Mission Changes

Current Problem

At the moment, decent missions are quite difficult to obtain. With a random change of obtaining missions each time cycle (0-1 for Dawn/Dusk, 0-2 for Day/Night), it’s incredibly difficult to hunt for and do missions. It’s also difficult when the mission board fills up the 8 slots, excluding the chance to get good missions and be frozen there for a while. And for those who don’t have friends who will help with sending missions, it can be a tedious task getting a rank up. This is why I’ll recommend a new mission setup.
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Highly Recommended Changes

Increase Mission Page Count Increase Mission Appearance Rate FIX JAILBREAK TUNNEL
This one’s a simple suggestion. At the moment, we have 1 page of 8 slots for missions. However, we could improve the missions by having 5 pages of 8 slots, akin to Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity’s mission list. This would apply to both the mission board and the job list. It’s difficult to obtain good missions, so why not have more frequency with the missions? As explained, the missions have a low rate appearance. With having 5 pages of 8 slots, it would benefit increasing the rate when missions appear as well! Seriously. Fix Jailbreak Tunnel’s issues with being the most dominant mission on the mission board list.

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Miscellaneous Suggestions

Random Mission Finds Special Missions for Higher Ranked Users Change Mission Rank System
Remember those bottles with a mission inside in EoS? Why not hide missions in random places on the overworld in Exbel, Winden, Tanren, and Archford with a random mission each 24 hours? That way, players can search around the overworld and see what staff has worked on in the process! It could make sense to have the mission attached to that specific region, but it could also just be a random mission as well.

Alternatively (or additionally), why not have mission requests from the Jail Warden or from random NPCs? It would give a bit more exploration and allow users to hunt down missions more often.|In GtI, there were special missions where the user could battle against a group of outlaws or even a legendary Pokémon. In EoS, there were special missions where you would receive special requests for exploring a new dungeon. Why not have special missions for people who have Diamond Rank and above? These missions could be of your own design, but just something special that higher-ranked users could do to get even further Exploration Points.|At the moment, we’re on EoS’s Ranking System. It’s a bit outdated according to some users, so I thought I throw in this portion. Newer users have trouble in these beginning stages getting to Gold Rank. The mission EP yield is low, and the mission rate is slow. It would take several weeks until they can get to Gold Rank on their own. That’s why I recommend changing to GtI’s Rank System. It’s a lot more balanced and a more steady progression than EoS’s Rank System.|

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These are just some suggestions. Feel free to leave some feedback!

Missions have been one of the core mechanics of PMD right since the first installment of the series, and quite appropriately they’re tied up with many other important features in PMU like storage space, the swap shop, houses, legendaries and even guilds. Yet I think there’s a lot of untapped potential in missions that PMU hasn’t been able to exploit so far.

I think the ideas you’ve presented are pretty interesting! Here’s a few of my own suggestions and views on your post:

Having ranked up an alt from scratch fairly recently, I think these are valid concerns but I don’t completely agree with them. The current structure of PMU missions makes it so that the grind to Master is a fairly long journey, the hardest of which (with respect to the player’s level) is probably the rank up to Gold taking over 5 times than it’s predecessor. It’s only when late game * difficulty and up dungeon missions are available that the ranking really picks up pace. It made me question as well, if this rigorous grind was really necessary? And weird as it may sound there is actually a subtle advantage of having such a system, that being making sure you explore everything. If I immediately landed on gold, as a new player I’d probably skip through half of the Exbel dungeons which honestly deserve a visit too. Of course the dungeon difficulties do make sure one doesn’t zoom past a region but even that can get so far. Moreover it is this slow grind which drives players to party up, join guilds, exchange missions and in general find more and better dungeons. Before making a guild, a player gets to experience what it feels like to be a part of the guild and learn how stuff works. It’s all part of the experience and important for newer players in an MMO setting.

Having 5 pages on the job board added with an increased rate in missions would end up making things a little too easy. Both for older and newer players, it’s important that the system is not devalued because ranking up is meant to be one of the long term goals of a player, in my opinion. Although, I definitely think that the structure of ranks could be spaced out better, according to the points one is expected to get at what stage of the game. For example, Silver Rank could take a little more points while Gold is brought down a bit because that’s when you’re mostly hanging out in Exbel with a bit of Winden (E ~ C rank missions). Oh, and of course bringing down Gold would mean promoting mapping to a degree, because that’s when you can expand your house. Many old players especially could benefit from that when making alts solely for mapping.

Anyway, my point is I don’t think it’s necessary to buff the mission spawning rate by the forementioned, but rather balance the ranking system according to the needs of PMU, mainly within the lower ranks, i.e, Silver, Gold, Diamond, Super and vicinity such that there are no dry gaps. It currently uses the EoS system, and as you mentioned in your last point it would probably be better to use the GTI format but that too has huge gaps in the later ranks and pushes Master to 20k, which is a bit too much.

When it comes to increasing the number of pages of your own job list I don’t think it’s very necessary because the list is reusable, once you’re done with a dungeon mission simply accept the next with the free space you just made. There’s no cooldowns or anything involved there and let’s be real, when was the last time you had to do more than 8 missions in a single dungeon? Although I do think something like one extra page dedicated to only shared missions would be a great addition. This could be a special page awarded for hitting bronze rank and would enable a player to receive missions from others, and that too up to 8. This would give one more space to work with and easily segregate sendable missions from the ones you received. Maybe these two pages could be simply identified as “shareable” and “non-shareable” missions, the naming of which would make more sense as you read the second part of my post below.

Yeah Jailbreak Tunnel loves clogging up mission boards for some reason, would be nice if it could be looked into.

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The good part

Apologies if this post is going too long, but I’m really passionate about this second part!

I think whatever you’ve written under this subheading are really neat ideas, though I’d like to expand upon them with a few of my inputs.
These random “bottled missions” could actually be items rather than being straight out jobs. Of course, they will be readable and you’ll know exactly what the mission is going to be for but they will only be converted into missions once you get them opened or say “verified” by a Pelliper NPC much like Xatu opening boxes. This would enable them to be even available in the market and house shops. These could probably spawn after one Dawn - Night cycle (12 hours) or maybe depend across various spots, like in spot A of Archford a bottled mission has a chance of spawning at Dawn but at spot B of Archford it can only spawn at Night, and so on. PMU also has many shorelines where these could fit well.

I think these bottled missions themselves should be the “special missions”. Though I’d say anyone can pick them, but one can only use/“open” i.e, accept them at higher ranks such as Diamond. This way newer players could save the ones they find while exploring the overworld and even sell these bottled missions to the older ones.
Would be cool to unlock new dungeons via these missions as you suggested, but I think these unlocked dungeons should be nothing more than an “extra” or “privileged” dungeons. Therefore nobody really misses out on anything. Such dungeons would not really be a main dungeon that you will have permanent access to post mission, but rather a place you can only visit to do the mission. To counter people exploiting the dungeon, on exiting the dungeon without completing the mission it could be auto-deleted and considered failed. Hence you get just one shot at it.

As for what exactly these bottled missions will give in return, it could be a good amount of explorer points (1k+), and really good drops according to which privileged dungeon you visit. Just like PMD had apple woods, a good place to farm apples, one of the privileged dungeons could have a generous amount of big apples of various types, a gummi dungeon, one full of Max Ethers/Elixirs, Reviver items and even one with a 100% chance of containing a random Fossil in the end box. These are just few examples, the possibilities are endless! Obviously, the better reward dungeons could be rare to get while the common ones still make for great restock opportunities to old and new players alike.

Quests
Receiving missions from NPC’s that you mentioned in your post would be another great feature and could serve as the game’s way of telling a more coherent story. Also there could be daily quests equivalent like in other MMO’s from the Jailbreak Warden as you said. Quests could be one way to enable a few new “mission only” dungeons, since everyone is free to get quests and nobody misses out. These would definitely be nice to see in the future if possible!

In fact, there could be a quest that unlocks mission boards in other regions too. Though I’ve seen this suggestion fly around before, nobody could come to a clear conclusion whether the mission boards in the other regions should get one mission for their respective region per time change or share the same missions regardless of where they’re placed. The latter will of course be more balanced and convenient, since (1) If each board only gets its region exclusive mission, SF and other late game missions will become exponentially easier to get (do the math), which may be hard to balance, (2) It’s much more convenient to stay in one town and get your missions instead of flying all over every time change. However this needs much more consideration and I’d love to hear if anyone has a few thoughts on this.
Additionally, this quest to unlock boards in various regions could be the excuse as to why the bottled missions started appearing. They were lost during transport across various regions, a more convincing story can be thought out of course. This certain quest could be the one received on hitting the rank required for unlocking the bottled missions, and the NPC’s associated with them.

Summary of bottled missions

Considering the various ideas put forth after introducing these bottled missions above and a few more that popped up in my head, here’s a summary to describe their properties in a nutshell :

  • These will have a chance of appearing randomly in the overworld in various fixed spots at particular times probably unique to the spot.
  • These can be picked by anyone, but only be opened/deciphered by NPC’s who are unlocked by quests received on a particular rank.
  • The item can be freely dropped and traded, however only some of the missions will be shareable out of these.
  • They could appear in various forms which have predefined names and lead to the same dungeons, so the players eventually learn what leads where by just the name of the item. For example : “Ancient Bottle [Special Job]”, “Cracked Bottle [Special Job]”, “Charred Scroll [Special Job]”, “Parchment Airplane [Special Job]”, etc. where Ancient Bottle leads to a dungeon full of apples, while Charred Scroll is the dungeon full of fossil pokemon, with a random fossil in the end box. Of course, since these will be missions the clients and other details can be randomized each time.
  • Rewards will be a good amount of explorer points (1k+) and the dungeon itself offering a unique reward in terms of drops, endboxes or even recruits.


Possible Issues that could arise

  • Since they will be spawning in the overworld, it needs to be made sure they don’t keep reappearing on a map reset like in the case of overworld berries and mushrooms.
  • It should prevent exploiting by auto-deletion if one exits the dungeon without completing the mission.

None of these ideas are set in stone, and they’re all open for discussion! This is just a detailed outline of how I imagined it.

Wooah I might have overdone it there with this lengthy post, apologies for that but the ideas just kept coming.

All in all, pretty interesting suggestions you brought forward shadow, parts of which if fleshed out I hope are implemented in the future. There’s still a lot of room for PMU to expand upon when it comes to the concept of missions, which could make for some fun mechanics.

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Your ideas are pretty good and i think i may have a solution that would incorporate most of your points:
basically put a mission board into 1-2 more regions which would:
-increase missions count
-could help keep easy missions in early regions and the more rare missions in the later regions
-have different frequencies for the boards such as exbels board stays the same but the better/hard missions boards in winden for example would have 2 time cycles ensuring that the missions still stay relitavely rare
-having them in different regions helps with your exploring point
-give other regions some love <3
Hopefully that would be something you agree with and if it gets enough support maybe it could become a reality :)

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Guys, do you have any of the above developed?