Right. So, as a foundry mission author, what motivation do I have to create missions now? With an exception of a -very- small group of people that actually play the foundry for the story content, 90% of people (that I know, and yes, that's quite a lot of people), play for the rewards.

They do giant space battle missions for the green+ items that drop from the larger ships and the FM rewards at the end. They do the ground missions for ground drops and FM rewards at the end. Not to mention the dilithium.

With your new "average time" system, the missions that takes a solo player 20+ minutes (that qualifies for rewards) takes a team 5 minutes. Then the mission gets flagged as unacceptable for rewards, and none of my missions no longer are played by the mass public.

So what solution can you offer me, as an author, to solve this? Should I start creating missions that take solo players an hour+ to finish, to make it so that teams of overpowered DPS can't cause my mission to be flagged with the evil red text of worthlesness?

As much as you guys at Cryptic want to insist everyone should play the missions for the story, people aren't going to do that. They need an incentive to do it, and you've successfully taken all of my "rewards" away that I can offer people to run my missions.


Recommendation: Cut dilithium and FM rewards by half. Reduce the "average" timer by half, if not more. Then when I have teams running my missions, it won't flag it as too quick of a mission. Heck, take the rewards down to 10 FM and 140 dilthium, and take the timer and mission cooldown away all together.

Throw me a bone here cryptic, you're making my missions completely undesireable from the majority of players.

People uninterested in story will always be uninterested in story. 90% of the audience aren't really interested in Foundry missions -- the change in rewards only really affects a small part of the potential audience. That is, people who like new stories and explorations but don't want to feel 'penalized' by doing them.

Where did you come up with this 90 percent. Are there metrics out there we can look at as to who plays the Foundry and why?

Or did you do a poll? What was your sample size? We're your questions symmetrical and non-pejorative? What was the margin of error?

My question is why are you doing it in the first place? Authoring I mean.

Granted, I author missions to tell stories and I like sharing that. But, what are you after? Tips? Your name in lights or something? I could understand if you wanted to facilitate people doing the fast repeatable, but, that's not how the system is intended so I doubt it will stay that way for long. It's a faulty goal.

I understand your frustration with how the mechanics have changed, but, I think this is a problem of perspective on the issues here. It's kind of obvious that a goal of these changes was to curb the behavior of just getting the rewards fast and cheap while still having something so people can get story too. Rather than just get the reward, or only get a story, cryptic is looking here to make it so people can get both rather than a system that still limits one or the other. They want to make it so people can validly spend time in the community authored content as a section of the game.

If you can give me a better run down of what you want to accomplish and what it means to you to be an author, maybe we can figure something out. But right now, I guess I just don't see where your coming from.

Like what xr377 says grinder missions will naturally fail to stay above the 20 minute mark. If you build a traditional mission (a la Cryptic story mission) the number of players shouldn't affect the time played. Combat might be a bit faster but the player(s) will still be busy with dialogue and running around doing stuff.

Among other things, you could mark missions 'solo' or 'team' play.

Though I imagine the market for team-oriented missions is even smaller than regular Foundry missions.

Marking missions as "solo" play won't stop anyone from power grinding them in groups. I would like to see either group play averages excluded from the calculation or the minimum times removed and simply require Foundry missions to be of a certain "Length" to be published at all.

There is no system that will prevent exploitation by players.

I dunno ... entertainment, maybe?

I have created a mission which MAY resolve this issue.

The mission is called "Devil's Run" - most of the mission is non-combat - and instead you spend most of the time escorting a dilithium freighter through an asteroid field and beaming aboard dilithium.

I'm still trying to get the timing right but I think I've almost got it.

Feel free to give it a try...and if you like it...feel free to implement something similar.