The Road to Balanced Fissure Missions

[roddles]

ISSUE:
Capture and Excavation are the ideal mission types for opening relics; capture is preferred for single opens while excavations are preferred for endless due to the short time that missions or stages can be completed. These missions are more efficient in terms of relics opened per unit of time played.
Other mission types are less preferable, but generally for non-endless from most preferable to least: Capture, Sabotage, Exterminate, Rescue, Mobile Defense and finally Spy. While for endless from most preferable to least: Excavation, Interception, Defense, Survival. Again, these are preference rankings based on the quantifiable average mission duration; players' subjective preferences for mission types will clearly change the orders of these rankings.

OBJECTIVE:
To balance Fissure mission types such that certain mission types aren't the de facto mission type to open relics, or put another way, such that all mission types fairly reward player's time. Furthermore, balancing actions should not be (or feel like) a "nerf" to the currently preferred mission types.

SUMMARY OF POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:
The ideas presented here can sort of be broken down into two different groups:1) new or revised game mechanics that can reduce mission duration or 2) new or revised game mechanics that make the additional mission duration worth consideration. 
For the latter, even with endless missions providing end-of-round/waves/etc bonuses, these bonus rewards do not count for much if anything, particularly among players who prioritize rewards per time-played. Instead, something more consequential or relevant to the objective of opening relics is needed. For example, if the common-uncommon-rare rates are slightly more advantageous in these longer missions than in shorter interval missions, that would present interesting choices for players to consider.
In all cases, these solutions are specific changes or enhancements to these missions type only for FISSURES. Whether these changes would be applicable to standard or special missions like Nightmare, Invasions, etc... is beyond the scope of this post. 

SOLUTION IDEAS BY MISSION TYPE:

SPY
Spy is a mission type that doesn't necessarily take very long, but failure rate of spy missions is more substantial compared to other mission types due the amount of player skill and/or familiarity with vaults required of the players. There are two solutions that could make this mission type more desirable (solutions are mutually exclusive--doing both would be too much): 
1. Decrease the linearity of the random tilesets, or it make the layouts very predictable as with Defense missions. For example, if players entered through "spawn" tile, followed by a hub that quickly presented vaults A, B, & C, as well as a fourth corridor that led to the exit, this would greatly improve completion times, and make the potential time lost due to mission failure more palatable.
2. Higher levels of success grant bonuses to uncommon and rare drops. For example, completing all three vaults might increase the uncommon rate, while each vault cleared without raising alarms would grant additional increases in rare drop rate. Such an increase could also be global or based on the invidual who cleared the vault. In the latter case, players who successfully open data vaults would be granted the bonus to their relic alone (for better or worse, this has the consequence of making Spy fissures better to solo, or at least having one player do all three vaults while others do nothing).

MOBILE DEFENSE
1. Decrease the length of hack durations. From first hand experience, going to the lower limit of defend duration (zero) is worth consideration; I personally ran a Mobile Defense mission that was bugged the other day in which Lotus immediately spat out the datamass as soon as it was inserted, saying she had completed her hack, thus removing the defense part entirely. Our group was ecstatic with how amazing the mission felt. Instead of mobile defense, it was mobile go-here-now-here-now-here-and-done, much more in-line with a Capture mission in terms of mission duration. It becomes more of a run-the-gauntlet or parkour-master type of mission, as some tilesets already force players to learn how to parkour through them to play them efficiently.
2. Allow players to determine when to pull the datamass from the panel, while increasing the level of difficulty over the duration of the hack. As the hack goes beyond the minimum requirement, players receive additional bonuses to uncommon rate by holding out longer, while rare rate is increased by having the console take less damage (or something along these lines).

RESCUE
1. Decreasing the distance from start to jail tiles and from jail to extraction would be sufficient.
2. Instead of having rescue be a which-door-is-he-behind, it could become rescue as many prisoners as possible with additional prisoners rescued granting Uncommon and rare bonuses, additionally rare chance bonuses could be scaled down by the amount of damage taken by prisoners.

EXTERMINATE
Veteran players can often clear these nearly as quickly as Captures, but I'm not sure if this is fair to newer players. Another problem often here is reaching extraction and not having enough enemies have spawned. Regardless:
1. Reduce the number of enemies needed and/or shorten the average number of tiles between spawn tile and extraction.
2. Create a minimum extermination requirement with a rare/uncommon rate bonus--with diminishing returns--for additional enemies killed.

SABOTAGE
In some tilesets, this is nearly as quick as Capture. Run to the location, press one button, pew pew, get to extraction. In other cases, it's more drawn out, including one or two spy-like elements, followed by two console hacks, all with much more travel requirements. Void Sabotage also has two hack-and-defend, followed by assassinate, then retrieve key and put in device.
This is the one that I'm drawing a blank for improvements; I appreciate each type of sabotage mission. Trying to make these more uniform in duration basically means cutting out a lot of the "fun" game-play elements in a sabotage ("fun" because when grinding sabotage, everything becomes rote or even a chore, which is true of everything I suppose).

 

SURVIVAL
1. Replace the life support mechanic with a boost-the-Tenno-operative mechanic: life support modules are replaced with a module that reduces the amount of time that the "Tenno operative needs to gather supplies." This could also be modified to an exploration type mission where players must run throughout the map looking for special locations or crates that hold time reduction modules. Between rounds, these modules would respawn to allow for endless play. One interesting side effect to such a gameplay mode is that this would encourage players to divide the map into regions that each player is responsible for patrolling for these modules while also surviving the waves of endless enemies.
2. SURVIVAL as Interception: Change life support capsules such that four spawn at various locations on the map each round. Holding each one reduces the amount of time required for the Tenno operative to gather supplies. The reason this is not purely interception is that holding capsules is entirely optional; enemies will still be after the players, not the capsules. players can choose to team up for safety, thereby sacrificing mission duration for survival. (This isn't my brightest or favorite idea, but it's an possible solution nonetheless).

DEFENSE
1. Allow players to control the intervals with which each wave starts, even allowing multiple waves to overlap. This increases mission difficulty while also potentially decreasing mission duration. Potential side effect: certain Warframes might become too "meta" or specifically optimal for this mission. With increased enemy density, Nova's Molecular Prime, Volt's Static Discharge, and Saryn's entire kit are especially effective.
2. SIMPLE TOWER-DEFENSE In addition to defending the objective, players can stand by one of several Defensive towers spawned  on the map. These towers would provide incredible buffs to players Warframes (+ability strength, +energy efficiency, +shield energy) or weapons (+fire rate, +critical chance/damage, +x% damage type), but players must decide which towers to activate to clear the most incoming enemies while also being sure that the primary defense objective is also adequately guarded. This forces players to be constantly making positioning decisions, thereby reducing the painfully dull aspects of this mission type. Towers could also be permanently damage, while Lot-Ordis could drop new ones in occasionally.
3. FULL-ON TOWER-DEFENSE This would take major revamps/remasters of defense tilesets, but add the ability for players to indirectly route approaching enemies, enable traps, and generally make disposal of the bulk of enemies automated, while stronger enemies might require more direct approaches. 

INTERCEPTION
1. Spawn optional capture targets whose defeat would further increase the control percentage. Capture targets do not last for long and will generally avoid getting too close to communication towers and players. This provides interesting decision points for players: defend their post or hunt the capture target. If the post is lost but the capture target is defeated, that would provide a small reduction (or increase) in the round duration, while defeating the target and holding the post would provide a substantial reduction. Further, multiple posts could be lost if several players abandon their posts, thereby having a net increase in round duration.
2. Spawn additional capture targets (see above) whose defeat would provide bonuses to the uncommon and rare drop rates. An interesting wrinkle would be to inversely scale the bonus to rare drop rate by the enemy's Capture points (i.e. the bonus is highest when players hold the enemy to 0 capture points, decreasing the higher the enemy scores).

 

So, that's it, a first draft at attempting to make these fissure missions more appealing. Even with no familiarity with the WF code base and tool chains, these ideas run the gamut of seeming quite doable (based on what already exists) to fairly extensive changes. If this even just gets DE's game designers' creativity flowing again and thinking about these missions in a new light, I'd consider that a victory. If you're reading this as a player, try to imagine these game modes. Would they be fun? How would you approach them? How might one abuse/cheat them? I welcome any and all constructive criticism!