At present, mission objectives are marked with an exclamation point which makes it easier to see what items or ships are critical to mission success. But this often isn’t enough to avoid confusion.
Take for example the mission ‘Lucifer’. I was supposed to escort a transport ship safely through Ice Pits to the Cobalt Mines gate. The transport, however, refused to spawn with its escorts until I approached its starting gate which was not indicated with a waypoint or any other special indicator.
Another example would be the beginning ‘tutorial’ missions where the player has to find the lone ‘pirate scout’ hanging out in the station system and eliminate them. The mission description usually has a hazy reference to a structure or asteroid field, but doesn’t provide a waypoint. As the station security ships usually kill these low-level scouts within seconds of them spawning, it can be very confusing to intercept the ship if you don’t already know where it will spawn.
So, I would like to suggest three things to help the common masses.
- Place waypoints on the HUD (similar to the waypoints that mark beacons) for mission objective areas so there is less guess work on where the player needs to fly on the map.
- Make mission critical markers (the gold exclamation points) visible on the HUD at any range, similar to how the Captain marker shows up on the HUD during Combat Recon.
- Lastly, to avoid annoying players with a cluttered HUD, make optional mission markers only show up on the HUD if the player accepts said mission in the TAB menu.
While transports are one of the easiest things to find ( just track them through their exit and entry points, which are almost usually warpgates), I agree with this suggestion. A lot of mission critical objects/targets are a headache to find without having souped up sensor range (the probe in Scrapyard), and can still be hard to find even with sensor range buffs (specific ships marked for elimination in zones with high hostile NPC ship density).
The problem is exacerbated when the player doesn’t even know what the mission item they’re looking for looks like. and basically has to fly around looking for a “!”.
Absolutely. Spending half an hour searching in high-danger sectors for a single ship is not how I want to play.
Although I share your frustration at not being able to find objective I have to disagree. Putting a big red X an a map discourages exploration. It also removes the challenge. It’s not that there may not be a better way to accomplish some of these missions, it just seems this isn’t the best answer. I just don’t think having it spoon fed to us is going to make it more fun.
I think this should be mission related.
Ok to mark the warp gate where convoy will spawn and the convoy during travel. (At any distance)
Not OK to mark bombs and minerals. Or ships you should hunt down.
I don’t know about station/beacons/generators.
Perhaps an indication of general area, instead of specific place, would be better. Say that’s where the objective “was last spotted” and make that marker within, say 3000m of the objective, but visible at any range.