Missions & Complexes

So you've been living under a rock for several years and didn't buy the minerals before the mission?

Can we sort this under "Please CCP Help me, I'm to stupid to play this game"?
edit:
And didn't even look at the offered mission in the journal?

I kind of like this mission. There's always enough of the ore for sale at the stations. IIRC, you plop down 2m and get a free implant + faction stadings. What's not to like?

Pointing out a problem is so much easier than pointing out a solution.

I don't have one, do you?

I have bad standings with Min and Gal because as a newbie, I didn't know how missions were affecting my standings with empire factions. They never tell you about the standings losses nor the consequences.

So I guess I can do level one missions for a few weeks to repair them. If I can ever be bothered.

Newbies are directed right into missions by the tutorial structure and then the SoE arc. But level one/two/three (four) missions are soooo boring for a newbie. Have you read comments about EVE on gamers' forums and all that? A ton of them are a variant of 'EVE is so boring, you do a mission and then do another one, you never see anyone. Solo MMO lol'. I wonder how many subs EVE has thrown away by pushing newbies into the terrible PVE?

Having a certain amount of "make work" to do means fewer people will have the standings, which means having the standings becomes a valuable trade advantage. Always assume players have far more money than you can imagine: any attempt to restrict entry into some venue (in this case, high standings) through resource consumption will just lead players to discover ways to multiply the resources they have. If it can be bought with ISK, assume an infinite supply of ISK.

Standings for tags could work since the tags are a first-order proxy for hours of NPC grinding.

At some point, making it easier to get standings reduces the value of those standings. I guess the L4 MfWP is a way for CCP to tell players, "no, you can't have your extremely profitable L4 missions and have your standings gains too!" Standings for tags would bypass this regulator function of the mission reward scaling system.

So for standings, go back to L3 courier missions in blockade runners :)

See, solved my own problem by sleeping on it for a day.

Oh sure. I'm not necessarily saying that the effort should be cut down, but rather that it should be moved away from this one narrow (and horribly poorly designed) mechanism. As it is, it is entangled in one of the rewards for having high standings already, and that reward is itself already self-rewarding so this additional bonus makes little sense to begin with.

If the standings grind was its own module, that tiny part could be modified, nerfed, buffed, tweaked, twisted and in any number of ways adjusted to serve the goal of providing the right level and rate of progression. It would be possible to offer alternate routes depending on exactly how you want to pay: grind time, skill time, daily increments, whathaveyou—each with its own benefits and penalties. Make it universal rather than force people down the same tedious activity and skill path. It's just a much more elegant way than forcing people to shoot red pluses or cart around dummy materials, possibly training otherwise pointless skills for that purpose alone.

Hell, with the right design, it could be turned into a proper business: yes, we have standings sharing right now, but its inelegant and severely limited. Just industrialise that sucker instead!

This mission is terrible because of the ****** standing increase. Such a waste of a storyline opportunity.

The mission pays 20mil for 2 minutes work, and doesn't blow out your standings, so doesn't force you to move to fix them. ie its exactly what I wanted once my standings were above 5 for the faction concerned.

Well, you can grind level 1 missions if you want.

I could have sworn I posted 'The Plan' in a reply to a thread of yours about fixing negative Faction standings. Maybe not, when a person get's older it's easy to forget the 5 W's (Who, What, When, Where and Why).





DMC

Edit :

Oh yeah, I like the "Materials For War Preparation" missions. Also see what I mean about forgetting the 5 W's.