TheArisen, on 11 July 2015 - 04:25 PM, said:
I made a thread awhile back talking about how to implement pve.
http://mwomercs.com/...campaign-ideas/
Basically, make & sell individual campaigns (Davion, Liao, Clan Wolf, etc) with a tutorial with a tutorial mini campaign (2-3 training sessions/missions)
Tutorial/training should be free (with one-time rewards, but infinitely replayable).
Campaigns should be multi-mission contracts you can accept by putting up the contract fee, all of the different houses should have campaigns available. (and clans because we've already got mercenaries joining clans for CW so that part of lore is already out the window - perhaps give bonus rewards if you've taken a CW contract for a clan/house, but don't force the player to take one to accept a pve mission). Upon completion, you get paid the contract reward amount, if you fail or the time limit expires (generally 24 hours or even a week, not something silly like 4 missions in 40 minutes), your fee is forfeit and you only get the reward from the individual missions you've completed. A daily/weekly limit on contracts should be in place, though the limit should increase with premium accounts, and can be bypassed altogether with MC on a per-contract basis (what would be the amount for this? 15? 60? I'm thinking 10-20 per mission, so the actual MC fee would be different based on how many missions it has).
There should also be two types of contracts: daily, and weekly. Weekly has a longer time limit, more missions and far better rewards, but you can only attempt these once a week. Daily is just that: 24 hour time limit, maybe 3-4 missions each and less rewards. More than one daily should be available per faction as well. Possibly getting faction camo/color/cockpit rewards from weekly contracts would be a neat addition.
*ALWAYS* have a 'free' mode available that has randomly generated missions and rewards (simple things like 2 medium lasers and 60k c-bills, have varying rarities for the rewards so you just might rarely be able to pick up a free AC20 or something from a randomly generated mission). Pay a small fee to accept the random mission, these are not faction specific and have no connection to anything (like the PvP modes), they're just there to grind endlessly for an admittedly smaller amount of income than PvP. Maybe force public groups if you're not a premium player? Premium should have some type of incentive beyond "get more shinies!". That goes for PvP as well.
Some missions should require specific mech chassis (from ones you own - If a mission needs one you don't have, and it's not provided to you by the mission, it simply won't show up in the list). Some should provide the required mechs (for that one mission of course). Others should have weight restrictions, and some would be totally free, perhaps have a 'recommended' weight class where going above it has no effect, and going below gives a small bonus to the rewards.
Also, a community mission editor would be amazing, and practically required if you REALLY want to add more replay value for literally no cost whatsoever (aside from the initial investment in the toolset). Have the devs pick a weekly regular, and weekly premium mission from the community. Regular missions give some small amount of c-bills to the maker for every time somebody completes it successfully, premium missions would give 5 MC (it would cost say 15 to start it) and some c-bills. Throw some GXP in there for both just for the hell of it. Heck, maybe even require premium time on your account at the time the selection is made for your mission to be considered for the premium weekly mission.
Edited by Kassatsu, 11 July 2015 - 04:53 PM.