Extermination: Moment-to-moment destruction > Beating the actual mission

[(PSN)Unstar]

I've come to realize that I hate doing Extermination missions with public groups.  On the surface, Exterminate missions are a kill-fest and one of the most fundamental and enjoyable types of non-endless mission.  But that doesn't take into account the nature of players, which has unfortunately made Exterminate missions a stressful hell.

Nearly every Extermination mission I join nowadays has a player (let's call them a "Wrecking Ball") who wants nothing more than to kill as many enemies as possible as quickly as possible (which is a very valid desire).  The way a Wrecking Ball achieves their goal is to exclusively go after large groups of enemies, leaving stray enemies and survivors behind them as they rush towards the next large group.  However, if your team reaches Extraction without killing the required number of enemies, you won't be able to leave, and will have to backtrack to kill those missed enemies.  Because of this, a Wrecking Ball exerts two two directly opposing pressures on other players:

1. If you want to stay in Affinity-sharing range of where the majority of the kills are happening and/or if you simply enjoy fighting more than one enemy at a time, you're pressured to become a Wrecking Ball yourself.  (note that this causes a viral spread of Wrecking Ball behavior that can continue beyond the end of the mission)
2. If you want to beat the mission in a timely fashion without the frustration of backtracking, you're pressured to play clean-up crew and take out solitary stragglers for the entire mission, while the Wrecking Ball has all the fun.

I don't know how to solve this problem entirely.  I think the problem could be mitigated by increasing the Affinity-sharing range — preferably by making it infinite like in Railjack — to lessen players' incentive to become Wrecking Balls while making it so that players in the same mission as Wrecking Balls don't have to make hard choices about losing Affinity.

However, that's only half the problem.  When a person has the choice between 1 candy in one direction and 5 candies in another, they head towards the bigger batch, surprising no one.  And apparently even the knowledge that down the road you might not complete your mission due to this behavior isn't enough to overcome the moment-to-moment dopamine rush derived from wanton destruction.  Is there some way to incentivize — in a moment-to-moment gameplay way — killing every last enemy?  Or sticking together with your team instead of running ahead?  Could there simply be an on-screen alert that pops up when an enemy has been left "several rooms tiles behind" and persists until that enemy is dead?  Could enemies in Exterminate mission spawn as "squads" and killing every member of a squad gives some kind of bonus?

This is a problem I don't know how to solve, but I think it's worth trying to solve. Thanks for listening to and considering my feedback!

 

 

 

 

 

[Uthael]

Some potential solutions from the that come to mind:
1) At the mission start, the shared affinity "buff" lasts 2min at infinite range.
2) Players invisibly "paint" the area they're moving on with the buff. If you're following a player, you get his XP.
3) As long as you're moving from tile to tile (not camping or afk), the affinity range is infinite.
4) Being within 20m of an objective gets you shared xp from everyone.
5) Go to sleep before 3 a.m. instead of trying to solve other people's problems.

Edit: "killing every last enemy" won't leave occasional Corpus who survived to tell the tale xD

Edited March 22, 2020 by Uthael

[Twilight-Knight]

Yes, this is annoying like hell because skipping enemies will cause a serious problematic at high - elite levels extermination. If the match suddenly have issue and have only a bit delay spawn. your mission time of 2 minutes can be turning into 5 mins match.

Players must have a better disciplines when playing multiplayer and this is a small faction of the trouble if they just dead brain and do whatever they want.

[dreamycreampie]

be wrecking ball yourself and if there are stray enemies, you let the first wrecking ball to do the cleanup while you afk at extract

[Uthael]

On 2020-03-23 at 6:29 AM, dreamycreampie said:

be wrecking ball yourself and if there are stray enemies, you let the first wrecking ball to do the cleanup while you afk at extract

This behavior is just as stupid as the wrecking ball and changes nothing.
The other guy just parkours, trying to get in front of you.