Feels like sometimes it takes forever for people to join an Expedition. Sometimes literally forever, as in I start an expedition and literally zero people get dropped in, which inevitably leads to mission failure because the bots are uuuuuuusssssseeeeeeeleeeeeeeeeessss but that’s a different set of issues. Though you could at least make capture objectives count them when they’re nearby so that their presence doesn’t slow these things way down. Or maybe rather speed these things up based on how many bots there are so they go a bit faster for me no matter where the bots have wandered off to. But anyway this post is about finding people to join games.
I had the thought, what if the Quick Play button could also put people into any Expeditions that are currently going on? But then I thought, wait, what if some people do not like Expeditions? A conundrum.
So here’s a proposal about having a menu to customize how your Quick Play button works. Could possibly be an entirely new Omni-Quickplay Button separate from the usual Quick Play buttons, but if not it would probably be just a side button next to the usual one to bring up a settings menu. The main idea is that all quick play buttons can put people into all game modes, with a menu to customize which activities you do or do not want to be thrown into when you hit quick play.
The menu would contain the following items:
Difficulty
- Uprising Difficulty
- Malice Difficulty
- Heresy Difficulty
- Damnation Difficulty
- Auric Difficulty
Game Modes
- Standard Missions
- Campaign Missions
- Operations (two is better than one, but we could still use a bunch more of these for variety)
- Special Assignments (currently the only Special Assignment is the Karnak Twins but I assume there will be more in the future)
- Mortis Trials
- Expeditions
- Havoc (possibly. I don’t know much about how Havoc teams work.)
Mutators
- Scriptures
- Grimoires
- Maelstrom
- Low Intensity
- High Intensity
- Shock Troop Gauntlet
- Sniper Gauntlet
- Hunting Grounds
- Ventilation Purge
- Power Supply Interruption
- Pox Gas
- Special Event (which includes whatever event is going on at the moment, so you don’t have to keep coming back to this menu to turn it on or off every time a new event starts or ends.)
(Any other Mutators that come about would also get added here.)
Mission Types
- Strike
- Raid
- Disruption
- Espionage
- Investigation
- Repair
- Assassination
(THEORETICALLY these level distinctions could actually be relevant at some point, and not just to people looking to complete Penances. Until then though, these could probably be left out to save some space.)
Each and every item of the above lists would have a selectable Ranking:
- Override
- High Priority
- Standard Priority
- Exclude
How This Affects What The Quick Play Button Does:
When you click the Quick Play button, whatever mysterious automated game finder machine that lurks in the shadows beyond the veil will first check for any available missions that include things you’ve ranked Override, and choose randomly among those. Other decision making criteria may come into play after narrowing it down to that initial list (I dunno what else is going on under the hood of the matchmaker, like does it check stuff like how long it’s been since you played a specific mission or mutator? Maybe it should do that, if it doesn’t). If it finds nothing marked Override, then it moves on to check for things ranked either High Priority or Standard Priority, and selects something randomly among all of those available missions, with things marked High Priority weighted higher than Standard.
So: you might get something from your Standard list, but you’ll usually be given things you’ve set to High Priority, and you’ll always get things you’ve set to Override provided the things you’ve set to Override are actually available.
Exclusion is for things that you actually dislike, and never want to do. If you set something to Exclude, the game finder will never put you in missions of that type or with that property. Though obviously, the more things you Exclude, the more likely it is that it will create a new lobby for you instead of finding an existing lobby or in-progress game to send you to, and the longer it’ll take to do it.
So you could, for example, set any missions you need to do to complete a Penance or Melk assignment as Override, and everything else as Standard Priority.
Or, you could set most things to High Priority, and set those few things that you don’t mind doing once in a while but aren’t that wild about to Standard, and not set anything to Override.
Or, you could set Uprising, Damnation, and Auric to Exclude, and leave everything else untouched because you’re cool with doing whatever as long as it’s in the middle difficulty area.
Or maybe the only thing you change is set Grimoires to Exclude because you’re tired of asking people to not pick them up.
If you want to focus on Expeditions you can set them to Override. If you want to focus on Expeditions but don’t want to do ONLY Expeditions for hours and hours, you can set them to High Priority and other stuff to Standard Priority.
Everything would be Standard Priority by default, so everything would be weighted equally if the player doesn’t customize anything. It would probably also default to only allow the highest difficulty currently unlocked for the character you’ve selected.
There are a lot of individual items on this proposed menu, but if it’s a basic grid, all the mission types and elements down one side, and the four priority settings across the top, it could be a simple and intuitive toolbar that can be accessed and changed with only a few clicks, without the need for each item to have its own drop down menu.
Ideally, this menu would also have customization Loadout slots just like your inventory, so you can save a few different configurations for how you want your mission randomizer to work. Maybe some days you want to focus on mid difficulty Expeditions, but other days you want to do nothing but hard mutator jobs. It would be a pain to have to keep adjusting the whole menu every time you wanted to switch things up. These loadouts would be selectable from the menu, and also from any mission terminal, like right next to the Quick Play button itself, so you can switch between them any time you’re about to start a game.
With pre-made teams, things would get a bit more complicated, but not on the user’s end. One option is to just combine everybody’s rankings together, so everyone’s Exclusion lists get lumped into one. That way nobody on the team gets put into a mission they hate doing. Overrides could be similarly all put onto one list (the Exclusion setting would override the Override setting, ironically) but it might be better to just disable everybody’s Override lists when you’re on a team and choose Quick Play. Or rather, it sets everybody’s Override items to High Priority instead, so they’re weighted more, but the mission pool isn’t limited to only Override things.
And of course, none of this replaces or even affects the regular mission terminals. If you want to go do something specific, you can still just, like, go do that. Even if you’ve set your quick play button to Exclude Mortis Trials you can still go do a Mortis Trial by walking over and giving Sef a ring.
