Ever since Cryptic introduced the 50 FM & 960 dili. into the Foundry and the recent 15 min requirement, I have started to experience the adverse effects of 1-star ratings complaining my missions were too long. Essentially the Foundry, which was envisaged as a place where storytellers could tell a story, have been pushed aside and replaced as a grind-machine for farmers and low-bee fleet members sent off to farm for FM's.
I appreciate that there is no avenue to earn FM unless you are forced to run hundreds of low paying and repetitive FM queue missions.
I would like Cryptic, and Dan to stand by their authors. I would like Cryptic to invest in the authors that have worked so very hard at filling the gaps.
So I would like to propose the following.
Incremental rewards based on time.
If the minimum requirement for a mission to quality for 50 FM is 15 mins, and these are repeatable every 6 - 12 minutes, then:
If a Foundry mission is 30 mins in duration, scale the FM rewards to 90 FM. (10 FM drop-off due to no cooldown between the 2x 15 min Foundry missions the player would have played anyways.)
If it is 45 mins, scale the rewards to 135 FM (15 FM drop-off due to no cooldown between the 3x 15 min Foundry missions the player would have played anyways.)
If it is 1 hr., scale the rewards to 180 FM (20 FM drop-off due to no cooldown between the 4x 15 min Foundry missions the player would have played anyways.)
In addition to FM, dili. could also be incrementally scaled.
This would open up the rest of the Foundry missions as viable alternatives to the ever popular grind missions.
Last edited by drkfrontiers; 01-11-2013 at 12:25 AM.
Rewards are fine I think, the only problem I see right now is, that story based missions are being moved down on the list because the grind-missions are too popular. I have also seen that some good story missions had a hard time finding enough players to make them eligible for the standard reward in the first place.
Indeed. Mine would NOT have made it where it is now, without my fleet being kind enough to get behind me and help. Zion Fleet is a casual one and we do not pressure our members to provide a quota of resources. People do what they can when they can--if they can. We live with what we get. We are there as a prayer fellowship and social fleet...to help each other, not make demands of each other.
Authors who don't have such resources to draw on are really going to be in a lot of trouble.
Last night before the maintenance I began a KDF mission that claimed it was one hour long. I chose it because it actually told me how much time I had to put into it unlike a lot of others.
It lied. It was more like 90 minutes and I couldn't complete it before the servers went out.
I don't know what your mission description is like, but there's a chance the time to complete wasnt well known and the players felt like they were forced into a slog. It's also possible fans if the grind missions are trying to force your story missions to the bottom out of spite for the loss of the clicky exploits. It's also possible they're just morons.
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In my mission, when you reach DS9, I have a popup dialogue that specifically warns players for a SECOND time about the mission's style and run time.
Most players are reporting 60 minutes, though I have been telling people to expect 60-90 minutes, just in case they are slow readers. (My mission also has a lot of "real science" inspired concepts and a fairly high vocabularly level, so I pad that time to account for those who are not as familiar with those concepts or who may not be native English speakers and might well need to pause to look up words.)
I've still wound up with a few 1-stars, because it's inevitable...but I think the fact that a player must go through two warnings (the mission description AND the first dialogue in-mission) explicitly telling them what the run time is, means that if you do play it through and your complaint is "it was long," you can't say you didn't know quite well what you were getting into when you signed up.
Why not encourage people to actually play longer missions by rewarding them for it.
When and more important why, did the Foundry fail? And yes it has failed imho. Go to any transporter to find the huddled masses for KDF Battlship Rumble or Royal or whatever, or the Academy Rock for Grinder: Feds on fire.
How are authors supposed to compete with that?
Frankly, next time I am asked to update my Spotlight following a patch etc. I will be deleting mine. Screw that.
I will no longer be bothering to support this system, which Cryptic have frankly ruined for me.
1. The game doesn't really have players, it has farmers and people playing paper dolls.
2. It's not the fault of the Foundry system that these farmers want the most amount of dil for the least amount of effort. Even if you had a time based reward system, the farmers would still see it as too much effort. Especially when they can just queue for Mirror or Academy Events.
3. Go to ESD or DS9. Look at the zone chat. Those are the ones your ire should be aimed at.
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I'm with the OP here. We've been looking around for short-ish missions that have a decent story in them to share with my fleet (to use with IOR), but I know of quite a few longer foundry missions that would be brilliant to take a team through. Unfortunately, most of our members, and our fleet leader, would prefer to stick with the shorter ones for the regular FM reward. With a time-based scaled reward, that wouldn't be a problem.