Concerning Mission Rewards

[ZiltoidiaAttacks]

Hello Digital Extremes, 

Your last devstream talked about the problem of certain mission types becoming irrelevant to a player once they obtained all the rewards from said missions.  This results in certain content not being used, and shortens the life cycle of content you guys spend blood, sweat, and treasure creating.  I have a few simple, technically easy solution.

 

Baro Ki'teer Solution:

The problem is that players move onto other content where there are rewards they have not obtained yet.  So it seems obvious to me that you could implement a 'reverse Baro-Ki'teer' system, where instead of buying Items for Ducats, you could sell items for either Ducats or another type of currency, which would be redeemable with all factions for standing, night wave standing, specific relics, skins (expensive), or other plat-only/cosmetic content (expensive).   The items you would be able to sell back to Baro would be cyclical, just like the items you can purchase from him.  You could create these sets of sellable rewards via thematic sets or missions where they're obtained, or to get distributed use of different content, pieces from each mission type in each sellable set.

This would provide DE a variable/lever/knob to manipulate the resource economy with, when inevitably making balancing tweaks with new and old content.  You could drain any excess resource out of the system by allowing players to liquidate it for this (Ducat) special currency that is universal redeemable for most grindable rewards. 

The obvious pitfall to such a system would counter-productive.  That is, players that play a single mission type that turns out to be the most efficient (currency / time) grind, and use that process to obtain all rewards.  This could be solved by a diminishing return on the amount of currency received based on how much is sold to Baro by the player, per reward.  This would incentivize spending time in a lot of different content, collecting a wide distribution of rewards. 

 

Market Solution:

Similar to the Baro Ki'teer system, this would be more persistant.  You could integrate it with Corpus Lore very effectively though.  This would be a market where demand/supply is factored into the price the player receives for selling excess rewards.  The more players that sell that reward, the lower the price is driven, while simultaneously driving up the price of rewards that are not being sold in excess to the market.  The player would receive this currency, in varying amounts based on demand, for rewards he already has, and thus gives the player a universal reward for participating in content whose rewards they have already attained.  The player then would be able to use this currency in the same manner as the Baro Ki'teer solution above, or even purchase directly from the market the same rewards being sold to the market, at a 1000% or larger profit margin of course (so that this is not the main avenue of attaining the rewards for new players).  Perhaps you could even factor the purchasing of the rewards into the supply/demand buy/sell pricing in this corpus market.

 

Direct market solution:

This is the most simple, yet perhaps the most unpredictable solution.  An auction house that would help automate and facilitate quick, easy trading between players.  Perhaps limit the types of items tradeable in this, or require bulk amounts (stacks) of a reward to be traded.  This may increase demand for platinum if it is used as the main currency for these trades between players.

 

Moving Unique Rewards (aka alerts):

You pretty much already have this solution implemented through nightwave radio.  My addition would be to add certain special actions or events that happen in the missions/content that are being under-used.   Example, say Ropalolyst content is not being played much.  Add a specific Nightwave challenge to defeat it so many times, or to place the last hit on its joints, or fly it into a bug zapper 10 times, etc.   You could also add new fun, whimsical environmental interactions to different mission types and tile sets for night wave challenges.  Example, the helium barrels in the gas city tileset, you could add a challenge to juggle one from hitting the ground for 20 seconds, or add laser drills to Europa and add a challenge to bore through 20 ice walls.

Additionally you could add more purchaseable content (rewards) and more ways to earn the unique temporary currency that comes along with Nightwave episodes.

Edited May 26, 2019 by FatsackTony