Topic: Transport Mission Rebalance and Redesign
When ever I am doing something in Perpetuum, I always measure the activity against transport missions. That is if I mine for an hour, I judge the volume of ore against how much I could have purchased with 1 hour of transports; same holds true for farming NPC's.
Of course, your milage is going to vary depending on tax rates, LWF frame setup, EP levels, and relations, but here are my numbers.
For (2) Sequars following each other with T4 frames @ 80 kph:
With 7 assignments, 0 tax, 1 sequar with Specialized Logistics 5
Alpha 'rounders' - level 1 transport missions starting and ending at ICS-Alpha
ICS Level 2/3 Rounder - 5xLevel 3/6x Level 2
Alpha Rounder / Hour = 3.19 Million NIC / hour + ~120k ammo (based on market)
Level 2/3 Round/Hout= 2.00 Million NIC / hour + ~ 280k ammo (based on market)
The reason I use (2) accounts here is to highlight the fact that the second account 'passively' contributes 50% of the income with minimal additional effort. The ratio of earning from level 1 compared to level 2/3 is still valid, although the totals would be lower, if only 1 account was used. The second 'account' is a combat alt with a minimal amount of EP spent in Indy to drive the sequar.
Where I am going with this is not a change to level 1 vs level 2/3 however.
Regardless of the transport missions, the comparison of the missions to every other activity is what I would like to adjust.
Currently all missions can be done repeatedly. This creates the conflict between getting 3.19M NIC/hour for "sure' vs. any other activity. This is compounded by the fact that the two accounts are dissimilar, which is the case with many players with multiple accounts; that is one is indy and one combat; and between mining, combat, and transport only the transport can use both accounts to actively generate income. In mining and farming, the second account is limited to transport duties.
Argueably transport missions do nothing but generate NIC, while mining and even combat missions inject resources and/or modules. NIC sources in general are not bad, but if they prevent the active player from contributing to the game in a meaningful manner than the method of the source needs to be adjusted.
To this end, I propose changing transport missions to a limited number of runs per 24 hour period and balance the payout accordingly.
While a sure source of NIC exists there will always be the conflict of doing that versus another activity. By limited the number of times the sure source can be done, players will have more incentive to perform variied activites during a play session. However these missions are a vital source of NIC to offset recurring sinks, so the maximum daily return on effort should be similar to the current play session earning potential.
There are (8) Level 1 missions per Main outpost, worth a base total of 168K each or 504K total. If these were limited to (2) per day, that would cap the earning potential at 1M NIC; significantly impacting the earning potential of a transporter to 1M NIC per day but reducing the time spent to only 1/2 hour. Limiting the Level 2/3 missions to (1) time per 24 hours would cap tranpsort TIME at 1 hour and an additional 473.5 K or 1.5 M NIC per day (some rounding).
One Hour of time leaves a second hour of game play to either PVP, mine, or NPC farm without an conflict, however reducing the earning potential to only 1.5 M NIC would be very a large nerf and imbalanced with other activities. To adjust for the imbalance, the total value of all combined missions would be raised to 2.0 M NIC. Somewhat against the results shown above, I would suggest that the level 1 missions get a greater increase than the level 2/3. This is because the newer players only have access to level 1 and therefore a smaller daily cap, while advanced players get the 'bonus' of additional missions. this also provided incentive for getting rep and accessing additional missions.
the same (1) time limit would apply to level 4 missions, with an appropriate adjustment upwards to the reward; both NIC and rep.
The 'rep' would also be raised to the same level that would normally be achieved with 2 hours of the same mission running. Players can continue to earn rep by sharing the assignment within a squad, but no additional NIC would be awarded to the player after completing their max runs for that day.
The net result should be a 'less grindy' play experience for raising reputation as well as encouraging players to spend more EP in mission skills to increase daily totals (instead of just running them more often). It will also move players into doing 'varied' missions, such as geo scans, and free up time to explore other NIC or resource earning options without conflict.
--- I have not done enough combat or other missions to comment if the same principal should be applied there, but in general, 'repeatable' missions should be limited either daily or even weekly. A weekly limit would alieve the requirement many players would feel to log in daily, and allow players that have more time on the weekends to do them all at that time, or to 'knock them out' on the reset day and leave the entire week open for other activity.
TLDR;
Revise the unlimited transport missions to daily or weekly limits and increase the payouts and rep earned per mission. This eliminates the grinding aspect of missions and opens time opportunities for players to explore other earning activites or PVP. The same principal should be evaluated in regards to all types of missions.
This would not conflict with the new missions proposed by Dev Zoom with bonus's for faster completion, it would acutally compliment and encourage this since it would be one way to increase your daily or weekly max NIC potential.
