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Crossposted from offtopic to avoid "tl;dr"'s. Mission listings has been marked as a wished-for feature not so long ago.

Mission listings

The game, based on your class, fills a list of objective you can fullfill. In Allegiance, a scout would get a list like "find alephs", "Escort <bomber 1>", "Escort <bomber 2>", "Defend <base>", "Defend <miner>", "Defend <miner>", "Defend <miner>", "Defend <miner>", "Probe and deprobe"; a bomber would get "Attack <base>", "Attack <base>", "Attack <base>", and so on. But the fewer are displayed the better.

You cycle through objective with one key (ET:QW uses 'n') and you always have onscreen a list of the people that are doing that -- if you're alone doing that, either you know what you're doing or you figure out you're doing something dumb. The team screens (TAB in ETQW, I'd say both team screens in Alleg -- why do you need a full row of money per member in the compact view again?) display who's on what objective so that the team know who's doing what.

There is too a "wings" system in ET:QW (Enter TN) but it's less frequently used.

People are encouraged to always have the correct objective selected thanks to the reward system.

Reward system

As you might have understood by now, you are rewarded XP for everything you accomplish: kill somebody? XP! Repair something? XP! Defend successfully? XP! Stay alive long enough? XP! Fullfill your objective? Bonus XP!

There are different XP scores for each class but at the end they all sum together forming a total XP which determines your rank. On online games the total XP is persistant, so you should be really able to go through all of the 38 ranks, from Private to Army Commander Uber Stacker or something. This means you can get classifications by class but also rough estimates of the level of usefulness of each player to the team.

Sure, in Allegiance it's harder to implement, but it'd be surely interesting.

Hey, attaching a ranking system to this would finally yield us the long-sought but as-yet-unachieved Ultimate Ranking Category: Following Commander's Orders Rank. Everybody would go for a system like that!

Really, I have no idea how hard this would be to implement, but I love the idea. Yes, it's one more window/interface to get used to, but there could be great rewards from this!

Wow... a new idea for scoring... its been a while
Loving the self selected missions part.
some downsides:
_"might" encourage going off and doing your own thing
_"might" make stacking easier(being scored only on the mission you have chosen would allow whores could select 'defend <miner>' and proceed into enemy territory, hunt miner, receive no points for their accomplishment, and thwart any attempt at automated balancing as they would have an artificially deflated rank)
_Possesses many of the implementation nightmares that a score based system does, but they are minimized by the short duration and "one at a time" nature of objectives,
the good:
_the interface could be a clone of the vc menu(its layered design seems perfect lists with "redundant" entries)
_better than h/elo

suggestions
_forget about the "reward system", sure score based systems would be best but implementation is next to impossible(I think you would be looking at 2 months(as in 4.5 periods of 2 weeks) of fairly constant development)
_give commander orders increased value
_let the com disable certain objectives(categories?)[by setting reward to 0?]
_ensure that the ratings are core specific

1. You don't get points for ONLY the objective you're on. You still get points, but you don't get the bonus for fullfilling it. ET:QW has bonuses in the 2-10 XP range (which can like double the reward).
2. You don't really have to implement both of Mission listings and Scoring. You can really have one of them. Still, the scoring system encourages a proper use of the objectives, otherwise you wouldn't want to delay your operations the few secs that change your objective takes.
3. The scoring system, in ET:QW, is connected to a reward system that gives you some goodies after you reach certain scores in certain areas of the game. This'd be unfleasible to implement in Alleg, but I'm stating this for completeness.

I like the idea of the mission lsiting as a command tool. The commander says:

"I have 8 people listed here as miner offense and none down for probing, I need two probers so X and Y change your mission status..."

I comments about such a system, especially if there is going to be a metric as to how often pilots complete tasks assigned to them by the comm, we might as well get rid of chat, and just beef up the drone code and make this a comm versus comm game. This is of course taking things to the extreme but I do not care for the direction it would take us.

God forbid that Alleg might not be seen as a FPS but as a teamwork game where you actually listen to the commander /wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink.gif" />

1. Grim, don't derail the thread. There's a thread in offtopic if you want to discuss that game. This is a thread on a UI change proposal and a ranking system proposal.
2) Dog: dumbass ways to check objective fullfilment.

Destroy target: target dies.
Defend target: sector is clear of enemy ships that can damage targets. OR Target is still alive after x minutes.
Escort target: target's objective is fullfilled.
The list goes trivially on.

Plus:

Probing points: a probe spots unspotted (+0.1 for every five seconds, -20% if probe is spotted, +500% if it spots antibase ships, +1000% a base or an aleph), a probe rescues a friendly pilot (+0.8), etc. Spotting a probe (+0.4), destroying a probe (+0.6).
Pods: getting rescued or docking (+1 points, scaling down to 0 with time), running out of O2 (-2), picking up a pod (+1), podkilling (-2 scaling up to +3 with killbonus)
Ship sensors: spotting stuff (same scores as probe with a -50% to 100% modifier based on sensor strenght)

I could go on, but I'm making up there values on the go and DataMiner teaches us Alleg's source would require heavy changes to allow such a system.

I'd rather like having the missions menu. It allows:

1) the comm to see at a glance who and how many are doing what
2) helps pilots sticking to tasks (miner d anyone? :-D)
3) helps situational awareness: if you're alone doing a task either you know what you're doing or you're not doing what you should (probing during base under attack).
4) makes the compact team view actually useful (why using half of it to display "$: 0"? Most of other info would make more sense there.)

Again, if this thread is tl;dr and you don't bother reading just don't bother posting. There is a funny thread in rants use that /wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink.gif" />

Disclaimer: here's how I translated Dog's message. I might have misunderstood that, but here's what I understood.

Dogbones wrote:QUOTE (Dogbones @ Oct 3 2007, 11:19 PM) My comment about such a system is that, especially if we encourage/force players to follow commanders' tasks), we might as well get rid of chat, and just turn Allegiance in a regular FPS game.

Your point is that such a system would force players to follow commander's tasks? I fail to see how.

Or, taking things to extreme, would you rather make it harder for the comms to be follown? And then we might as remove the commander and turn this in a all vs all space dogfighting game (if that sounds any better than FPS)?




Oh, well, I surely got it wrong. Would you bother rephrasing? /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />

Grim was being sarcastic. And yes you misread my post completely.

I never mentioned FPS. When I said comm versus comm I meant RTS

I also said "if there is going to be a metric as to how often pilots complete tasks assigned to them by the comm". I then stretched this argument a bit down the extreme side of things where points would be heavily based on whether or not a player followed a comms 'assignment' or not. No they would not be 'forced' too but part of the "fun" and "headache" of Allegiance is the human pilots and this system rubs me the wrong way in that regard.

There is a way to do almost everything you mentioned minus the points/rewards (but if the below is followed/effective, the reward comms form the points your team gets for winning).

I've seen this attempted and fail miserably (in pickup games).Alpha wing = attack minersBeta wing = scoutCharlie wing = constructor defenseDelta wing = miner defenseetcProblem is it never seems to work. Now we couldRename the wings to "Con defense" "Miner defense" "Miner offense" "Probing team"Edit: there are already wings named 'attack' 'defend' 'scout', etc...Give the com the ability to assign any player to a given wing (in addition to letting them choose one)Filter F6 (or provide another summary screen) so it is easier to see who is on what wingI'd be just a tad hesitant to try and implement such a system only to have it not used.

Now if points are added, and the com tells me to go scout but I see a miner under attack (and the assigned miner defense team is no where in sight) and I defend it, I am going to get penalized for that. Now the com could 'reassign' me to that task noticing the same situation, but that would require a micromanaging com and I really don't see that much more benefit to 'assigning me the task' as opposed to 'Dog get your @#$#@ over to the miners now'. I can also see players that prefer offense even dropping if 'assigned' miner defense all game or comms booting players assigned to 'probing' if they launch in an int.

I am not against this idea whole heartedly. I think most would agree giving the commander better organization tools is a good thing, I'm just not sure task lists and points are the way to do it.