Your first two ideas make sense, but I don't see much I can add to them.
However, I do have some things to say about your comment that an agent should receive rewards that are proportional to their rank. I am against this, infact, I should think that a player should be rewarded more for completing certain missions at lower ranks than is normal. What I'm saying is that if you have to be rank 4-5 to accept a mission, then rank 4 player should be rewarded slightly more than the rank 5 player for successful completion of the mission. Imagine a TERMINAL (I believe the highest rank in the game, but my memory is bad these days) ranked agent completing the delete a file mission. Obviously for such a skilled player such a mission is trivial, and thus the reward should go down as rank increases.
This does not mean that I am against rewarding players for achieving higher ranks. To my knowledge, the current ranking system is little more than for show than for anything else. One possible alternative to the idea of increasing the cash reward for higher ranked agents is to implement a simple "milestone" system.
This system would work as follows :
- when a player reaches a certain rank he is sent an email by uplink corp
- this email rewards the player for achieving the rank, possible rewards
could be :
o - new hardware, software, combination of both
o - monetary reward, necromancer change (I'll explain this later)
o - secret hardware (only accessible for achieving a specific
milestone, not available anywhere else in the game)
o - etc, etc.
These milestones would be hardcoded into the game. Since I forget how many ranks there are in uplink, let me just assume there are 20 ranks in all.
Milestones would be achievable at the certain ranks :
Rank 20 (lowest) -> Rank 19 (player completed the tutorial)
Rank 11 -> Rank 10 (player has shown decent level of skill)
Rank 6 -> Rank 5 (player has shown increasing skill)
Rank 2 -> Rank 1 (player has maxed out rank)
This system is flexible, allowing for many types of awards to be given. To explain the necromancer change, uplink would simply ask the player
"Congratulations Agent <name>, for achieving the rank of <rank>.
We have been monitoring your progress for some time, and the higher
council presiding at Uplink have decided to reward you for your
perseverance and hard work.
In light of this, we present you with the following choice. We are aware
of your current necromancer rating, but are you aware that we
have the ability to "adjust" your rating either up or down at your
discretion.
Simply reply to this email with this in the body with, "Up" or "Down".
Once again congratulations for your achievement!
I'll continue my comments in another post later.
|