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Please remove companion gift missions from all the mission skills


Heezdedjim

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If you think we "must have" a mission skill to get these, then just make a generic mission skill which returns ONLY companion gifts, rather than polluting every other mission skill with these useless missions. As it is, every mission skill right now is just a variant of Companion Birthday Party Planning, and they're all annoying and useless if you're trying to actually gather materials for crafting, because of the constant 4/5 and 5/5 gift missions crapping up the roster.

 

You've shown by now that you don't care to improve the mission selection UI or the mission roster iteration any time soon, so you can at least do the next best thing and make the skills that are supposed to deliver mats actually do what they say on the tin -- deliver mats.

Edited by Heezdedjim
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Most likely... not gonna happen :p

 

Crafters have been asking since Beta and since they haven't changed it, so I guess they meant it to be cluttered with useless Companion Gift Missions on purpose.

 

The only work-around to avoid this is to reset your crew mission list by either hopping on and off your Starship, or relogging ( relogging on your Starship is the fastest ) until the mission you desire appears on the list.

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Companion gifts tier 3 and above can be used to max out companion affection. Affection increases a companion's Crew Skill critical chance and efficiency (speed). +5% critical & +15% efficiency at 10000 (maximum) affection.

 

Gifts missions also have a chance to return crafting schematics.

Edited by MorgonKara
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actually it is the fastest way to level up any crew mission skill as they typically take far less time than the blue material missions. at the last few tiers the times are almost cut in half.

 

also if you knew anything about the benefits of maxing your companions affection and how if affects crew skills you wouldn't have made such a post.

 

but to answer your question, no leave them in. the benefits of using them to maxing out companions affection and the rewards for such are nice to have. even if you don't use crew skills the legacy benefits are impressive especially with the added presence it gives.

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Gifts are awesome.

You do realize that as your companions AP goes up, their time to completion goes way down, right? You actually want to get them all maxed...and so do others, so GTN those when you're maxed!

 

Put it this way, it's like getting a small return in credits every handful of missions...except that unlike lockboxes, these things actually sell for *more* to players.

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The fact is that gift missions also create a scarcity of materials. Fact is in a game such as this, the supply of materials is infinite; no matter how much of a material has been gathered/discovered there is always more. So, developers create game mechanics to limit those resources over time:

 

- gathered nodes are not always present and spawn different things

- certain materials are only obtainable via a "critical success"

- (SWTOR specific) missions cost credits and time and they are in most cases random

 

With this in mind, gift missions perform the function of delaying the acquisition of mission skill materials. If they were to be removed from the system I foresee several possibilities:

 

1) the amount of material obtained from each mission is cut in half

2) the cost of missions increases

3) the time required to complete missions increases

4) or a combination of the above.

 

As an example, right now grade 6 UT abundant metal missions cost about 2100 credits, take an hour to complete, and results in 4 prototype quality metals on a non-crit, 8 prototype metals on a crit, and 2-4 artifact quality metals on a crit. Imagine if you will, no gift missions. Now, that same mission costs 4500 credits, takes 2.5 hours to complete, and results in 2/4/1-2. You get what you want, but the scarcity of materials is maintained.

 

Is that REALLY what you want?

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Gifts sell well. Gifts are awesome. Gifts boost affection.

These are all great reasons for having a mission skill that returns gifts only. None of them explains why a mission skill that is supposed to deliver mats is useless for actually gathering mats.

 

The argument about scarcity is bull. None of this is planned scarcity, it's just a lousy UI that people have complained about since day one. It doesn't even do what you claim it does, because people can still game it to get five missions, by just relogging over and over or jumping on and off the ship. If BW does think they need to adjust mission yield for a system where you can start five missions easily, then they can adjust mission yield (and then nobody would be able to game it in any way to defeat this assumed yield control).

 

I have five companions. They are all at max affection. Like most crafters, when I log on to craft, I want to gather and craft, not jerk around logging and relogging fifteen times or hopping between zones trying to game a clunky, broken, slot machine UI into just giving me five gathering missions instead of five useless gift missions over and over. Make it do what it says on the tin: Gathering skills should allow you to gather mats, without hassle and without gaming the UI trying to just start the stupid missions.

Edited by Heezdedjim
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The argument about scarcity is bull. None of this is planned scarcity, it's just a lousy UI that people have complained about since day one. It doesn't even do what you claim it does, because people can still game it to get five missions, by just relogging over and over or jumping on and off the ship. If BW does think they need to adjust mission yield for a system where you can start five missions easily, then they can adjust mission yield (and then nobody would be able to game it in any way to defeat this assumed yield control).

 

Then how come EVERY SINGLE MMO in creation has some sort of system in place that somehow limits the infinite materials available? I (and friends of mine) have played them all at one time or another and they ALL have some method of limiting what and how much can be produced.

 

Yes, any given player can flub the system by logging in and out a hundred times to get the missions he/she wants. How many players actually take advantage of that? I guarantee...only a miniscule minority.

 

And, most likely, the logging in and out was not intended, but because so few do take advantage and it soothes some of the complaining, Bioware will probably never "fix" it.

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you do realize that it doesn't take very long to max out your crew members affection, and then you're still stuck with way too many gift missions.

 

They really need to limit the gift missions to like 1 per grade.

 

(and P.S. if you're serious about crafting, you shouldn't be concentrating on simply getting your mission skill up, you should be MAKING stuff, which will cause your mission skills to go up naturally from getting the mats needed to make the stuff)

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you do realize that it doesn't take very long to max out your crew members affection, and then you're still stuck with way too many gift missions.

 

Then you make an alt and you have five more companions to get to max affection :p. If you balance your crew skills right then you will only have one of each and you then want to do gift missions on one character to send to another.

 

Ironically enough, I did exactly that and there have been points where I wanted companion gift missions and there were none :eek: That's right UT grade 6 had two fabrics and three metals missions. I obviously took advantage of the situation, but it slowed down my goal.

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gifts are needed.

 

That being said, the mission selection system for crew skills sucks really hard. Massively, horribly, really hard.

 

They need to have a grade 1-6 mission window for EACH type of reward...i.e. underworld metals offer 5 missions per tier, moderate to rich- you shouldnt have to spam logins or zone to shift missions to get the ones you need to run...

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