I’m here to talk about one of the biggest offenders of PMU’s spaghetti code:
Missions
They don’t give them to you frequently enough, the points system has been broken for years (missions do not display the correct amount of points), there’s no way to disable certain rank missions after getting to higher ranks, the rewards are kind of garbage on most of them.
So what I’m suggesting is not an edit of the current code, it is a total rework of all of the coding involving missions, rebuilding the system from the ground up, with these key points in mind:
1: It should be easier/faster to obtain missions, unrelated to real-life timers or the changing of time cycles in-game. The grind should be consistent and not have to rely on other people or waiting around.
2: Missions should be a decent source of income in direct poke and/or reward actually decent items. There should be a reason to do them after you reach Guildmaster rank and they should be a tolerable grind.
3: You should be able to disable lower rank missions after reaching higher ranks.
So… With those three core ideas in mind, my revamp looks like this:
1: Missions are given to you after the completion of a dungeon, rather than anything to do with a real-life timer.
The way I can see this working is heavily dependent on a later point- what rank of missions you have enabled/disabled.
In order to prevent cheesing of the system, you will only receive high rank missions after defeating high rank dungeons. For example, you will not get DDD missions by completing Pebble Cave. If you have low-rank missions turned off, and complete Pebble Cave, you will not get any missions.
The way I’m proposing this missions system should work is that after beating, say, Mysterious Jungle, you are guaranteed to get one 5* Mission, as MJ is a 5* Mission Dungeon. You then have a 50% chance to receive a second 5* rank or lower Mission.
A missions system like this encourages the grinding loop by giving you relevant missions to your level as you continue to grind. These missions, in turn, give you more reason to return to the dungeon you just did, or dungeons within similar difficulty ranges, to loop the grind again.
This also encourages team-running dungeons to grind missions, as if you bring a team of four, you are all guaranteed get 1 mission, + a 50% chance each of getting another mission. At the end of your dungeon run, you can all go the mission board and check what missions you got, then run another dungeon together as a group, solidifying an actually decent multiplayer-focused gameplay loop.
2: Missions should give you better rewards when you do them.
Not all current mission rewards are terrible. Some of them are great, even, like Silver Keys and some evo items. But I think they could afford to be better.
Missions done in the Tanren Underground should reward Ekop instead of Poke. This should carry over to ALL places that have different forms of currency.
DDD Missions should give Royal Gems, and DS missions should give Rupi.
Mission rewards should work on a %-chance based system, with rare chances for extremely good items to be in your mission rewards, while also having worse items being more likely.
To use SF as an example, maybe it has a 20% chance to reward you with a reviver herb, with various other items scattered about the potential reward table, and a 1% chance to reward you with an extra Deluxe Box from the end of the dungeon. Maybe a 0.1% chance of rewarding you with the ‘best’ item from that endbox. So for SF it’d be a Miracle Chest.
Keep in mind that 0.1% is 1/1000, and you’re far more likely to get a Miracle Chest from the box at the end of the dungeon than you are to hit that chance, it’s just a fun idea to encourage more mission rolling. Maybe even like shiny-hunting but for Rare Item missions.
This could also change based on the best reward for the dungeon, so for SF maybe its 0.1%, but maybe its 1% in MJ for the best item in the end box, (Big Nugget) and a 5% chance for an extra end box.
These would obviously need to be playtested and balanced, so those are mostly just placeholder numbers as a proof of concept.
Escort Missions should be especially more rewarding as they force you to use one of your 4 very important team slots to hold onto a Pokemon that will leave you once you reach the destination. They are also extremely low level for the dungeons they are brought into so they are not particularly useful, either.
I think escort missions should be hard-coded to have higher value Pokemon (ones that are hard to get like starters, other low-spawn-chance/Secret Room/End Room mons like Cutiefly/Scyther/Dusk/Midnight Lycanroc/etc, or HC-Exclusive mons) and give you an egg of the Pokemon that requested the Escort (or just have it join your team permanently in cases of Lycanrocs). This is also canon to PMD as many Missions would have ??? as a reward which usually meant that Pokemon joining your rescue team or receiving an egg from that Pokemon.
If changes to rewards like these are implemented, I see no need in increasing the direct amount of Poke that missions give you as they end up giving you valuable items in the PMU community. We may end up with an actual economy surrounding missions again- I.E. People paying others for missions that involve higher tier rewards, or otherwise making friends through the sharing of missions. “I have a Scorbunny escort mission, is anybody looking for a Scorbunny? Would love to run the mission together as well.”
One thing I have heard brought up about missions having higher-tier rewards is that it would make some grinds (like Mt.Moon) even more lucrative than they already are and decrease the value of Poke even more.
This is a fair point, but Mt.Moon is also a high-level, near intolerable grind that is brain rotting and makes me want to rip my hair out. I know many others don’t grind Mt.Moon specifically for that reason. Missions are fun, interactable, and SHOULD be actively incentivizing people to run more dungeons. As they are now, they’re not doing that. Missions being more rewarding and more lucrative would encourage people to run other dungeons.
Suddenly, running MJ for exp with the chance of getting an extra end box from a mission is a really good incentivizer to actually grind that Pokemon you’d been meaning to for the past month.
3: We should have the ability to enable/disable getting certain rank missions.
Put plainly, getting a list full of E-S rank missions is disappointing, discouraging, and demoralizing not to mention annoying when you’re Master*** and grinding for Guildmaster Rank. A good 95% of my missions from Master*** to Guildmaster rank came from other people I am 100% sure of that. At the very least, we should get the option to turn off getting letter rank missions after reaching Master***. At most, I would love to see the option to individually disable certain rank or even certain dungeon missions from appearing, though that might be more difficult to code and more overpowered when you can just disable all missions except for ones from Mt. Moon. So maybe just being able to disable letter rank missions would be good.
Alternatively, I could see a system like in Point 1, but changed to where you only receive missions from the dungeon you just completed when completing a dungeon. But that would also make the Mt.Moon grind more OP so I’m not sure where to go with that.
4: More Mission slots.
I mentioned it earlier, and its a rather simple request, but we should be able to flip through a few pages of mission slots and build them up. Explorers of Sky lets you have 8, but I think we should be able to have more, maybe with a limit to how many we can do at once (so be able to hold 16 missions, but only be able to ‘accept’ 8 missions at a time). I wouldn’t want it to be too overpowered, especially with an upgrade to mission rewards.
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To conclude, missions should be a viable grind for income in PMU. They should be infinitely grindable, with scaling rewards for dungeon difficulty and the rewards present in them. They should provide a solid, fun gameplay loop, and something to do with friends. A full rework would also allow for fixes to missions in Sky Fortress and in Tanren Chambers, as well as fixes to the point display being incorrect. I would love to see the way we get missions be reworked, even if the reward increase doesn’t happen.
If you agree or disagree with any of my points, or have additions you think would fit in a rework, I would love to see engagement in the replies since I know the forums are kind of dead