no "you can't take this" missions and it did try to set the difficulty to "match something".


Philosophical question is: Is it freedom if every mission scales with you? Somebody else (an algorithm) decides "what is good for you". I bet that it is "off the mark" for most of us.

You have freedom of choice, if missions of all difficulties are available all the time. It is up to you, what you can or bother to do.

Having said that, what would be a genuinely difficult mission? Are the "impossible" missions worthy of their rating? Should there be (more) yet harder missions? How to add "difficulty", when teleporting more cannon fodder to the site is not an option?