Citizens,
We've finally released the new missions system, introducing our first agent / contract provider: Duke. We're sorry it took so long, we wanted to make sure everything was as good as it could possibly be.
To unlock Duke, you must go to the missions page (on the sidebar) and speak with Anonymous. Anonymous is unlocked at level 5.
Contracts
Contracts are like mini-missions. You'll be asked to complete fairly simple randomly generated tasks that utilize already existing game mechanics. Duke currently provides 67 separate contracts of which most are repeatable, we'll also constantly be adding new ones based on feedback and suggestions.
Every agent we add will have a different theme. Duke's contracts are almost entirely focused around attacking (a sensible starting point), so most of the tasks will be somewhat similar--although receiving the same contract with the same task and target more than once is very rare.
Duke will provide one contract per day, at midnight. You can have up to three available or in-progress contracts at a time.
Standing
As you successfully complete contracts for Duke, you will gain standing. You can lose standing by failing or declining contracts. By successfully completing many contracts, the difficulty level, rewards and amount of contracts available will begin to rise.
Difficulty
Upon first meeting Duke, everyone will start on Easy difficulty. The targets and challenges you face will be very simple and the rewards will be low - this will change dramatically as difficulty increases. In contrast, some Expert contracts may be impossible to complete without assistance from others, but they'll provide on average 16x higher money rewards and 5x mission credit rewards.
You can increase the difficulty of contracts he provides by increasing your standing with him. There are 5 levels of difficulty: Easy, Medium, Hard, Very hard and Expert. Each tier dramatically increases the money and mission credit reward, and will unlock more contracts that were previously unavailable.
Before you can unlock a new difficulty level, Duke will provide a special contract that you must complete. By completing these special contracts, future contracts will have a chance to spawn at a higher difficulty. Some specific contracts have set difficulty levels, so you may sometimes receive lower difficulty contracts than you're expecting.
Mission credits
The mission credits panel (seen at the bottom of the missions page) is where you can spend your mission credits. Mission credits are a new currency given when missions and contracts are completed.
Six random rewards will spawn here at a time. When one is purchased, it will be replaced by another one. Every unpurchased reward will be replaced by a new one every 7 days.
We understand that the rewards may appear expensive at first due to the amount of mission credits received at lower difficulties. We also want the special rewards to actually be special - by keeping their prices high. We'll certainly be re-evaluating the mission credit gains and reward costs in the future however - nothing is set in stone.
Special ammunition
Special ammunition is now available and has a chance of spawning as mission rewards. This ammunition is not intended for constant daily use, but rather for important attacks when you tactically need a power or accuracy advantage.
Hollow point - Damage is increased but armor penetration is decreased
Tracer - Accuracy is increased
Piercing - Armor penetration is increased
Incendiary - Damage is increased
Hollow point and tracer ammunition is the cheapest, followed by piercing, with incendiary being the most expensive.
To use special ammunition, you can visit your ammo locker and set the specific type as priority by clicking it. It will then be used during every attack and defend until priority is removed (by clicking it again) or all of the ammunition is used up.
Future rewards
The mission reward system will mainly be used for providing users with things that are generally not available elsewhere, things that cannot be traded or purchased. Weapon attachments will be the next to appear here when they are ready. If you're not interested in special ammunition, there will certainly be something there that you strongly desire at some point.
Future missions / contracts
We have five other future agents lined up including an endurance challenge style agent, a courier agent and a weapons specialist. Now that the mission system's core is complete, it will be very easy for us to add new agents and contracts.
We made it a priority to start with randomly generated contracts (rather than fully fledged missions) because we can produce lots of them in a repeatable format which provides infinite gameplay rather than single one-off experiences. That being said - we're very excited about adding actual missions in the future.
We hope you are all happy with how the missions system has turned out. Please be sure to keep at it, we found it took beta testers a good few days to really get a feel for it.
The contracts that Duke provides are actually pretty diverse, but may feel a bit samey at the earlier difficulty levels. Remember that Duke is just the first agent, he exists to provide attacking related contracts - we're saving other contract types for future agents.
Thanks.