[Factions] Faction Outposts punish player progression #13443
Replies: 2 comments 2 replies
-
I don't really think this is much of an issue for most lobbies, not to the level that you are describing. Sure, it's a challenge to balance reputation gain with still making money at every outpost. That's a good thing! That means you make tough choices with actual consequences behind them. It's not supposed to be easy to get high reputation while still being able to jobs for every faction. This is the entire reason factions were reworked and (part of) the reason "outpost reputation" was removed. Like, how would global reputation even work? You do a mission, you gain global reputation - how would it go down? Stealing? Failing missions? That's not interesting or good enough. (Failing missions is already a waste of time, a rep loss would be an infuriating insult to injury.) Global reputation would just be "how long the campaign has been going" meter, there would be nothing interesting. The entire reason there are two competing reputation tracks is because it can actually have a large impact on the game. I do agree that secondary factions should be shown on the map, but turning all factions into secondary factions is a massive step backwards. I'm fine with players simply not wanting to engage with the system, but the solution to that is modding/cheating, not changes to everyone's game. |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
-
The Problem:
Every station is split into one of two Factions. Taking general purpose missions from these stations directly increases your Reputation with that Faction while harming it with the other. It is also by far the best and most reliable way to make money, gain experience, and generally progress.
Because you are first and foremost trying to make money in order to get XP and upgrade your ship, Reputation takes a back seat. This means it hardly matters which station Faction you are going to or what missions you take -- let alone whether you actually agree with the politics of that Faction. You're just trying to make money. Unfortunately, doing this dramatically slows down the progression of the game since you end up in a see-saw of Reputation with neither side rising particularly fast (especially if you're not doing the Politician Captain skill tree). This also makes the impact of griefers in outposts much more severe.
In order to avoid this see-saw of Reputation, you can alternatively avoid taking missions on certain stations as to not harm your Reputation with the Faction you've sided with. This is dependent on RNG for whether outposts are distributed in your favor. Additionally, you lose out on a huge amount of income which you need in order to upgrade your ship to get through the game, and dramatically slows down your character progression since XP is tied to missions.
You are either stuck with poor Reputation on either side and are paying exorbitant prices to get through the Biome gates, or you skip tons of missions at the whim of RNG outpost Faction distribution while remaining very under-powered and under-equipped. Both fundamental options for progression punish the player.
A Possible Solution:
The vast majority of stations, if not all, could be turned neutral. Reputation with most stations now contributes to a global neutral Reputation/karma, and determines your discounts and scrutiny of security searches (but never reaches the point of outright kill on sight for neutral stations when docking, so that missions may still be done). This means that, no matter what, you are at least able to take basic missions (monster nests, wreck clearing, perhaps fighting pirates etc) and still continue progressing through the game without either hurting the Faction Reputation you're going for, or having to skip large amounts of stations because of RNG.
With the stations now being neutral, major Factions could be turned into something more akin to minor Factions -- with Coalition officials in their own area in stations handing out their own unique missions, and Separatists hanging out in the darker, sketchier parts of stations doing much the same. These unique missions differ from the local ones that neutral station Administrators give, instead focusing on more long range missions like Jailbreak or Assassination. Additionally like with the minor Husk and Clown Factions, there should be far more overarching "quest chains" that involve you performing unique missions -- much like how rescuing Jacov Subra is uniquely designed. As these are meant to be major Factions, the variety of missions, length and complexity of quest chains, and number of unique characters for them should proportionally be more richly developed.
Summary:
Below is a mock-up of what it could look like:
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
All reactions