Suggestion: Alternative to jobs for leveling

[comsciguy82]

It seems like no matter what class you play, except possibly for explorers who know where the good mining is, eventually you are stuck doing jobs at some point in the leveling process in order to continue. Warrior classes need to level exploration/trade to keep their levels balanced for shield/device/reactor tech, and so on. But doing jobs ends up being sitting for 10 minutes or longer waiting to get a full set that go in the same direction (or waiting on jobs, period), and then the job takes very little time and effort, especially if you have wormholes available to you. To me, this isn't what makes for a fun game or leveling process.

Someone has already suggested 30 step missions to raise faction levels such as for the Red Dragons to make the grind less painful, even if not less time consuming. I think this is an excellent idea, and I think could be applied to leveling experience as well. I think that the leader of your particular class should offer missions, appropriate to your level range (in line with what the optimal job terminal level is for you) and would offer 3 missions of that range at a time, a combat oriented mission, an explore oriented, and a trade oriented. These missions would involve large amount of travel all over the galaxy, but would have somewhat high payouts in experience. They should give all 3 types of experience each, but over 60% in the category that corresponds to the mission. The objective of each step could be random or predetermined, as far as location is concerned, and the entire 30 step mission should be repeatable, allowing you to choose whichever orientation (combat/explore/trade) each time. Perhaps even allow taking a different faction's 30 step quest, and reward small to moderate amounts of faction over the whole course of the mission, but only allowing 1 such mission, regardless of faction, at any time.

This allows you to grind out your leveling experience in a similar fashion to job terminals, without having to compete with other players or waiting around, so that it feels like you are constantly engaged in doing something with some sort of purpose, instead of mindlessly waiting on jobs, wormholing and returning to get new ones before the terminal has even reset

[Murdered]

I love this idea, and I wouldnt think it would take too much coding and work to implement. Of course till the game goes live im sure that this cannot be a primary objective due to all the other things in the game need to be working right first, but after live I would look forward to seeing this or something similar added to the game.

[Terrell [BT]]

I think it's a good idea as well. Even killing the same mobs over and over can get tiring after a while, IMO, it's good to have more than one way to do things.

[Mayko]

I figure any added complexity and freedom in the game would be an awesomely welcome change, but as Maniac pointed out a few things might be "more important" until then

[Kenu [CDEV]]

not sure about the randomized steps for the mission, but we could just make a ton more missions for players for the purpose of getting exp. It would truly be a lot of work, but enb live had more missions than we have right now, so we'll have to go in that direction anyway. might as well make the scale bigger. it's a very content oriented task so our coders can focus on things like fixing skills and other coding bugs without getting involved in this.

[kemperor1]

Good to hear it kenu, it'd also be interesting to have some missions where you have to make a decision which will effect the way the mission progresses and the rewards you get. And not like "the other space game" where one of the rewards is so much better that you'd never choose a different option. And it'd be interesting whether or not such missions are repeatable to get the other storylines/rewards. Could be cool either way. Anyway I'd be happy to see more missions regardless of what they're like as long as they're worth doing. And thanks devs for the ariad and malhause missions keep up the good work!