Mission Rework

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.

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 :yellow_heart:

Finally, a mission rework suggestion that doesn’t add tens of new mechanics out of scope of PMD

I especially like this Idea. Whenever anything revolves around the concept of “on dungeon completion” people Immediately think “but then you could just spam pebble cave”. Having only missions of the ranks that the dungeon you just completed are In Is a very simple but genius way of handling It actually. I think this combined with tweaks to alleviate the current meta around speedrunning would make for a healthier gameplay loop

I don’t see how It encourages group runs any further, unless It was like, there’s a higher chance If you complete a run with more people. It might create an ecosystem where new players are asking to be carried In later dungeons to get and complete better dungeons; which I think Is funny and would be nice for a change. Carrying new people Is just a fun part of the MMO experience

I think for missions to be relevant late game, i.e. when you already have the max benefits It allows, mission rewards would need to have something special yeah. For starters, dusts are supposed to be mission exclusive… Putting them willy nilly In dungeon end boxes has devalued them greatly. With how commonplace they are, what they give In addition to silks and family Items might seem trivial now. But they have the potential to be much more desirable

Imagine If like PMD, you needed a silk and dust to make one of the event token Items. If we had done this from the start, I think all these Items would be In a much better position. But the oversaturation of dusts, keys and silks may have rendered It too late to Implement something like this without extra steps

It’s just weird to think that silks are practically one to one with their Implementation In EoTDS; needing a key and opening the chamber In various dungeons, minus the box rng ( which I think Is good that It’s not guaranteed ). I’d only suggest any chambers be moved from early dungeons to later/harder ones, and remove dungeons having more than one chamber

After shiny hunting Phione I’ve come to grow a fondness for SFR. Call me crazy but aside from the fact you have to read It every time, I think the story Is pretty cute, I love that you have to physically go underwater and find the dungeon, and Central SFR Is one of the few actual challenge dungeons In this game. CSFR does have a sealed chamber, and as It Is now you would never get a blue silk there, you would get It from Southern Sea. But If It were only In CSFR, I can only Imagine how much more valuable It would be

I feel weekly events really just need to be deprecated. It was probably a good concept back then but when they aren’t live events It’s not as special and It’s more than ever something you only do for the Items, not to create memories with the community ( I miss when people would join the VC during live events… ). What can be done Is removing the association with an arbitrary timeframe. Just decide some day for some event and have that be that. Of course, If the main event token prizes were to be reworked and then removed from the event token shop, there would need to be an Incentive to participate In events that aren’t auctions or HCs. But I can’t Immediately think of anything that wouldn’t be unrealistic. Only thing that comes to mind are obviously cosmetic things; maybe put every hat/music Item In the shop so they can still be obtained outside of their events

But well, that was a lot of yapping unrelated to the post. My point I guess was, changing missions opens opportunities to change other elements as well, and that I think If at some point all these changes were collectively made, It would be an Improvement

If you have a chance of getting something from the end box by completing a mission from the dungeon anyway, at that point why have end boxes at all? And I mean this In an opportunist way; this could be worked with. Meaning, rolling for a mission with Z reward will more or less be equivalent to trying to get X Item from Y end box

If missions rewards become some kind of successor to end boxes though I think If you share a mission, It should not share the reward, only the points. For obvious balance reasons.

That plus, I’ve played PSMD and RTDX combined for like over 800 hours. And something from those games I wish PMU would Implement are the boxes. Yes we do already have the family Item boxes from EoTDS, and I think more could be better

Boxes are rarely at the end of dungeons akin to PMU, because the all boxes from these games contain the same pool of valuable stuff: TMs, stat boosters–which probably should never be In PMU, gold bars–another thing I think PMU would benefit from but that’s for a new topic at this point, gummis for rare qualities

However I can’t see a way to feasibly Implement them without overshadowing the family Item boxes, thus making getting the family Items you actually want even more annoying, without some “trade X amount of family Items for this one” kind of thing, which I do think would be the most Ideal solution by the way. Basically, anything that encourages actually engaging In the game or combat and not just bolting to the stairs within 0.000001 seconds, at least not all the time

This Is probably the only thing I explicitly disagree with for obvious reasons. Ideally, with the changes mentioned before that one, getting garbage missions shouldn’t be so detrimental as you and other players are getting more overall and your point gain Isn’t limited to who’s sharing missions or not

I’m neutral on this. I feel like 8’s pretty good, and unless Items getting sent to storage ever gets Implemented, needing to make bag space for rewards will be even worse lol. Maybe Instead of sending to storage an easier way would be to just let the player claim the reward later

The last thing I have thought to add on to this suggestion. Maybe In order to spawn another mission, you have to complete one, and discarding does not work. This could create a system where you have to visit other dungeons just for mission consistency. When you complete a mission, you could be guaranteed a mission either: of the same rank, or any rank, In a dungeon with missions In the same rank.
e.g.: You complete a D mission In Pebble Cave, depending on the chosen solution you would get a Happiness Lake D, or a Fruity Grotto C ( assuming FG also has Ds ). And additionally, maybe you have a chance or are guaranteed a completely random mission as well

So this would create a weird hierarchy of mission generation where you’re doing lower ones to eventually spawn higher ones. Simply for balance reasons Idk If you should be able to just consistently keep getting amazing missions. I’m only unsure cus we don’t know how any of this would work In practice, and how well It does will depend on whether speedrunning Is still meta or not. Like If you’re beating these dungeons snail pace then It probably doesn’t matter If you’re always getting good missions. But I also like the Idea of having an Incentive, however artificial, to go to other dungeons for once

3 Likes

Overall a fan of the idea, though I’d probably also add functional boards to the different towns.

As of now there’s only one place where you can actually access them, so adding that bit of quality of life would be the cherry on top.

If you wonder, here’s what I’m mixed on:

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.

It’s true that theese are techniclly riskier than a delivery or rescue, but I don’t think they should give a bonus given that a team rarely relies on all 4 members to function while also not being completely overkill.

The only time they can ever become a problem is if you were to be stacking too many of them for the same run, which would be entirely on the player.

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.

Here’s the thing with this proposal: By making the chance too high, you risk rendering endboxes obsolete, and by making it too low, you basically make it useless for the most part, an afterthought so to speak.

I think it’s better to just not have that chance in the first place, since it does give you a good incentive to actually run the dungeon to the end instead of instantly dipping out imo.

We should have the ability to enable/disable getting certain rank missions.

No, for balancing reasons. Specially since part of your suggestion is buffing the rewards.

More Mission slots

We already got more than enough if you ask me. 20 slots total, 10 being from your own job list, and another 10 from the board itself, which the hypothetical rework basically always keeps filled if you are actively playing the game.

2 Likes

I appreciate your responses, you have a lot of cool ideas and this is fun to brainstorm about. Gunna jump around a bit so I hope thats okay.

My idea was that running MJ, for example, gives each person who completes the dungeon one 5* mission with a certain % chance of getting a second 5* Mission. At the end of the dungeon you all run to the mission board. The 5* Mission Dungeons are:
MJ, Spectral Thicket, Inferno Volcano, and Shimmering Seabed

So with the 4 of you running to the end, lets say 2 of you got extra missions. That’s a total of 6 missions. Maybe 3 of those missions are for MJ, so you share your missions around with group you ran with and do it again. Then maybe at the end of that second MJ run, a bunch of the new missions are for Inferno Volcano. Now the group shares around IV missions and you go run that together. It encourages a gameplay loop where you run missions with your friends over and over again, sharing missions throughout the group and tackling different dungeons together while remaining in a similar skill level. It encourages grinding and farming together, rather than separately (where it can typically be done faster). This could also apply to something like Guild Events. My guild runs expeditions and events where we all run a specific dungeon looking for a specific thing. With a system like this, I could run a ‘Missions Expedition Night’ where we all run the same dungeon looking for missions to help boost our guild members’ explorer ranks.

Honestly that sounds great but I feel like we’re in too deep now like you mentioned. It’d be insane to revoke event token items from the event shop and turn them into something else.

I do think that the event token shop should be depreciated. There are way too many basically ‘essential’ meta items locked behind it, inserting a false sense of progression by being forced to wait.

Hm. I guess I was just trying to think of SOMETHING better that could be given as a mission reward. End Box loot was the first thing that came to mind as its dungeon-specific and usually has high tier reward items. A rare chance to get an extra valuable item feels less like “Why would I grind endbox if I can just grind mission rolls” and more like “Oh cool I rolled a rare mission!” as like, a reward for mission grinding. Kind of like how shiny Pokemon are a ‘reward’ for running dungeons and spawning more Pokemon.

I don’t think missions should become a successor to end boxes, specifically because I do not think you should HAVE to have a mission to get a box out of a dungeon. Dungeons should still have rewards in and of themselves, I think Missions should be bonuses on top of that for ‘going out of your way’ so-to-say.

I also mentioned a new economy around missions, and especially sharing Escort Missions for certain Pokemon/Eggs. I think that being able to share missions should remain the same with the same rewards when shared, at the very least with Escort Missions, since I mentioned the reward for those should be getting an egg of the Pokemon you escorted, or having them join your team directly. If rewards did not carry over, offering, “I have an escort mission for Scorbunny, does anyone want Scorbunny?” would no longer be something you could do.

(snipped for space)

As for your other box issues, I think that you could totally implement boxes that have TMs and other cool things in them, just make them different to the family item boxes. I kind of feel like they already exist in a way? Like the Deluxe Boxes that spawn in secret rooms. Sometimes the relic items feel like Gold Bars from the later series. I think if we had a trader that could convert Poke into certain Relic Items for a small fee, that would be cool. Idk what purpose it would have but it’d be kinda neat I guess.

(Context for ppl who haven’t read up: ‘This’ being disabling lower rank missions)

That’s fair. If running higher level dungeons makes you guaranteed to get a higher level mission, then the chance to get lower level missions should be fine and you’d have no reason to disable them.

This is actually the reason I suggested a cap on how many missions you can accept at once. Meaning that you could have a full list of 16 missions and 10 on the board, but you can only click ‘accept’ on a certain amount of them at once. (To balance with higher rewards, lets say like 4.) So even if you have 10 MJ missions, you can only click ‘accept’ on 4 of them at once, and if you try to click accept on another one it gives you the bad sound and says something like, “You have accepted too many missions! Cancel one of your accepted missions to accept a new one.” This means you cannot pile on god-tier rewards in one dungeon run. The only problem I could see with this is people running missions for points rather than for rewards and being annoyed that you can’t grind missions as effectively anymore, since before you could accept 10 missions and grind out the points for all of them extremely quickly, but with this you’d be maxxed to four.

Maybe something could be implemented where you could forego mission rewards for extra points? Or forego mission rewards to be able to accept more missions at once, allowing for the points grind to not absolutely suck because better rewards were implemented.

This is the biggest thing I have problems with.

What happens if someone doesn’t like any of their missions and deletes them all? How do you keep getting new missions if you have none that you want to do with this system?

I think getting random missions of the same rank as the dungeon you just did already incentivizes doing other dungeons like I mentioned above. Running MJ doesn’t only get you MJ missions unless you’ve only cleared MJ as a 5* dungeon. Out of the 5* Dungeons, you can get a missions from any of them assuming you’ve run them before.

I think having a cap on how many missions you can accept at once (I already mentioned this above, but) could also help with balancing so that people can’t just speedrun grind out missions super quickly and get amazing rewards.

I think there are also benefits to taking a dungeon slowly vs speedrunning it for items/poke/whatever. It ends up making ALL dungeons a relatively tolerable grind for your level, with scaling rewards based on your level, rather than making any one dungeon amazing. I think with a mission system like this, they could heavily nerf the spawn rates of Star Pieces/Comet Shards from Mt Moon, and instead make them incredibly common in the rewards for missions in that dungeon. Imagine getting 4 Mt Moon Missions and the rewards are Stardust/Star Pieces/Comet Shards, at the cost of having less of them spawn in the dungeon itself you are instead guaranteed them through missions and forced to run endbox instead of grinding out side path. (If you can’t tell, I hate the Mt.Moon poke grinding meta)

If we also make relic items relatively commonplace for Mission rewards in other dungeons, this could make ALL dungeons viable for grinding Poke (relative to your level, of course).

That’s fair, I just usually bring a full team of 4 when running with friends and it is always difficult to leave a mon behind for a mission. (I bring Altaria, my carry, Girafarig for BUP/Ally Switch, and Smeargle for Lunar). When running solo I could see it being overkill though.

I still do like the idea of getting rarer Pokemon from escort missions, though. Your response kind of feels like you read the first part of my idea surrounding escort missions and not the second.

I disagree. I don’t think “By making the chance too low you make it useless” is a fair argument. I could say the same thing about Shiny Pokemon- and people still hunt those. It’s more like a cool bonus for when it happens, and not something you should ever expect to happen, if that makes sense. Like finding a shiny. Or rolling a legendary character at 0 pity on a Gacha game.

I’ve seen this mentioned above as well and can agree at this point.

Yeah, that’s fair. I was also suggesting a limit on how many can be accepted at once vs how many can be held onto for later, but maybe having a total of 20 missions available to you at any given time would be enough with the proposed system.

=

My ideas definitely aren’t perfect but I think with some discussion and input we could polish them out and come out with a suggestion that would be really beneficial to the PMU community as a whole.

1 Like

this whole idea of the mission rework system is very intersting i would love to see something of this kinda implemente, that said there’s something that is bothering quite a bit. and that the supposedely making better for running with parties, i really do not see it.

in the exemple you provided there’s a massive flaw, half of the missions optianed are not for mj, and are instead all towards different dungeons,
if i got my missions and got 1IV and my friends got MJ missions that dosen’t spur me in running with friends again, the game seems like it’s actively telling to go home and run iv by myself,
because with 3 mj missions, which missions can only be shared once for balance porpuses i don’t think anyone will dare increase, it’s not a equal split for 4 poeple, if we where to keep 4 people party with 6 missions totals someone will be left with less missions, which is first of all cause arguments and discussions, which would at best slow down the time it takes to start up another run, it would second of all be way more efficient if i just leave them, cause they would still get 6 missions, more equally split 2 each person, but i would also be rolling another missions in another dungeon.

this is the opposite of encouranging partys, it’s encouraging to leave your friends because you are actively doing less missions each for staying togheter

1 Like

Hooooo… okay let’s see what the wall of text has in store…

I’d say the random chance mission should be same or higher rank. Because with same or lower, you get lucky to have worse missions. And that just feels wrong. Luck should give you better stuff, not worse.
…one or two ranks higher at best though. Again we want to prevent getting high end missions from Pebble Cave spamming and i’m on board with that. :wigglyjoy:
Could also make the chance for the random mission higher or lower depending on the dungeon. Number of floors/100 sounds good to me. The 99 floor dungeons of the endgame basically guarantee two missions per run while the early dungeons will very rarely give you more than one. (let’s just not mention TC’s way too many early exits, okay?)

Does it really? Each person still gets the same amount of missions, solo or no. Unless the group is already a super close friend-group, more than one run on the same team is rare and i don’t see how getting missions at the same time would make the players want to do multiple runs with the one group of mostly strangers. :umbreshrug:

Sure. :mewwave: Would help with the agonizing and long grind that DDD and DS bring along with helping sustain Doom Seed diets. Got nothing to say, i like it.

Nevermind i do have stuff to say. And that’s that i hope missions would be guaranteed to at least give you something (which it tells you) and afterwards it rolls for extra stuff, also telling you if the extra stuff is there. Like the Explorers missions with like “TM Focus Punch + ???” as the reward. You don’t know what the other thing is but it is there and (at least for me) that’s a good enough incentive to pick that mission. Wahoo gambling. :zoomtah:

It’s not like you always need all 4 team slots to do dungeons. Weather, status control and fighter are the needed roles, and they can easily be compressed into 2 or even 1 Pokemon.
Easier access to some of the least accessible mon is cool, though hopefully no Pokemon ends up mission exclusive for a long amount of time, thus most likely preventing shiny hunts for a long time… :nosnacc: Juuuuust a random thought.

Meanwhile Mt. Moon is my preferred Poke grinding spot due to also doubling as an exp farm and having multiple Kecleon shops, allowing me to sell more items than my (6 page) inventory would allow on the “more lucrative” dungeons…
I guess it’s just a matter of perspective. :umbreshrug:

I’m sure the following is a disappointing sight for many of us…


Being able to never experience it again is undeniably awesome. How would it go? Turn off missions from X rank downwards or a whole list of all the mission ranks as you tick or untick them as you’d please? I shudder to think how the spaghetti would handle the latter… Though it would make it easier for those who share low level missions to newer players.

The Job List screen does only take up half the screen so i can see it getting doubled. With the better missions and more slots, they might even be worth it past Guildmaster. Would still take a bit to get a very lucrative run set up, and that’s fine.
_

All in all, i like the idea, but i’m more concerned in the execution. And potential consequences of the rework, assuming the spaghetti can survive it, of course.

I suppose I was under the impression that others also run with friends they’ve made. Also I disagree that you get the same amount of missions if you run alone. Not all cases are going to be the same, especially if you ask in a specific way “I’m trying to grind missions, would anyone wanna help run me? I’m doing MJ first.” vs “Does anyone wanna run missions with me? I’m running MJ first.” The former gets you people who want to help, for 3-6 missions per run that they can give you. The latter encourages other people to join you who also want missions. Also in groups of friends,you typically would talk about that stuff during or beforehand especially if you’re in a vc. Kind of like how when you go into a dungeon and multiple people want the eggs in the dungeon and you communicate with your party about fairness.

In my experience I’ve never had anyone argue over much at all. It’s always been like “Oh I don’t need this mission as much” or “Let this person have it I’ll run another time.” or “I’ll just get this thing on my next run.” The most I could see is taking a few moments to agree on the mission order priority. Are we ALL trying to rank up? Is there someone here who’s just along for the ride and doesn’t particularly care about the missions? Is someone shiny hunting? Who needs the thing the most?

I guess with higher rewards it could cause more arguments, I just don’t really see it happening very frequently with the kind of community that’s been established on PMU. From what I’ve seen, we don’t really tolerate people who are going to start petty arguments over things, most everyone understands its a game and not a huge deal, and I rarely see selfish individuals among our community.

It’s a very “give and receive” type of place, we tend to support each other and the kind of time-eating discussion you’re talking about I’ve rarely ever seen come up.

I suppose the point I was also bringing up with that is, if everybody but 1 person gets MJ missions… You share with the person who didn’t get any MJ missions and try to make it as even as possible. Then next run you see what dungeon got the most missions and run that dungeon while sharing around the accumulated missions evenly.

Over time you accumulate missions and cycle through dungeons. For example, using a random number generator from 1-4 (one number for each 5* mission dungeon) and assuming that 6 missions is the average amount of missions that people receive. I got:
1, 2, 1, 4, 2, 4

1, 2 and 4 have an even number of missions so you run either of those and save your missions for the other ones. The people who rolled the missions share them with the people who didn’t, everybody gets a mission. Could the people who rolled the missions share them with each other and then run alone? Yeah, sure. I guess. If you wanna split up your group that’s totally valid. In fact, if they’re not the same people, the people who got 2 missions of the other dungeons could group up as well. You’re still in a group, though.

After running, lets say dungeon 1, your missions are still: 2, 4, 2, 4
Everybody rolls missions after that dungeon, so you get 6 more missions as a collective, rolling on random.org I got:
3, 4, 2, 3, 1, 4

So now there are 4 missions for dungeon 4, sharing them all around, a group of 4 ould end up with 2 missions for Dungeon 4 each.
You then have: 2, 2, 3, 2, 3, 1, and roll more missions from completing Dungeon 4.
I got:
2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1
We now, as a group, have 5 missions for dungeon 2. Everyone gets 2 dungeon 2 missions and one person gets 3.

This is the group gameplay loop which is more missions per person per dungeon than grinding it yourself, because you are not receiving any missions from anybody, nor are you sharing your own missions.

I know my statistics aren’t entirely accurate because there are going to be runs where each person only gets 1 mission and they’re all for different dungeons, but at that point you decide if you wanna stay a group and keep grinding or if you wanna go to your different dungeons and reconvene at the end or if you wanna just stop for now. My point is that on your average run, you generally average out enough missions for each person to get one. At least when it comes to 5* Missions. With 6* Missions there are 7 dungeons, one of them being HT which is kind of a bust. But 7* Missions only have TC and Dynamo Sands, which means that that grind is kind of nuts because if you run with 4 people and get 6 missions, half of them are likely to be from either dungeon, meaning you can literally grind out the same dungeon over and over again.

I would support only getting missions from the same dungeon, if it didn’t mean that Mt.Moon became even more lucrative. So if common mission rewards for Mt.Moon were what gave you the comet shards/star fragments instead of the dungeon itself, or at the very least if the dungeon itself heavily reduced the amount of those it spawned, then maybe the dungeon ONLY dropping missions of the same dungeon would be a good idea.

(Going through Diego’s response next! Just need a moment ^^ I’m happy to see all of the discussion on this post, though.)

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Btw, in my responses I take snippets of what the person above me has said. For future readers, if you’re just joining the convo I heavily encourage reading the entire post of the people I quote because I will be responding to things within the same area as the point they made, even if not directly quoted.

I think I agree here, that it would help the gameplay loop if you got higher missions rather than lower. A lot of people just delete lower missions anyway. I guess I was thinking that it might be too overpowered to get a higher rank mission from a lower dungeon but if there’s a cap on it then it wouldn’t be that bad.

I sort-of like the idea that more floors = higher chance of a 2nd mission, but I also disagree with it because I think the newbie grind should be tolerable. Maybe there should be a minimum of like a 25% chance of an extra mission.

I responded to a lot of this in my response to superscemo in this section:

I guess if it was a group of strangers it wouldn’t be much of an incentive, but I think it would encourage making friends and running with people more often.

I would agree with this, but it would require that missions send your items directly to storage if you have a full inventory, because people already get salty about the full inventory thing, imagine what happens when it goes: “You received… TM Focus Punch… and… A Mystery Egg! But your inventory was full…”

Which would require a storage system revamp or at the very least interfacing with the storage system. I think having multiple items as a reward also gets complicated, and as much as I’d love it, I think asking for a full revamp is brave in and of itself, much less requiring interaction with other parts of the PMU Spaghetticode or a full revamp of that code as well. At that point might as well make PMU 8.

I agree and also disagree here. Usually when running with friends (which I like to think this system encourages) I have Altaria for my C9, my main runner, then Girafarig (B-Up Ally Switch) and Smeargle (Lunar Dance) and while Girafarig and Smeargle are totally optional and not neccessary, I like having them, and not having them is definitely a detriment to my dungeon runs. (I don’t usually run dungeons solo, either)

Definitely is, lol. My point was mainly that a lot of people (including myself) find the Mt.Moon grind awful and having other lucrative options would be great.

Yes, I just deleted a list like that earlier, tried to find people who wanted them, but found nobody.

I would assume its something rudimentary like “Disable all missions S-Rank and Below”. But at the same time, if the “Complete dungeon, get missions of that dungeon’s rank or higher” is implemented, then there is no filling your list with bad missions unless you’re doing low-rank dungeons. It already solves the problem by just not giving you trash missions unless you’re running trash dungeons, in which case you just run to the board afterward and delete them.

Setting up the extremely lucrative run would take a moment, I also suggested maybe having a cap to how many missions one can accept at once as like, a balance thing since if missions become MASSIVELY more lucrative then being able to do like 5+ of them in one run becomes kind of insane. But you also aren’t likely to do 5+ of them in one run because you’re also running the dungeon to get more missions so you might as well do your missions while you’re there, meaning the “hyper lucrative run” isn’t a thing unless you grind for it on purpose and put off missions until the final run.

There would definitely be a lot to work out and a beta period needed. I think it could make really good use of the server select, though. There could be a beta you could sign up to with the mission rework and you log onto the beta test server and help work out bugs before an official release.

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but. why would people want to do missions togheter?
i’m really not feeling it, wouldn’t still just be better doing the run by yourself and then share and ask for missions out of it?

in all my game time, playing with other people has always dramatically slowed down the speed at which i can beat a dungeon, i can beat a dungeon solo in a quarter of the time it takes in a group run.

without speaking of how hard it feels to get multiple people to join you to play, i would ask in a guild server and get no response for a whole day.
people don’t share timezones, they work at different times and sometimes they just don’t feel like playing the game, so having multiple people show fast interest in joining a grinding run seems really hard.

so isn’t just better to just. ask for missions and then do em by yourself? like even in the exemple you provided where there is the 4 friends online.
why not just. each run the dungeon alone. re meet up at the common respawn point share, and they go off on your own again.
especially since your not limited by the single dungeon missions, you can shove all the missions of the same dungeon to a single person, and that person goes to run that dungeon!

especially if this gets added. you can store like 20 dynamo missions from asking around and since you can only do like 4 at once that means your set for 5 runs all by yourself without any need for sharing. and possibly, 6 runs if you don’t get another dungeon, and then afterwards you just repeat the cycle of just going to town ask for more dynamo missions stack em up and then go off alone again.

again this system really dosen’t encourage playing with other people, you just meet up with your friends share your missions and then go grind on your own. it’s much better and efficient,
and you may say well, “who cares about being efficient, you can choose not to be” which is true. but it dosen’t stop the fact it is less efficient and thus discouraging"

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Wait. Ruben. Even Better,

What if each town gets its own board?

so we have x4 the number of missions spawning.

i think that’s nice.

aside from that, i basicaIIy compIeteIy agree with deIeca’s opinion on this.

I guess I have the totally opposite take on that. For me, playing together is enjoyable. I find doing dungeon runs alone kind of unfun because what I like about PMU is that it is multiplayer mystery dungeon. I prefer to run dungeons with other people, hop in vc, hang out and chat while we’re doing the dungeon It’s also the biggest benefit of having or being in a larger guild, usually someone is around to play with you. The great thing is that this can still work with parallel play if you prefer it that way. You can talk to friends, all agree to do missions in a certain star ranking separately of each other, meet up at the board, share missions and go your separate ways again and still have the same benefits as if you ran them all together.

If you don’t like running dungeons with other people because you can do them faster alone, then like… Idk if there’s ever going to be a solution for ‘incentivizing’ multiplayer for your playstyle. Multiplayer is never going to be as fast as doing it alone.

Technically, I suppose it WOULD be more efficient to shove all of x dungeon missions on y person and then be co-operative that way, but I like running dungeons with other people, so Idk if I’d wanna do it that way.

Sharing with your friends is still sort-of a way of being co-operative, though. You’re sharing with your friends still. If you want to be the most efficient, gameplay involving being in the same dungeon as your friends is never going to be the most efficient when you’re totally maxed out because people don’t get to the stairs all at the same time, or are looking for certain things on certain floors, or don’t have 4x speed + mobile scarf, or whatever. But for people who don’t have boosted speed and mobile scarf, running with someone who has 4x speed, mobile scarf, and beatup is likely going to be faster than running alone.