[2020] Alert Rewards, Missions, and You.

Oh, hello again. Thought I'd chime in before the weekend to allay some concerns.

There's obviously a lot of blowback regarding the alert reward removal, and it's totally understandable at this stage. Alert currency rewards were added in 2017 and increased a fair amount over the years that followed, so it's become the norm for a lot of players. That said, it does puts us into kind of a strange place with Missions reward-wise.

One of the goals with Missions was to not only provide more rewards to players in ways they have easy access to per session (especially for new players,) but also to have better control over our economy overall. We don't want to be in a state where we can't justify the creation of new content because of veterans able to instantly hoover it up with easy access to certs (I've seen your cert balances,) and we can't shower veterans with ISO because that's one of the better cert sinks we have access to.

Alert rewards definitely have issues, like not having a real participation metric, which leads to AFKing in Warpgates; and new players don't receive any real benefits from it given their lower session lengths. But that's where you're seeing Missions (and sliding-scale admission rates for Campaigns) come in.

As a system, Missions are great for new and non-veteran players to shore up their Certs/ISO (we remove these from the reward pool if the player has loads of it already,) and with Alerts already catering to the more dedicated players, we should be alright reinstating most of those rewards. A7 will not be coming back, as it's too easy to cap out on and there aren't many things to buy; and some of the flat cert bonuses have already been replaced with experience, so that'll be taken into consideration as well. Regarding mission rewards in general, we're going to make some observations over the weekend to see where the tuning actually needs to be done to this end. Some of that could be in better chances at certain types of rewards, or better mission spreads so that there are more opportunities to earn the things you're looking to earn.

Ultimately we want to do what's best for the long-term health of the game, and we'll be making the changes I mention above early next week.

Thanks everyone.

P.S. Also look forward to a dev letter early next week talking about what we've learned so far from Campaigns/Missions/This Update in general, and how that'll apply to the future.

P.P.S. We will be running a double experience for all event starting now and through this weekend to not only celebrate the update, but also as a consolation for the loss of alert rewards.