Survival 2.0

[Rexuz]

Something that's been happening to me is that sometimes I literally fall asleep while doing long Survival missions. The issue is that the monotony of killing hundreds of enemies while watching that counter go up becomes a long term hassle.

Also the only thing we have to worry about is that the air doesn't go below 10% and we don't get killled by butchers. There's no crucial target to protect or care like in Excavation, Defense or Interception.

So why don't we do all the work on Survival to make it more interesting? We become the operator that takes 20 minutes to give us something, without actually waiting 20 minutes.

The idea would be that we just get rid of the timer and replace it with a sort of Spy hunt where we look for Rare Caches (or Consoles) and (if we keep the rotation) on the 4th find we get the "Rotation C" Reward. With the Rare Caches the work would be more easy to implement because the game can randomly spawn it on the map, while the Consoles need their own space.

With that we have an actual goal instead of looking at the clock like we are waiting for the train on the Air Support Station.

Other suggestions?

[Datcoolguy]

I'd be totally okay with removing life support, i don't believe survival in any game should include fail states not related to your survival

[Mattoropael]

9 hours ago, Datcoolguy said:

I'd be totally okay with removing life support, i don't believe survival in any game should include fail states not related to your survival

To my understanding, the point of life support is to stop, or at least dissuade, you from camping at one "safe" spot for hours to end. They'll need to find an alternative to either do the same thing or give you incentives to move around.

Edited April 19, 2016 by Mattoropael

[BlackCoMerc]

2 hours ago, Mattoropael said:

To my understanding, the point of life support is to stop, or at least dissuade, you from camping at one "safe" spot for hours to end. They'll need to find an alternative to either do the same thing or give you incentives to move around.

See the first post: Spawn in loot caches. That we have to HUNT DOWN. 

This IS the incentive to move around. IF you dont move, you dont find caches. IF you dont find caches, you dont get any loot. 

I would add here, though, that the mission should cap the Caches at four. IF we find all four, we receive the Rotation C reward IN ADDITION to the Cache rewards. 

That is:

Cache 1 - A

Cache 2 - B

Cache 3 - B

Cache 4 - C

Bonus for finding all 4 (Another, extra): C

I would also add that we could simply eliminate enemy scaling entirely. I mean, there are only four caches and a C rotation reward now. After that, players are welcome to stay and explore the map, killing enemies and earning XP. But there are no more Caches or Rotation rewards. 

By implementing this type of mission - and I really hope they do - and getting rid of scaling, players will not be able to milk a single survival mission for endless XP. Since enemies will no longer scale, players will experience diminishing returns on XP at some point, and seek out tougher, higher rank missions. As was the intention of the very system that is in use now, and which is having the opposite effect, to wit: Scaling enemies upward, allows players to milk the very mission DE tries to drive them out of, for additional XP, WITHOUT having to leave that mission. 

So yeah...Loot Caches with A and B rotation rewards. And maybe some small clues about which area of the map they are in, at least. Not exact locations, but offer some clues. Then, if we find all four, we get one C Rotation reward from the last Cache found, and ANOTHER C rotation reward as a bonus for locating all the caches. 

Edited April 19, 2016 by BlackCoMerc

[Rexuz]

8 hours ago, BlackCoMerc said:

I would add here, though, that the mission should cap the Caches at four. IF we find all four, we receive the Rotation C reward IN ADDITION to the Cache rewards. 

I would also add that we could simply eliminate enemy scaling entirely. I mean, there are only four caches and a C rotation reward now. After that, players are welcome to stay and explore the map, killing enemies and earning XP. But there are no more Caches or Rotation rewards. 

By implementing this type of mission - and I really hope they do - and getting rid of scaling, players will not be able to milk a single survival mission for endless XP. Since enemies will no longer scale, players will experience diminishing returns on XP at some point, and seek out tougher, higher rank missions. As was the intention of the very system that is in use now, and which is having the opposite effect, to wit: Scaling enemies upward, allows players to milk the very mission DE tries to drive them out of, for additional XP, WITHOUT having to leave that mission. 

So yeah...Loot Caches with A and B rotation rewards. And maybe some small clues about which area of the map they are in, at least. Not exact locations, but offer some clues. Then, if we find all four, we get one C Rotation reward from the last Cache found, and ANOTHER C rotation reward as a bonus for locating all the caches. 

That is a very radical change. Also, this plan has issues:

1. If the mission has that cap and the enemies doesn't scale then the challenge is reduced.
2. It has a hard effect on the loot farming, which is the whole point of going to the Void.
3. We spend more Void Keys and T3 keys are very rare.

Also disagree with the XP farming being a problem. You can go to Defense, Interception and Excavation and have the same effect.

[Zookes]

Okay, so let's say life support is gone now. You can remain in the mission forever or until you die too many times.

Now let's replace the "collect life support from enemies" objective with "collect key fragments from enemies". To get a reward, you first have to find a randomly spawned cache (only one is spawned at any given time), and then kill tons of enemies to collect fragments of a passkey or password. When you have enough fragments, you activate the cache and get the reward (losing all collected fragments in the process), then you can start looking for the next cache or extract. All the while, enemies are becoming more difficult over time.

There you go. Now you can stay in the mission for as long as you want, there is a reason to kill lots of stuff, and a reason to move around. Even better, there's a reason for everyone to stick together!

I'm sure DE will have a better version when/if they decide to re-do spaceship survival.
As it is, Excavation was designed to replace land-based survival, and it's pretty good, so who knows?

Edited April 20, 2016 by Zookes