I don’t like this change at all.
It will just make earning keys slower and more tedious than it already is and will also make new players struggle even more in the early game.
This new change basically force players into playing with extra lives equipped, because if you will die your earnings will be reduced, so players will spend more often keys on lives than they do nowadays.
There is also the fact that newcomers die a lot often and don’t have tons of keys to spend on extra lifes like midgame players can.
This just sounds to me as an early game progression nerf and an EA way to accomplish that.
Not to mention the fact that to actual key farming you would now have to waste a lot of favourite mission slots to save tons of comet chases.
Why? Because a death or a mission lost screen will mean that replaying the mission will not be as worth as playing on another one!
The alternative to this? Exploring the galaxy more, so the player will use fuel more often, draining keys even faster.
Please IA, reconsider if this rework actually has a place in the game. Because it sounds like a worsened gameplay experience for every player that isn’t an explorer archetype.
If the rework has to stay, tough, I want to suggest a way to soften the inevitable damage:
Buff the H&C ships with an additional ability to mitigate unoriginality penality (reduces the resource nerf caused by the penality)(better models mitigate less), due to their role as farming and starting ships.
This change may solve some of the problems I have with your rework:
- Not nerfing too much the early game progression by buffing the starting ship
- Reducing the negative impact on mid/endgame key grinding, by buffing the farming ships and giving them more of an incentive to be used for grinding
While still mantaining what you want to achive with the rework:
Disencourage players to replay the same missions indifinetly (they would replay only while farming but less than nowadays) and give more (forced IMHO) incentives to the galaxy exploration.
Sorry for the wall of text
I’m writing this post really late into the night, so I aplogize for eventual grammatical horrors in it and the fact that I will respond to eventual replies in about 8 hours