Originally theorized by Kirk as “mission tokens”, the classic message in a bottle–henceforth referred to as bottled message–could be an excellent way to resolve the non-interactive timegate PMU’s slow, entirely automatic mission generation creates.
The idea is fairly simple: You use a bottled message item, and if your job list isn’t full, it gives you a new mission and consumes the item. The rank of the mission would be fixed according to the specific bottle, which would dependent on where the bottled message was obtained.
The bottled message would be right at home in most dungeon’s endboxes, or as a possible boss drop in those that don’t have endboxes–it’s excellent filler, which we are in dire need of in many loot pools. As mentioned above, the mission rank can be tied to the specific bottled message, so that ones obtained from say, Sunny Hillside, would probably be E and D rank, whereas ones from the endboxes of SF Garden would likely be 6* or higher.
Now, this sort of item would also probably benefit from an overhaul to mission rewards as well, but I think that’s a subject for another thread. As for whether these should be tradeable/droppable, I’m not as sure; I am leaning towards them being locked to the player who obtains them in order to encourage farming them yourself to progress in explorer rank–as opposed to just being fed them by a player at Guildmaster rank who no longer needs any of theirs.