Systems: Mission Performance Tracking and Rewards

[Tapman]

The mission system as I understand it serves the purpose of organization and command, both of which are important on the battlefield. With the level of customization available already, individuals and outfits are going to specialize based on their gameplay style preference and therefore will be taking some missions more often than others. This will lead to highly skilled individuals/groups who can be relied upon more heavily for certain types of missions and less for others. This information should be collected and analyzed as in what percentile you fall in throughout your empire and all players in each different category and the overall numbers individually. This needs to be available for commanders in-game and for personal statistics, and you should be able to compare yourself with other specific players/Outfits. Commanders/Outfits will make names for themselves based on the following information which can be researched for and by every player, and this information should go into daily/weekly/monthly/yearly/all-time leaderboards. There should be merits based on leaderboard performance to keep people interested in the long run.

The most important piece of data is your success rate. You will have different success rates for each of the different missions you accepted, and if you have assigned missions then you will have that as a separate success rate.

The next most important but slightly more complex is time, based off of a simple checkpoint system. Time spent from the moment the mission is accepted showing how long it took to plan/give orders to subordinates if you are leading a squad/platoon and how long it took to eventually accomplish or fail a mission. These must be based on specific data that can monitored and recognized automatically client-side and confirmed server-side. Some people may have a very high success rate but the situation has a time window that is too short for their average time of completion. There will be some missions that are not time based but with the pace of the game I am guessing that most will have some sort of time-based information.

Average number of and percent chance of death of you and those in your squad/platoon during a mission you lead. This will help people identify good leaders to follow, specifically those that seem to know how to not get everyone killed as often as others. Especially helpful for gen/CC holds/resecures, armor columns (as a driver AND gunner and if you have passengers), and MAX crashes/defense from them.

Average kills for each mission and average kills per squadmate if you have led squads on missions. This can be an indicator of stealth and of overall skill, and can be combined with the death information to get average ratios of K/D.

Average BEP per mission and per hour during that mission, assuming we have a similar system where it is scaled, i.e. when you kill someone, how long the other player had been alive, the amount of kills they had before death, what vehicle they were in if any, etc.

One item that should be considered when designing the information from missions is that there will be players that log in after a mission has begun and before it is completed. We need to determine what happens if you log out during a mission but you log back in while that mission is still going (I think you should be able to continue it but the time spent logged out during the mission should be logged separately.) What happens if you log back in and the mission was failed, reassigned, or cancelled? Difficult questions.

I assume that the missions are either going to be created before/during Beta but I would ask that player-created missions be allowed to be created down the road. Beyond more specific instructions for the different mission types, you could have a "Fun" category to organize new events across your empire or between all of them like races, contests, it could be revolutionary in FPS/sandbox gaming!

In addition to being extremely useful, you will also be rewarding the veterans of the original Planetside because they will be quick to organize themselves properly into command structures. Passive rewards for vets that doesn't give anyone an unfair advantage is win.

Anybody else have ideas as to what should be tracked and how people can be recognized for performance?