This year has seen a major explosion in mission rewards. Was this a technical limitation that we overcame, a philosophy change in development, or was something else at play?
TL;DRMission rewards were held back by technical limitations, namely freight elevators, Server Meshing and the mission refactor, and the intent is to move beyond UEC and extend rewards to other missions beyond Wikelo.
There were a few things that kind of came into this. Firstly, we needed freight elevators. That was the big thing, because it's either we do a bunch of temporary throwaway work to get your rewards, or we wait and we do it properly the first time. And the big thing for this was we needed the freight elevator system. And then we got the freight elevator system. And then the next big thing was Server Meshing. So it was all about the mission refactor. But once we got the mission refactor done, it finally enabled us to take the time to actually make these mission rewards. So it was a technical limitation. We was waiting. We always wanted to do mission rewards. Way back when the mission feature team was still around, it was always something we talked about: we want to try and get away from just giving people UEC, because UEC can just help you buy things, but you want to see some other stuff. You want to have a gun. So it was sort of a pushing forward and an initiative to get that, but also because we knew we was going to do a year of content. What we wanted to try and do as well was have a way of incentivizing that content, not just in the aspect of, hey, it's cool, I want to play it, but hey, it's cool, and while I'm playing it, I can gather things for Wikelo that later benefit me. Or I'm doing it, I found it, I picked it up, and then later on I found that Wikelo wants it. So that's where mission rewards come from. It's not going to stay with just Wikelo. We're going to keep pushing it out. We already have with both Foxwell and Headhunters. There's a lot of missions. They give out scrip, obviously, and they give it directly to your home location. That's something we'll see for other missions going forward.