So,my idea is lowering the mission difficulty,key yield,frequency of special missions(Squawk Block,Boss Rush,Key Rush,etc.) in frequently visited systems,constellations,planets and frequently played missions.
Basically,the idea is that the more a certain mission is played,the less difficult it gets and
yields less keys.I am not talking about the number of times a certain player has played a mission,it’s the number of times the people in the whole galaxy have played that certain mission.This could apply to a lot of things,like deals getting worse in crowded areas.
Therefore,if a person wants better deals,they would have to explore the galaxy,thereby actually giving an incentive to explore.
Proportionally speaking.Each mission has a set difficulty,and the fluctuations will be based on that fixed difficulty.Of course,if the galaxy is evenly populated,all missions would have their base settings.TLDR,a mission gets harder or easier based on their fixed settings.And of course people keep moving about,so the galaxy will mostly always have uneven concentrations.
I really had this idea with how things are now,as the majority of people are just crammed into a few constellations,with some players in the unexplored regions outwards.
And again really,I think the new player spawning spots should be in more than one central location.
I’m all for changing the key yield by this measurement, but difficulty and frequency of special missions should remain stable, because:
I also think that it should be based on how many spacecraft are playing a mission proportionally to the others, so that even when there are many/few players in the galaxy the mechanic would hold up. And I would prefer to see it only come into play for players above a certain rank (maybe 10? not sure) so that new players aren’t set off on a particularly bad foot due to chance.
So it’s a nice idea, but it needs a lot of tweaking to avoid issue in my opinion.
One of my original ideas was scaling down the difficulty of all missions for new players. But ultimately it contradicted the idea of “minimum tier requirement” for harder missions, so it was dropped. Accessing a hard mission should be a reward in its own right.
What you’re basically suggesting is similar to “location fluctuation” which is already used for score and keys, only affecting difficulty too. I’m worried that it would punish new players unlucky enough to spawn in popular areas. And if you exclude new players from the fluctuation, then missions can’t be directly comparable between all players. Argh!
It’s a good idea and, technically, it’s simple. But matters are complicated by the interplay between this (or any other) idea and cross-cutting concerns with other design decisions. That’s (a software engineer’s) life
I really like the score and key fluctuations but currently they are a bit too low to ever be relevant, it pretty much never makes it worth it to travel to a place even if they have super high fluctuation percentage.
About the “crowdedness” idea, if we exclude the new players from the fluctuation but still make their plays count for the percentage for the stronger players I think a balance could be made, and then maybe start affecting the player with fluctuations after a certain tier. Or maybe making the fluctuations available only when played on Veteran and above?
I don’t like the idea of difficulty change simply because it will:
1.As said before, break favourites
2.Make it so you can’t replicate the same mission, meaning you can’t do self-imposed challanges well or compare to other people since the difficulty changes constantly
3.Boss rushes could even swap bosses from difficulties causing even more chaos
I’d just want to have my set of “Hardest” missions of the galaxy always available
