Player Power: Planetside 2's Player Missions
Planetside 2's missions are pretty general. They're mostly focused around the push and pull of attack and defense at specific spots on the map. That's fine for just getting teams to fight each other, but it doesn't take advantage of Auraxis. All those valleys and mountains, all the connecting roads, all that space can feel unused. While there's probably an argument to be made for letting the game generate smaller missions for people to take part in away from the larger territory control meta-game, SOE are doing it differently: soon they'll allowing players to request support via player-generated missions, mini-alerts that will create hotspots on the map for players to drop into.
Not everyone will be able to set-up missions, as it requires the proper certs in the Squad Leader section. Here's how SOE envisions how they'll make it worthwhile for the player.
Air Strikes at location
XP bonus to ground kills/assists while in aircraft at this location.
Greatly increased gunner XP bonus (for Lib Pilots)
Greatly increased XP bonus for Sunderer kills.Deployment to location
Large XP increase to deploy-bonuses.
Large XP increase to AMS spawn bonuses.
XP bonus for repairs to any deployment vehicle (Galaxy & Sunderer)
XP bonus to squad-deploy bonuses
Increased weight on Instant-action values
This is the sort of micro-strategy that usually happens on Teamspeak between friends. The sort of call for help that comes in a panicked burst of chat over the mic, but in this case it comes with a reward. Alongside general requests for more infantry, players will also be able to call for air-strikes, air superiority, tank support and anti-tank counter-measures.
I'm only a dirty casual, so I can't see the full scope of the changes. If there are any objections that make sense let me know. I would imagine it would need some form of cooldown, so you can't spam, but it does seem like a really smart way to capture the minute-to-minute changes of the battle. There's no footage of a mission running, so instead I've dropped in a video of a chap talking about his game's ini settings. Why? Because I love the PC, that's why.
Player missions should arrive in PS2 in August.