Mission ideas... Any Thoughts?

[Darkbane]

I'm sure this has been brought up before, but...

Add to the game 'story' missions, these would be randomly generated but 'static' missions which are available for a fixed length of time (1-2 days say), any one who consults a mission terminal would have a chance to be offered one of these if their mission profile, level and side fit (within a narrow criteria band).

Funcom would then track two things, how many people 'accept' such a mission, and how many people actually get the mission reward. The actual mission should be of fixed layout and MOBs but otherwise just like a normal mission with a key and all.

These mission would be created to forward the goals of a story line NPC in a non-critical way, so that whilst the measured level of success (accepted missions versus completed missions) would determine the outcome of that element of the story, no major part of the story arc would be affected (though a particular NPC having a lot of their story mission fulfilled would accelerate their element of the story).

This would give players more involvement in the story driving it in certain (perhaps unexpected) directions without de-railing it completely.

The mission reward should be more class specific and often special and/or unique and tokens always awarded.

Many of these story misions could be for high level PCs, giving them more influence and a feeling of actually achieving something.

You could actually use the random mission generator to construct each mission layout and MOBs, just store the results so everyone gets the same actual mission, just a different instance. This would make it much easier to create these (only needing the 'mission overview' to be written by hand).

I think this would add a lot to the game and probably not require much effort on Funcom's part, and once team missions are active, things get even more interesting.

Hope that all made some sense :-)

[Slingback]

I thoroughly approve of this idea...

Although I have the feeling that the disintegration of the peace talks is probably our fault...

Pleasant thought, eh?

[RandaZ]

I'm not sure if it would be such an effective use of programming / content resources to put it in mission terminals. Sure, almost everyone who reads this specific forum are roleplayers, but all are at varying levels of involvement.

Because of that, and the problem that a lot of other people don't even care about roleplaying a single bit (pure l33t levelers), having a story element in such a passive method will most likely go un-noticed. Heck, just look at how many people actually attempted to run through the NPC quests? Even I haven't gone around to it.

To make matters worse, there's a program out there called AO Mission Display, that'll pretty much skip all the descriptive text and give people the gist of what missions are offering. Even if such a program didn't exist, let's have a show of hands of people who even bother reading the text, instead of looking for the key words.

I'm not trying to be all negative here and bash your idea. I like the intent behind it, but this is just my honest, if blunt, opinion on why it wouldn't work well, especially considering that it still requires at least one person to sit there writing the descriptions which no one will read (since it randomly chooses who gets it).

For sake of the content creation team's morale - I tried doing something similar only to be met with deft ears - and to preserve whatever precious resources FC have left, I hope they don't go down this blind alley.

Is there something better? I dunno, but anything we should come up with should keep in mind that not all people who play this game are that interested in roleplaying. An analogy would be trying to give away box sets of the Star Trek Classic DVDs to random people on the streets.


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