05/15/2009    |    Devlog    |    Lum    |    Discuss

When we create big mission arcs, we design them to be a fun, engaging, and most importantly, a linear experience. We want players to get a sense of story and to do something interesting. We also want to reward players who accomplish the goals for those missions. This changes when people farm missions, though. They’re participating in a kind of experience that’s not fun and not really what we had in mind when we put those missions in place.

Playing a mission over and over isn’t really the problem by itself, even though it isn’t what we originally intended. Even gaining a lot of money per hour by playing it over and over isn’t the problem.

The problems with mission farming are:

• If you don’t turn a mission in, you can never progress to the next mission in that particular arc. It stalls the game. We want players to be progressing through mission arcs and storylines, not stopping at the most lucrative parts to repeat them.


• Once you know about Just One More Time, you lose the choice of working for a different trade faction. This is huge, and not only locks you out of other content, but other rewards and storylines. We want choosing to side with a Faction to be a meaningful decision, not just based on which one has the best mission to farm.


• Once you find the single most efficient mission, that’s the only one you play and it stops being fun.

We want to reduce the desire for players to farm missions, and one of the ways we accomplish this goal is with reduced loot in non-repeatable missions. We want you to turn those missions in, see the rest of the story, change factions, etc. We want to reward you for completing a mission, not for farming it. So, in 1.15 you will no longer get loot from killing NPCs in missions. This does not affect loot dropped by NPCs on the Open Sea, so keep sinking those Fleets. We hope you will complete Just One More Time one last time and enjoy the remainder of that chain, or even explore a new Faction.

Ideally, we want to provide players with readily available sources of both income and enjoyment without putting a roadblock in a big story that says “farm here.” Repeatable daily missions with big money rewards are intended to be replayed and there’s a lot of variety in those missions to keep it interesting.

05/15/2009    |    Devlog    |    Lum    |    Discuss