I've tried JAN four or five times now and never got more than three steps in.
Sorry, better things to spend turns on than missions with a very low chance of success.

Now be nice Lamma. No picking on the retarded kids.

It would be easy enough to make it so you can not vote on your own missions.
And I hate to think anyone would be petty enough to mark down other people's missions out of spite.

>>Pirates stops reading the forums and starts hunting for Prophet<<   

Yeah, Emi posted a couple days ago saying the neg rep was now a percentage of the missions. This was intended to give more weight to the negative consequences of making dishonorable choices. Just needs a bit more fine tuning maybe.

Handing the rating using forum threads has too many drawbacks: Not all users read the forums.
There are already dozens and soon will be hundreds of missions. Which means staff
would have to read them all and then make value judgments about whether the
consensus was positive or negative, which would take a lot of time. With the star
rating system in game, it could all be handled in code automatically. After 30 days,
any mission that dropped below three stars would be marked inactive. The code
could even append a publicly readable log file that tracked dumped missions.

And it could lead to hurt feelings. A numerical value is just a fact. Nothing personal.
Comments like "This mission sucks." or "Whoever made this is retarded." is too personal. On the other hand, constructive criticism might help the author address the shortcomings and revamp the mission and resubmit it. So forum threads might be useful as helpful feedback, but not as the criteria for dropping.

Perhaps it might even be possible that when a mission was dropped, the author got an in game message.

Of course, a lot of the problems could be avoided in the first place if the mission test links were available to all users and authors could post the links and request reviews, criticisms and suggestions before submitting them. Perhaps a mission authors only forum thread where we could post the test links and review each others missions without the entire community seeing them, or the catty remarks about them. And maybe that is the place to use the rating system. A mission has to get ten, three star or higher ratings by the writers group before it even gets reviewed by staff. And a Send Author Message link at the end so the reviewers could let the author know why they gave the rating they did, pro or con, and offer suggestions for improvement.

Someone suggested earlier that the author's name be shown. That also might motivate people to put more effort into making something they can be proud of.

But the first line of defense is just the staff being more selective about what gets approved and what gets sent back to the shop for improvements. Maybe a new name tag to go with WIP and FIN - NMW (needs more work) so authors know it has been
reviewed and is not up to snuff. And I think that already accepted missions should be able to be resubmitted for review and in game up date, just by changing the ADDED to WIP. So we can be self improving when we see problems with our own added missions.

Sorry to rattle on, but the mission creator is now my favorite part of the game and has brought the fun back to exploring the galaxy in game. I just want it and the missions produced to be as good as they can be.

Addendum: [In reply to Silence's post, so Slither [sic] doesn't need to flame me for double posting  ]
There already is a link that shows all the steps. Would be groovy (that dates me eh? lol) if they were inputs and there was an Update All button on that page.

While I won't point any fingers, I must say a lot of the missions are just pure junk.
Clearly a lot of people are just trying to create a lot of steps for the rewards and
do not put any effort into it.

And even some of the ones that the author has put effort into creating a good story line
are so poorly designed that no one is ever going to fly them after getting ripped off for a
lot of turns for no reward and ending up at double fail/ mission ended screens a few times.

You should never have any mission where it is even possible to end up at a double fail screen.
If it were up to me, 50% of the current missions would be scrapped. I think staff needs to
be a lot more picky about what missions get accepted. There should be higher standards for
story lines and engineering.

Again, I would urge a user rating system of one to five stars and any misison that doesn't
earn at least three within a 30 day test period should be scrapped. Or we are just going to
end up wit  hundreds a bunk missions and the entire project will be denigrated to pointlessness.
This is a high quality game and deserves high quality components.

Back stepping is not allowed. You can skip ahead, but not back.

We have all run into this. And it does require more scripting.
But it also allows for more control, as you know some event has taken place to cause the skip ahead.
Whereas if you skipped back, you would not know if it was the first time through or not.

I have one that I had to pretty much duplicate several steps, just to know if I could use
text that referred to an event that might or might not have occurred earlier in the mission.
But hey, on the bright side, we are rewarded according to the number of steps.

You just put a minus sign in front of the number for a negative reward.

Added or pending?

In a year and a half I have made seven posts.
You have made 3528 and I am getting called out for spamming?
How ironic.

I just flew Just Another Nebula and since you asked for feedback.

It is well and humorously written. And I like it that it doesn't burn a lot of turns.
And the intermediary rewards are generous enough for the low turn steps.
Only negative is there is no big pay off at the end. But maybe I just missed it
because I was beaten when I joined the game and then was asked to leave.

Wish list:

Upload mission icon image.
Select battle type: reg, board, scout, raid.
Reward controls moved to fail/succeed side of set up.
Allow preview link to anyone, so you can have friends preview and offer suggestions. (while WIP)
User mission rating (1 - 5) at end of mission  and rating stars shown on mission preview/accept screen.

The mission creator is now my favorite part of the game. I only fly turns now to find and look
at everyone's missions (a couple of dogs, but most are really good.)

But the rewards need to be rebalanced higher for everything except creds (which are fine)
or no one is going to waste turns flying them. For instance, I just flew Risky Business. Used
over 100 turns. Mission power was 900 billion (2x my FP) Final reward was 50% experience.
(I know that because it's my mission.) Paid 9,000 experience!?!  Are you kidding me? I can fly
a five turn 10b FP AC encounter with zero risk and make 177,000 experience. Ninety times the
risk and twenty times the turns pays five percent the reward? No way Jose.

But this concept is on track to be the most compelling feature of SO and I just love it. Kudos E.

I agree with all of Prophet's suggestions.

In order to correct some of the commented upon problems and implement some of the new ideas,
I would suggest the following.

Recombine the three servers. All styles of play will be accommodated in a single game.
(Multiple servers only further fractionalize an already too small user base and lessen interaction
between the current groups because most people now play in one of the other but not both.)

Expand the gal map to a 3 x 3 grid with the current map as the center.

Each of the nine maps would represent a galaxy and have a unique map. There would be a 1,000 turn cost to warping between galaxies.

It is an on-going saga and never ends (ala WARS) but monthly winners based on top ten alliances/
individual scores. No more D-Days (only the strong love them, which means 90% of players hate them)
and no tediously slow restarts. No more maxing of cash. When an individual player hits max cash,
he just gets +1 in another counter and resets to 50% of current cash on hand or in stash. If she runs
out and has a positive value in the max counter, decrement the counter and resupply with 50% of
max to the active. The only adjustment to ships is that defense can only be 10% of HP, so even maxed
ships (which continue to max at the other current values) can be killed by other maxed ships,
if there are enough attackers.

Put the central (current)  galaxy under council protection and only allow flying missions and encounters in it.
No building bases, system fleets, planets or PvP attacks in the central region. This would give
noobs or low involvement players a safe haven where they could learn the game, build their skills, power
and knowledge and give the grinders a place to grind, but with very little chance of finishing a round
ahead of the more daring and successful players/alliances who did their business in the uncontrolled gals.
(Maybe allow one base/system fleet per player in the protected galaxy, to experiment/ become familiar with.)

In the outer, unprotected regions, double mission/encounter rewards, base production/earnings
and allow all advanced features.  (Another way to look at this is gold bonuses would only become
available in the unprotected galaxies, even for gold players who chose to park in the neutral gal.)

Allow each alliance to claim one star system for the alliance and make it so all member's ships, system fleets
and bases at their system present a joint defense against attacks, so that every defender attacks in
turn until all attackers have been beaten or all have had a battle. If more than half defending
ships are eliminated, the attackers take control of the system and inherit any bases and planets there
and any remaining defending ships are scattered to the wind, each fleet warping to a random place.

When an alliance has built bases at every star in a quadrant, they control the quad and their fleets
will automatically move to defend any planet in the quad. But system fleets and bases would, naturally,
be bound to the planet they were constructed at.  Bases/Mines can be built by any member of the team
at the planets/quad that is controlled by the team. Of course, this will mine them out more quickly, but
no one bothers with mining once they have high levels of replication skills anyway.)

If you randomly hop into an alliance's home system/quad and there are more than double your FP
in combined defenses, you bug out, back to the starting point of the hop, with a report that you
have evaded X Allaince's Home fleet. (The odds of this happening often are low because it's going
to be a big universe and the locations of allaince home ports will become public information before
long.)

This would encourage teamwork because it would take multiple, large, attacking fleets to take over
a claimed system. And would give people a place in the battle galaxies a semi safe place to park.
For instance, if ten attackers attack 20 defenders, they will each fight two defender's bases/fleets. If one attacks,
he would fight 20 times. If 20 attack ten, each defender would fight two. With the matchings being
strongest attacker vs strongest remaining defender. So in a ten attacks 20 situation, #1 attacker would
fight #1 and #11 defender.)  And would increase the intensity and complexity of battles to a level far
more interesting than single PvP's are.  And it would encourage all players to get into an alliance
because surviving very long in the eight non protected gals would not be very likely for solo players.

And add a new mission type, Scout System, that gives FP of combined system fleets, number of bases,
number and FP of defenders (but not their specific ships.) System probes can be performed remotely,
at the cost of ten turns per probe in gal and 100 turns out of gal.

At unclaimed systems, anyone can attack anyone they find there, but with the following
modifications to the battle rules.

1. Specific mission objective: marines, workers, credits, segments, minerals.

2. When players are of equal (within 10%) TP (not FP) the max booty is 10% of the goal resources.

3. When the players differ in size, the max booty is adjusted up or down by a scaling factor. Perhaps
something along the lines of +/- 1% for every 10% difference in TP, with a max of +100% (20% of total
available on target) and min of 1%.

4. No more remote attacks. You can only attack people in the current system.

5. Three levels of alliance relations, Allies, Neutral, War, with all defaulting to neutral until changed.

6. Can not attack ally fleets. Always automatically attack enemy fleets within a settable percentage of FP
or automatically warp away from any that exceed your FP by the set amount to a point somewhere in the
current region. Which could leave you far from your alliance system and unable to return immediately.)
Non allied players (those not in alliances) are always neutral. No auto attacks, but you can always attack
manually if desired or set up your to automatically attack neutrals. This works in both directions, no
matter if you were sitting at the planet when they arrived or are the one doing the moving.

7. All warps use the number of distance/turns you warp. Including warping away from retalliations.
Warps are never further than 50% of available turns. When you run out of turns or there is no system
within 50% of your turns left, you can't warp away. Meaning if someone with a retal has more turns than
you do and is willing to burn them until you run out, you get hit. And the attacker will be able to tell when
the defender is running low by seeing the hops to the new location getting shorter. Or, alternatively,
players with retals can also warp in pursuit and not burn turns. Just so both sides are the same price.
Or something in between, say like warping costs 10% of the distance moved.

8. Warp disruptors/stabilizers are capped at 50% (level 25) to prevent those who are willing to spend
all their turns on techs can not gain an overwhelming advantage and force everyone else into a
never ending arms race of using turns on techs. And the formula for stabilizer/disruptor effectiveness is

Warp Chance - (WC * (stabil - disrupt))

Which means, even at max disrupt against no stabil, the most you could increase your odds would be
50% of the initial odds. So, if you were 10x more powerful and had a 10% chance, the max you could
have is 15%. Since your reward for that attack would only be 1% anyway, there would be no big incentive
to attack much weaker players. You take a shot and if they warp, they're gone, but you did cost them
a bunch of turns. Which means weaker players could sustain dozens of attacks without losing significant
percentages of their resources, but could lose a lot of turns and wind up far from home or safe port.

9. The winner of a battle gets scrap recovery from all ships, their own and enemy's, destroyed in battle.
50% of ships cost and 50% of marines. Surplus marines are held in reserve in a separate group on
the mothership, just like workers are on the secret base or mins are on the mothership. When you
add marines to new ships, they are first drawn from the available pool until exhausted and you have
to spend credits hiring more. You can hire reserves and resupplying marines after battle is only done
from your ready reserves. When you scrap a ship, 100% of its marines go into the reserves. (There
are naturally material recycling losses, but marines can just disembark and odds are not many of them
will not fall the gangplank. And, I would like to be able to control how much of my cash on hand
can be used up on marines before I am willing just to sacrifice my ships and percentage of targeted
item rather than continue to resupply marines.)

10. As long as a player, defender or attacker, has at least one surviving ship to report in,  they get
a full battle report. Otherwise, simply a statement their fleet was wiped out in a battle at x location.

11. Motherships always warp away if their fleet is entirely destroyed in a system battle, even if their
side prevails in the overall battle. In PvP battles, the Mship warps away after losing a battle and being
plundered.

12. No more nebs. If you need to be AFK for an extended period, you park in the neutral zone.

13. Auto resupply of fleets after losing battles, just like resupplying marines, if that option is turned on
by the player and up to the percentage of mothership cash selected.

As weaker, protected area players got stronger/bolder, they would begin making border raids into the
wild regions, meaning to retreat back into the safe zone after flying some high value missions. But, with
auto attacks, if they happened to run  into more powerful non allied fleets, they would get warped deeper
into the region. Perhaps running into more hostile fleets and burning more hours and risking running out of
turns deep into hostile territory. And the stronger players/alliances would most likely tend to congregate
near the borders of the protected zone, making cross border raids a risky venture for weaker players.

The whole crux of this is the auto battles in the unprotected regions. You're playing whether you
are logged in or not. You will get battle reports and may have gained or lost things while you were
not logged in, but the odds of being seriously damaged would be fairly small. There would be far more
battles, but the loses to individual player's wealth would not be greatly diminished, even if they had
lost several battles since last logging in. You gain stuff (creds, mins, marines, from successfully defending
against attacks) so you may just as well have improved your standings as lost stuff while you were AFK.

While the changes would be extensive, a lot of the current issues would be addressed and the game
would be more varied and active, without forcing anyone to adopt a certain style of play. And it would
add a lot more random events. Any time you hop to a new system (without scanning it first)
you risk running into a more powerful enemy fleet and getting warped far away. Perhaps making it
impossible to quickly return to your alliance system, leaving both yourself and your alliance less well
protected. Any time you do a coordinated team attack on an enemy alliance system/quad, you leave
your own team's system quad undefended (or less well defended) and may end up all scattered all
over the universe and a long time before you could regroup to defend. Which adds new considerations
for the players to make as to how many of their turns need be held in reserve to provide warping and
returning to base after forced warps capability.

Now, I know a lot of the present day killers are going to say that this will reduce their chances of
PvP battle and force them so spend more time playing. Which will most likely be true in the short run.
But the main objectives are to increase the retention of new players and to add more variety and
randomness to the game. If successful, over time, there really will be far more players and the
chances of finding targets in the unprotected gals will increase. And, frankly, people who spend a
lot of time playing, should do better than insiders who know all the tricks and can currently beat
the pants off everyone while only playing a very limited amount of actual time. Those players do
deserve to do well, but not to the point of dominating the game and driving away newcomers.
And it will introduce a whole new aspect of team battles that can be had for the taking at any time
once an allied system/quad was located. The only way to control multiple quads would be to take
other alliances systems. The losers would simply regroup and rebuild somehwhere else. But the winners
would be forced to split their player fleets between the controlled quads and holding many would
reduce the chances of defending all and the shoe would soon be on the other foot. Or they would
be forced into making major investments in system fleets/base tech to attempt to hold them without
a lot of player fleets being present.

And it provides for all styles of play, no PvP, wars and SO on one combined system, rebuilding
and maintaining contact and cohesion within the entire user community. And, to further encourage
that, add a newspaper where everyone can read reports about major events (large team battles.)
And allow an alliance an extra ten members for every quad they control.

And of course there are many possible variations within the multi galaxy framework.
Perhaps the entry point to a galaxy is a council controlled base where you  can
safely warp in and do system scans from, so that your 1,000 turns aren't wasted or result in
instant annihilation or losing many more turns warping deep into the gal and away from the ext, and
weaker players could get in some high value missions without too much risk, at the cost of
spending ten extra turns for every planet visited for system scouting, whereas stronger players
can just fly them without scouting and let the chips fall where they may.

Finally, I do not claim any of this is deeply or well thought out and it is only offered as a banquet
of ideas for purposes of discussion.

But doesn't the 158% convert to 95%?
So the difference is really only 7%?

I still think my way has better overall balance, because it preserves some benefit from
a large investment in disrupt in all cases, but prevents it from overwhelming the basic
odds in any case. But the current (new) algorithm is definitely an improvement.

Don't really see how this changes much. The guys who figured out this exploit before it was fixed and have already run up their dispruptors to 40 (+80) will still be able to prey on players much smaller than they are with virtual certainty of success. Yes, it adds protection to very small players from very large ones, but the very large players gain nothing from attacking very small ones. The sweet spot is 5 - 10 times TP, because those are the targets that have something worth stealing and you still have the power to one shot them and have no worries about retals.

At two times FP, the cureent forumla gives 18 + 40 + S - D,
which in the case of +80D, gives -2% chance of warp.

At five times FP, the current forumla gives 18 + 100 + S - D,
which, in the case of +80D vs +20S, equals 58% chance.
Still pretty good odds of getting into a fight you can not lose.

A better algorithm for applying the bonuses (for attacker > defender) is:
warpChance = 18 + 20 * attackerPower / defenderPower/100;
warpChance =  warpChance + warpChance (stab -  disrup}

So, in the case of 100x (+40 Disrupt) attacking 50x (+10 Stab):
wC = 18 + 20 * 2/100 = 0.58  (ie: 58%)
wC = 0.58 + 0.58 (0.20 - 0.80) =  0.58 - 0.35 = 0.23 (ie:23% chance of warping)

In the case of a much larger attacker (100x/40d vs 10x/10s):
wC = 18 + 20 * 100/10 = 2.18  (ie: 218%)
wC = 2.18 + 2.18 (0.20 - 0.80) =  2.18 - 1.3 = 0.88  (ie:88% chance of warping)

Since the stronger player will most always have more disrup than defender stab.
the reverse situation is probably not really worth thinking about, but for completeness...

in the case of 100x (+20 D) attacking 50x (+40 S):
wC = 18 + 20 * 2/100 = 0.58  (ie: 58%)
wC = 0.58 + 0.58 (0.8 - 0.4) =  0.58 + 0.23 = 0.81 (ie:81%)

And basing it on FP rather than TP is a joke. Any big player can power down and still have
the cash to board a smaller player to death with virtual certainty of the target not warping.

But any way you slice it, it is closing the barn door after the horses have run off.
Those that capitalized on this programming misstep for the past month  have gained so
much, and the rest have lost so much, there is no competition and hence, no game.

The only solution is a game reset.

But even that will not bring back the dozens of players who become disgusted and left.
And since there is no way for newcomers to even get started , they soon quit as well.
This game is dead. (But making it so that no one with more than double your TP can attack
your stations would be a big step towards retaining newcomers. They will never catch the
top players, but at least they could play and enjoy the game.)

[removed some off topic remarks..Pi]