It's about time to talk about the mission/ClickSaver problem...

[Kuro]

Originally posted by Darkbane
Yeah, I'm beginning to think that this element of the mission system is borked. I like the idea of the mission type hinting at the general type of loot/reward. And outdoors, certain types of MOB should drop certain classes of item more often than others. This way you can focus your effort if you do want something specific, without being handed it on a plate.

However, better in-game trade mechanisms would almost certainly be needed before this would work...

The player created mission system had some potential for this. I played around with it those few times when it was in game and working.

You could create a 'delivery' mission, requesting the player return a specific item within specified QL ranges to you for credit/item/xp reward. The rewards were immediately taken from the player when the mission was created and returned if the mission wasn't completed within the time range specified (but this part was bugged to hell). Now if only that portion of the system was reactivated and only credits were applicable for the reward, there'd be 2 problems remaining I could see.

1. How to distrubte the delivery requests without demanding the player focus on getting someone to take the mission
2. Making it so accepting the delivery request and making delivery could be handled while offline.

There are tons of items received during missions I know people are dumping into vendor machines that I'd want to buy for more than the vendors would pay for them. Gems, junk rings, implant clusters, implant parts, tradeskill weapon components ect. Along with the weapons and armors people find in missions they have no use for but I would. If there were better mechanisms in place to advertise the demand for items and deliver the supply for the items, I think people would focus less on rerolling mission after mission to get a specific item. Why spend even 15 minutes using Clicksaver to get your next NT nuke if you could take any old mission, get worthwhile credits for it + items you could in turn trade, then easily advertise your demands and have them met while offline?

[_______________Tooks]

Originally posted by MORB
Well, when I play a game, usually what I want is just that, playing. And having fun. Waiting for hours in front of my monitor isn't my idea of fun.

If an item has to be long, or hard, to obtain, at least it should be long/hard gameplay, not long wait.

I don't mind working for an item, it's part of the enjoyment of the game puzzle. But spending hours staring at my monitor waiting for a spawn, or for that rare item to emerge in a mission is just ludicrous.

[Kuro]

Originally posted by Byte
Whats about if only Guilds can buy ops or houses and open shops.

Thats not so many then, and every one of the Guild can sell items in the shop.

Me pay Storm set prices?!?

Okay seriously, I don't have anything against Storm. I've never met any of them. But that type of system would put the AO's economy almost directly in the hands of the uber-guilds. Very bad idea.

[___________Judgement]

Honestly, if it weren't for click-saver, I'd have quit anarchy already.

I refuse to spend 4 hours staring at my monitor, clicking the freaking buttons, waiting for a ql 72 sword/implant/anything that i can use to appear.

Down-time like that is enuff to drive any sane man away from a game. Nano-Nanny is also awesome. I don't have 6 days to figure out my implants, its a great addition.

If the funcom boys don't like the 3-rd party stuff --> they oughta include it in the software.

[Kuro]

Originally posted by Judgement
Honestly, if it weren't for click-saver, I'd have quit anarchy already.

I refuse to spend 4 hours staring at my monitor, clicking the freaking buttons, waiting for a ql 72 sword/implant/anything that i can use to appear.

Down-time like that is enuff to drive any sane man away from a game. Nano-Nanny is also awesome. I don't have 6 days to figure out my implants, its a great addition.

If the funcom boys don't like the 3-rd party stuff --> they oughta include it in the software.

NanoNanny and ClickSaver can barely be compared to each other. NanoNanny doesn't go out and find the nanoclusters to put in the implant for you.

Even Morb, who updates ClickSaver, realizes that the program makes item aquisition too easy.

[engelstein]

Originally posted by Kuroshio
*snip description of new system*

If I had designed the mission system, and I read that, I'd be kicking myself. I hope FC ganks your idea.

[___________Judgement]

Bah. Not tooo easy --> freaking perfect. One must still do the mission, after all. It cuts down on needless down-time immensly.

If you or another chooses not to use quicksaver, feel free. But I don't have 6 hours to waste in front of a mission terminal looking for a sword i can use.

Originally posted by Kuroshio


Even Morb, who updates ClickSaver, realizes that the program makes item aquisition too easy.

[Kuro]

Originally posted by Judgement
Bah. Not tooo easy --> freaking perfect. One must still do the mission, after all. It cuts down on needless down-time immensly.

If you or another chooses not to use quicksaver, feel free. But I don't have 6 hours to waste in front of a mission terminal looking for a sword i can use.

Definately too easy. The mission terminals weren't meant to be glorified vendor machines. And that's exactly what they are.

[Snuble]

Kuroshio:

You are in fact advocating a system that would give most people MORE downtime. Its a game. A game should NOT have downtime. Its even downtime that you can't use for anything else, because you have to be concentrated on the terminals.

As long as the terminals give specific items as rewards, CS is probably a revenue saver for FunCom.

If the missions only said "Pick up a level 1 Vase and get a QL 143 piece of armor in addition to 40000 credits" you would have no need to sit on your but for hours staring at a static screen.

Rubi Ka would have been a very deserted planet without AOMD and CS...

/me heads back to pool to enjoy my vacation from AO

[_______zeroframerate]

Originally posted by Kuroshio
The mission terminals weren't meant to be glorified vendor machines.

I disagree based on the fact that the missions show you the reward and that you can adjust the slider to get a QL. If they weren't meant to be a source for items, then we wouldn't be able to half of the modifications to missions we can now. Instead it would be just click on the mission terminal and *poof* there's your mission.

ClickSaver saves time and allows for greater enjoyment of AO because it *helps* people get to what they want. It doesn't break the mission process rules whatsoever, it only does what humans can't do: be faster at searching through missions than a human. The only difference between ClickSaver and browsing through the missions yourself is time.

Don't use ClickSaver if you feel it's violating game principles. Personally I don't care about player economy, item trading or uber loot. How much someone's willing to pay for something else has absolutely no bearing on me. ClickSaver saves me time and has put some enjoyment back into AO.

[Kuro]

Originally posted by Snublefot
Kuroshio:

You are in fact advocating a system that would give most people MORE downtime. Its a game. A game should NOT have downtime. Its even downtime that you can't use for anything else, because you have to be concentrated on the terminals.

As long as the terminals give specific items as rewards, CS is probably a revenue saver for FunCom.

If the missions only said "Pick up a level 1 Vase and get a QL 143 piece of armor in addition to 40000 credits" you would have no need to sit on your but for hours staring at a static screen.

Rubi Ka would have been a very deserted planet without AOMD and CS...

/me heads back to pool to enjoy my vacation from AO

'Downtime' is game mechanics preventing you from doing anything at all without reason. Nano rechargers were made to reduce the downtime of regaining nanopoints by sitting and waiting for natural regen to replenish your supply.

'Downtime' isn't having to put a little effort into getting what you want. What you're attempting to say is interacting with other players to get what you want is 'Downtime'. There are better structured single-player games that completely eliminate that type of 'Downtime'

Originally posted by zeroframerate

I disagree based on the fact that the missions show you the reward and that you can adjust the slider to get a QL. If they weren't meant to be a source for items, then we wouldn't be able to half of the modifications to missions we can now. Instead it would be just click on the mission terminal and *poof* there's your mission.

ClickSaver saves time and allows for greater enjoyment of AO because it *helps* people get to what they want. It doesn't break the mission process rules whatsoever, it only does what humans can't do: be faster at searching through missions than a human. The only difference between ClickSaver and browsing through the missions yourself is time.

Don't use ClickSaver if you feel it's violating game principles. Personally I don't care about player economy, item trading or uber loot. How much someone's willing to pay for something else has absolutely no bearing on me. ClickSaver saves me time and has put some enjoyment back into AO.

AOMD and Clicksaver were programs created to address problems in a mission system which, in my opinion, never should have been implemented. If the mission terminals only openly offered nothing but credits you wouldn't be sitting there waiting around for the reward you wanted to pop up, would you?

This doesn't have to do with gaming principles. I do use Clicksaver because the mission description interface is far better than the one the terminals use. But I don't use the item/location list features because to me they're unnecessary. I know credits can get me everything I want. The item reward is incidental.

Clicksaver turns the mission system into vendor machines. Even the program itself hints at this when it refers to the autosearch feature as "Buying Agent". And while Clicksaver addresses a lack of features in the current implementation of the mission system, it doesn't change the fact that the underlying mission system has a fundamental flaw by showing the item reward in the first place. It's a simple truth of human nature and this game genre: if the player knows that eventually the chance to aquire something they want will appear at a specific location, the player will camp that location. The fact that a 3rd party application was created to alleviate the tedium of camping of the mission terminals doesn't change the fact the system is fundamentally flawed because you are still camping. Just cause you don't have to pay attention to it while you're doing it doesn't make that fact go away

Everyone agrees Camping = Bad. Yet the mission system promote camping by its very nature. All Clicksaver does is make the camping more tolerable. But Camping still = Bad.

[_______zeroframerate]

So would a better system of item acquiring, in your opinion, be this:
Walk into one store, enter the QL of the item, enter the type and merely just purchase the item. That way you get exactly what you want, when you want it, every time.

I honestly have no problem with that. Would be nice instead of the clunky vending machines that we have in stores currently.

Originally posted by Kuroshio
If the mission terminals only openly offered nothing but credits you wouldn't be sitting there waiting around for the reward you wanted to pop up, would you?

Well, you're still going to have camping as long as there are varying mission locations as well (which is exactly the reason why I use ClickSaver: to filter out locations I don't want to visit.)

But until that is implemented (which will of course be never), ClickSaver will be my ClickSavior because it helps me get missions in areas that I actually want to visit.

[Kuro]

Originally posted by zeroframerate
So would a better system of item acquiring, in your opinion, be this:
Walk into one store, enter the QL of the item, enter the type and merely just purchase the item. That way you get exactly what you want, when you want it, every time.

I honestly have no problem with that. Would be nice instead of the clunky vending machines that we have in stores currently.

For some odd reason, AO seems to be the only game I've ever encountered where the players expect that everything they want should rightfully be gotten from a machine all the time. No other game has ever even approached that and the biggest complaint usually met involved framerates in the locations where players met to trade their items. I'd almost swear the people playing this game want nothing to do with each other

Something a bit more feasible would be a way to easily advertise what people wanted and have it delivered easily. Part of the player created mission system could be used for that. It let you create a mission specifying the delivery of an item to you for whatever reward you set. It let you specify a QL range for that item as well.

If I was a developer for AO, I'd take that feature and find a way to distribute those missions as 'Purchase Orders'. Players create the mission specifying they want xxx-yyy QL item and drop it off into a machine somewhere and go about their business of killing or whatever. Those 'Purchase Orders' get autoclassified by the item type wanted and put into appropriate machines where other players can see what's wanted and the price offered. If they've got the item and the price is acceptable, they grab the PO, stick the item into something and get paid. No muss on the seller's part. The item gets delivered to the buyer, whether he's online or offline. They already put up the creds to make the mission. No mess on the buyer's part either.

Originally posted by zeroframerate

Well, you're still going to have camping as long as there are varying mission locations as well (which is exactly the reason why I use ClickSaver: to filter out locations I don't want to visit.)

But until that is implemented (which will of course be never), ClickSaver will be my ClickSavior because it helps me get missions in areas that I actually want to visit.

Camping for mission locations? Hehe...I don't really do that cause I'll go almost anywhere for the right price . But you do have a point on that since not everyone is me. But if they tore the guts out of the mission system, it would be a hell of a lot easier to put in options for locations and balance the credit reward. PvP zones = more credit reward. Inside your current playfield = less credit reward. Inside opposite faction playfield = more credit reward. Whompa connection to mission playfield = less credit reward.

[___________Judgement]

Bravo!

And I mostly do solo. I'm not into this whole "community" vibe. I have 2 neighbors (ie real life friends) who play, and when they are on, we do group missions. At no other time, do I care to.

Bah humbug, to the rest; so says me.

Originally posted by zeroframerate
So would a better system of item acquiring, in your opinion, be this:
Walk into one store, enter the QL of the item, enter the type and merely just purchase the item. That way you get exactly what you want, when you want it, every time.

I honestly have no problem with that. Would be nice instead of the clunky vending machines that we have in stores currently.

Well, you're still going to have camping as long as there are varying mission locations as well (which is exactly the reason why I use ClickSaver: to filter out locations I don't want to visit.)

But until that is implemented (which will of course be never), ClickSaver will be my ClickSavior because it helps me get missions in areas that I actually want to visit.

[Kuro]

Originally posted by Judgement
Bravo!

And I mostly do solo. I'm not into this whole "community" vibe. I have 2 neighbors (ie real life friends) who play, and when they are on, we do group missions. At no other time, do I care to.

Bah humbug, to the rest; so says me.

When you play a game designed for large numbers of players, you can't tell the community to go jump in a lake to cater to your gameplay style.

Neverwinter Nights is better suited for that type of mentality. Completely soloable and multiplayer when your friends have the time.

AO marketed the ability to solo and players can do that. But AO is still a MMOG and to excel, you have to deal with the rest of the players in the game. It's part of the genre

[___________Judgement]

ha!

Now your just talking nonesense.

Someone has never heard of mules, and multiple accounts. If you insist on a swim, find your proverbiale lake.

Bah humbug, says me.

Down with Downtime!

-- The Judge

Originally posted by Kuroshio


When you play a game designed for large numbers of players, you can't tell the community to go jump in a lake to cater to your gameplay style.

Neverwinter Nights is better suited for that type of mentality. Completely soloable and multiplayer when your friends have the time.

AO marketed the ability to solo and players can do that. But AO is still a MMOG and to excel, you have to deal with the rest of the players in the game. It's part of the genre

[Kuro]

Originally posted by Judgement
ha!

Now your just talking nonesense.

Someone has never heard of mules, and multiple accounts. If you insist on a swim, find your proverbiale lake.

Bah humbug, says me.

Down with Downtime!

-- The Judge

No, Judgement. It's a simple truth of this type of game's genre:

You create a community game, you reward the people that interact with the community.

Otherwise FC could have saved themselves the bandwidth fees, server rack fees, and other necessary costs of making a Massively Multiplayer Online Game, and just gone the route of Neverwinter Nights.

Mules? Please explain how a mule character would apply here.

And no subscription based game developer in their right mind objects to people buying multiple accounts or even running a character from each account simultaneously. They get to bang your credit card for each account.

But I suspect you know this. Megabio is better at what you appear to be attempting.

[Thyrra]

i almost quit because of the lousy mission system. AOMD and clicksaver have dramatically increased the length of time i'm willing to play this game.

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i like your suggested mission system Kuroshio as possible and very much more workable and acceptable than the current mission system.

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shop terms are dumb mission terms with no mission footwork involved. in other words, they are borked too.

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it would be great for this to get fixed, but i doubt it will happen anytime soon. would people prefer a good mission/shopping/trading sytem/economy or good pet pathing and prof balance?

i think FC has put this issue off for a good reason. i would love it if we had a good working system, but last time FC 'fixed' the mission system it took several patches to undo some of the f* ups they introduced.

[Kuro]

Originally posted by Thyrra
i almost quit because of the lousy mission system. AOMD and clicksaver have dramatically increased the length of time i'm willing to play this game.

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i like your suggested mission system Kuroshio as possible and very much more workable and acceptable than the current mission system.

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shop terms are dumb mission terms with no mission footwork involved. in other words, they are borked too.

---

it would be great for this to get fixed, but i doubt it will happen anytime soon. would people prefer a good mission/shopping/trading sytem/economy or good pet pathing and prof balance?

i think FC has put this issue off for a good reason. i would love it if we had a good working system, but last time FC 'fixed' the mission system it took several patches to undo some of the f* ups they introduced.

I'd say now would be the perfect time for doing something like this actually. According to Funcom's own statements, the development team has split. One group working on Shadowlands and one group continuing to develop for AO currently. Overhauling the mission system and implementing a good system for advertising Demand so players could Supply would be a great incentive for buying Shadowlands.

[Darkbane]

Abso-fragging-lutly! The mission system cannot realistically be overhauled without an effective and simple in-game trade system allowing supply and demand. Once that exists, the mission system can just give xp and cash rewards, and all items are then found as loot.

Items should also have been categorised. The basic category would have had stuff that was perfectly useable but nothing special. This sort of stuff would sell in shops at all QLs. The next category would have had slightly better stuff, this would sell in shops up to ql120ish like now. Next category would be better yet, and be loot only. The next category would be the best stuff, and would be from bosses only. A final category would be unique loot, rarely dropped by bosses, more often dropped by unique mobs found throughout the game world. probably too late to do this now though.