More choice on quests! (A Quests system rework)

It isn’t like loot boxes though.
Think about it: You don’t like this quest so much that you wanted to trash it off, then anything that replaces it must be better than that, right? Sure it may not be something that you’d love to do, but it’s guaranteed to not be what you hated doing before.
Like, anything that is not what you hate isn’t what you’d love immediately, but it’s not what you hate.
(Given that the randomized future quest is not the same as the quest that just got trashed - which I highly think will be the case when IA considers it, it won’t make sense otherwise)

PS: psychological stuff is hard to explain. Sorry in advance if I sounded confusing here.

I would rather having the same fixed set of quests that can never be changed, but you don’t have to complete them all (to avoid the unhealthy psychological effect and also satisfies what you want). There are currently 10 ranks, we could make it so that you only need to complete:

  • Rank 1: 3 out of 5 to advance
  • Rank 2: 4 out of 6 to advance
  • Rank 3: 4 out of 5 to advance
  • Rank 4: 5 out of 7 to advance
  • Rank 5: 5 out of 6 to advance
  • Rank 6: 6 out of 8 to advance
  • Rank 7: 7 out of 9 to advance
  • Rank 8: 8 out of 9 to advance
  • Rank 9: 9 out of 10 to advance
  • Rank 10 (endless mode): 10 out of 10 to advance

Or maybe your original EXP suggestion also works, but remove the ability to trash quests, I think that would be too easy and at the same time be frustrating.

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I’m okay with the quests being fixed and shared across all players, but that would spark “quest walkthroughs” which hinders the players’ imagination if they choose to follow the methods laid out before them in said walkthroughs. It’s always easier to follow a path laid down before you than making your own.

Also, this fact doesn’t help either:
If you watch said walkthroughs, you’re most likely going to do what’s been said in the walkthrough.

PS: I thought the quests are randomly generated per player when I first saw them.
Then I read all the EA v119 replies.

PPS: discussions of this “quest walkthrough” have already been started in Chatting place.
There will soon be one actually existing.

This could get removed once we’ve reached Endless mode though, as all quests will be equally long and hard by then. But by that point removing it feels … off.
Kinda like when you’ve had something for so long, then suddenly it’s just … gone, kinda off

It’s not possible to prevent walkthroughs from helping players with the “farming” portion of most games: farming resources to upgrade a city or base, or in this game, buy and upgrade your spacecraft (spacecraft is not literally upgradable, I mean upgrade or buy a better one for everything related to your spacecraft and spacecraft parts). If there isn’t a quick tip or trick, some games I just find too complex to be left completely open and you do everything on your own.

The only thing that walkthroughs (thankfully) cannot help you is actual experience fighting, battling, which is the action part of the game.

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I’m gonna agree with OneWingLunarian here. Let’s just wait a little before making a rework. At least something like 2 weeks.

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Reworked the post to account for some of the replies I’ve seen here.
It got longer, sure, but the main points are at the top now, so it should still be easier to see the whole point of this.

Also, due to some more insights on the current Quests system, I’ve added more scalability to the new quests suggestion, where they’d offer more quests to do when you’re at a higher rank.

Although I understand you have good faith, I still stand by my opinion that if a player refuses to discover everything in the game (the game does not force the player to do just one thing, it’s almost everything, except limited time competitions like dailies and weeklies for now), that player should not expect to complete all missions to reach the top tier.

When I see a player with a Supreme Admiral badge, I should expect that the player has a lot of experience in all features in the game (this is now a bigger achievement, a real endgame achievement, than reaching tier 99 or exploring the whole galaxy), that is, very good at the “farming” aspect of the game and discover everything possible (or for F2P players, except Double Team, which has been confirmed by iA that it won’t appear).

These “farming” players may not necessarily be amazing in competitive missions, which is completely fine, not a large percentage of players even have a global first place medal. To make up for that, they will have to invest more than usual in quests if they want to have something to be proud of. Players who love action and reach the top of competitive missions every time are less likely to invest in this, or they will give up at the higher tiers, because they have experience in competitive missions and would rather spend time there to practice instead of being locked to the quests. But it’s completely fine because quests here do not have any special rewards that force players to have to do it.

Also, these quests help giving the farmers something to do, especially new players who start out farming. You may say that players completely rely on quests and do not discover by themselves, but there are games that are too complex. When I started playing Minecraft, I felt that game is too complex for having no tutorial at all and I’m forced to look up online for everything.

Maybe it’s just me, but in this game where you can freely do anything and are not obligated to do quests (unlike Subway Surfers, where quests are very important to increase your score multiplier in the endless runner game), I want quests to be a challenge to max out. 6 months, 1 year, or even 2 years expected to complete (3 years is too much, but I think 2 years is balanced). I want quests to be fixed and cannot be changed, no matter the cooldown. Each rank should ideally take:

  • Rank 1 to 2: 1%
  • Rank 2 to 3: 2%
  • Rank 3 to 4: 4%
  • Rank 4 to 5: 6%
  • Rank 5 to 6: 8%
  • Rank 6 to 7: 11%
  • Rank 7 to 8: 15%
  • Rank 8 to 9: 19%
  • Rank 9 to 10: 34% of the expected completion time

To make it look a bit more welcoming to new comers, we can increase the slope:

  • To rank 2: 0.1% expected completion time
  • To rank 3: 0.3% expected completion time
  • To rank 4: 0.9%
  • To rank 5: 2.7%
  • To rank 6: 6%
  • To rank 7: 10%
  • To rank 8: 15%
  • To rank 9: 25%
  • To rank 10: 40% of the expected completion time

Of course, what I want is not necessarily what the community wants, but this is an online forum where I get to share what I think.

The only quest that I think is too hard for Quests is the Galactic Cup missions that may appear in the future, forcing you to stay there for the rest of the season if you fail to qualify, and it may be too hard for farming players, who are dedicated and willing to explore everything even if they are not amazing at it. I suggest that Galactic Cup length varies based on the number of players participated, to increase chance of players accessing more Galactic Cup missions:

  • The number of recruits that pass the qualification phase is the closest power of 2 to the number of recruits that play the mission with score above zero. For example, if there are 10,000 players parcipated, 8,192 players would proceed to Group phase.

  • Group phase proceed as usual, groups of 8, still takes 7 days like before. There is too much information to display on one page, so we can separate the pages, one page for each group (like in the Hall of Fame, one page for 100 players). Half of the players are eliminated in this phase, down to 4,096 players.

  • Knockout phase proceed as before, half of the recruits are eliminated after each round. In this example, knockout phase would last 12 days.

I see the main problem now is not really the quests we don’t want to do appear. I think the real issue is that there’re too many “epic” quests out there and even trying to speedrun them is hard and consume time. For me, they’re boring, painful and exhausting to do, especially when you start seeing quests as main target of playing the game.

I have another simple rework. We can nerf all most quests to make them easy to do in less time. As a trade-off, ranking up will require many more quests done and more milestones reached. This ensure that the quests are refreshed regularly (if you’re hard-working), allowing us to play more types of quests without meeting “epic” quests everywhere. I can’t imagine how bad will it be when players start complaining about “epic” quests even when they’re just only Recruit or Ensign. Easier quests will definately encourage players to keep an eye on them to do through the game and suggest players targets / goals in playing the game.

However, “epic” quests can still appear on the highest ranks with very limited amount (and still should be slightly nerfed) to spice up a little bit. Just don’t make quests already hell on lower ranks. These type of quests encourage players to play exploitatively or ignore them. They will take you years to accidentally complete if you’re not intending to do it.

I support the idea of accumulating exp to level up and introducing different value of exp to different difficulties of missions. Generating a linear function for it is very painful and produce ugly numbers, so (if iA don’t want to balance them) we can simply divide quests by difficulties and set ranges for it. For example, quests of killing under 2000 enemies can be considered “easy” and worth 10 exp; 2000 - 4000 is “intermediate” and worth 20 exp; 4000+ is “hard” and worth 30 exp, etc.

Just a short poll to see if you guys think like me or not:

Do you really want those painful “epic” quests to keep showing up everywhere even on low ranks?
  • Yes, why not? Skill issues. So impatient.
  • No, I want quests to be more feasible and fun to play.

0 voters

They’re supposed to take time so it’s natural that you can’t just speedrun them. You’re not supposed to be able to reach the top rank in a span of a few days.

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Same, this is like what? 3 days old? No one knows what coming in the later tiers, so let’s wait for like a month.

Quests aren’t meant to be finished quickly though, which I’d rather have than to have quests that I don’t want to finish because I’m not a big fan of those parts of the game, but have to in order to progress.

Of course, as the system stands now, that would mean that I’m forever in a certain rank, which is a really really really long time.
All players play the game differently, which is what I like about the entire franchise as a whole.

To me, Quests just aims to ruin that. It also feels like the hours I’ve spent is worthless, as people in the future will be looking for “high rank” officials to recognize long-timers - those who may or may not have used tactics to get to the top instead of actual play time, which is far more concrete and simpler to know. @InterAction_studios even encouraged this kind of “optimized and boring” style of play.
Which is why I find the concept to not be that interesting for the moment.

This rework does not change that, I agree, but at least with the playtime I’ve had, with this rework, future people could reach higher ranks doing what they want, instead of optimizing the heck out of the game and its gameplay in really boring ways to get a higher rank (or not do it entirely because it is unintersting to them), which will lead to extremely boring ways to play the game in the long run.

This is what I fear would happen to this game should this system be kept.

But also @QuackQuack does have a point - there should be 1 extra “elite” mission that came from 2 tiers after this one (as per this rework’s post details), so the old long-timers could progress more quickly, as they’ve had better gear and might not want to use them on simple missions all that much.

Edited the post to reflect this.

Also @GuestUniverse the 2 years you asked for … that’s the play-time needed to get all quests alone?
You should calculate things based on actual play time, as that’s the more important metric.
But if that’s the actual play time you’re suggesting then:
2x365x24 is 17520 hours. That is a lot of time spent playing CI. In fact, I don’t think there will be anyone in that rank if you can get it by just playing, let alone playing and doing quests at the same time.
I don’t think all of our old-timers’ time combined can even come close to that number.

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Also going to rework my polls in future idea threads, as Neutral doesn’t give you any necessary data which could help with evaluating this idea as a whole, while a score scalar would lead to those confused by the idea/too lazy to read all this ended up rating the whole idea as a 3 (which is basically the same as neutral, but worse as it affects the higher/lower scores too due to how averages work).

I don’t think we even need to wait because we all know the quests are already hell now and it’s will definately just get worse later. I agree with @ChickenGaming:

Seriously I don’t think quests are supposed to be that boring and painful. Ranking up does. Instead of doing some impractical “epic” quests to rank up, I think play more easy quests is better.

Of course I talk about time taken in real life, so if you play 1 hour every day (on average), it should take about 730 hours to complete. It’s really strange seeing people flexing about how many thousands of hours spent in an online game, or in game quitters forum, be ashamed of how many thousands of hours wasted, while that number is nowhere near as important as actual time taken in real life.

I only have 240 hours of flight time. If players want it to be better designed, then up to rank 5 or so the quests can be easier, but from rank 6 no mercy is needed. I know that in real life people usually say that it is better to focus on one thing and do it well rather than doing everything half-assed, but that is already reflected in the medals that you have, while this is a separate badge on your profile.

I was a bit stubborn in some of my posts above. After reading the posts above again, I agree that difficulty should be more balanced, giving easier quests at the beginning, and go on much harder quests at later ranks. This will make it more welcoming to new players, but I still want it to be hard to reach the highest rank. Give it a few months, until we get the full list of quests, before calculating exactly what is too much, as this is a randomly generated seed set for all players.

This might sound crazy, but they’re not hard for me. I keep finding strategies to complete these quests.

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