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[AoshimaMichio]

Don't forget there was missions that paid a lot of tokens for person. For example:

M1: Faith 12, Milno 13
M2: Mason 13
M3: Bishop 21
M6: Milno 17, Travis 13
M7: Miyamoto 18
M9B: Miyamoto 14, Vichislav 13, Simus 12, Denzel 11, Flint 13.

See? It's easy to get tokens as long as you do your job and don't fuck up. Fucking up is easy to do, but still. Tokens have always been easy to get.

[Nikitian]

Well, considering that five tokens is no longer absolute minimum pay for surviving a mission (even completely botched)... yeah. Also, I would not say that it's anywhere "usual" amount being 10; let's take the last batch, for one. M17 paid 6 tokens for the mission; anything over that was just the spoils of war - and M17 was to be considered one of the least botched missions, practically perfectly accomplished. M16? Again, ~6 tokens per person - which was probably to be 5 were it not for a death. M18? Well, this one varied wildly in pay; some people did not get paid at all, some only very little, and the top participants were paid whooping 9 tokens. And see those "three dead men", whose "...pay would be 9 tokens combined"? That gives the perspective of what is the current baseline for "average" performance.

Thus, these days it would take 10 (give or take a couple) average missions or 5 exceptionally good ones (see the above on Feyri's and Morul's payment in M18) to reach 50 tokens - without spending any of that on any additional equipment, which would severely limit the character's usefulness. Now, I must admit that supposedly black-ops have a higher rate of pay on average, and by their perfect scoreboard so far one could claim that it is even easier to earn tokens there, but then it'd take a character dedicated to black-op missions to earn tokens that fast without straining the limits of possible, and they'd might have little incentive to buy the Avatar in the end.

Also, I would like to note that the statistics provided by Aoshima are all prior to Assault on Hephaestus and formation of ARM. The pay simply ain't no good these days! ((And that one was a year-long mission, if I got it correctly, and it was a "double-long" one. The pay should be "halved" and considered for two separate missions; even the level-up came twice for it, IIRC.))

So, all in all, while I agree that making them cost 50 tokens would make them even more exceptional, I would still argue that it would simply put them outright out of the realm of realistically possible. Plus it would leave too large a gap between "equipment tiers".
So, my regular mantra: please don't fix what isn't broken!
((I might find it bearable if it turned out something like 35 tokens. But at that point it might as well be negligible of a difference to necessitate all the problems with that change.))

[Radio Controlled]

Yo Radio, should I just make Iveso and the gunner bots shoot at the regrowing fungi or what?

I'd say consult Morul in game, he's running the perimeter defense now, but I wouldn't let the gunnerbots shoot, just put them into scanning mode and let someeone without a usable weapon look at the feed. Shooting with bullets at growing fungus is just a waste of ammo, but if the planet sends something to attack us they can engage. You could use the spektr on wide angle to help hold off the fungus though.

@ nik: remember that one can sell of pretty much all of his equipment on buying the avatar, since you get quite some stuff for free. ans said stuff is quality stuff!

[Harry Baldman]

Making the Avatar of War cost 50 tokens would be a pretty good way to make sure nobody else ever buys one, I agree. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, naturally. As it is, it's on the lower end of the token/utility ratios. A valuable thing to bear in mind is probably that nobody's likely to get the tokens to pay for one, considering the player turnover these days and the respective proficiencies and play styles of the long-term players. Flint could, maybe. Lars as well. But I don't think anyone else getting one even while theoretically having the tokens required is plausible.

As for high token payouts in relation to the tasks accomplished, only people that occur to me recently are Yttra from the cultist mission, who got 8 tokens pretty much for doing a good job medicating her teammates and staying put, and Chief and Dubley in M18 getting 7 for deciding not to bother with the mission objective and go do less dangerous, more interesting things. Maybe Feyri getting 9 for waking up at the end of the mission to ferry Morul around. And examples from missions before Hephaestus can safely be discounted, as the game worked a little differently back then.

Of course, it all depends on if there's going to be looting missions in our collective future, ones that have lots of critical loot that gives a bunch of tokens or just one, indivisible item of prized loot. M16 could have been one, had circumstances not worked out like they did.

[Comrade P.]

M19 has some potential for looting. And it is mission of key importance, so they'll probably get increased pay by default. So people there are up to some nice payout I think.

[Devastator]

Not including loot seems silly, really, you still get those tokens after all.  That made m17 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 10, 10, 10, and 10 tokens.

[Radio Controlled]

Not including loot seems silly, really, you still get those tokens after all.  That made m17 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 10, 10, 10, and 10 tokens.

And we worked for those tokens! That mission was as close to perfect as we've ever had one, so I'd say we dang well earned them.

[Devastator]

Eh.  Just have 80% of the team do nothing during diplo, get Steve to take out the failure chance from orbit, (which was smart, mind you, but he used it like two weeks previous), followed by a dozen turns of weapons-free murder against defenceless "hostiles".  I do remember you complaining about not making clean kills of three battlesuits in one round with your +3 amp and perfect decomp.

Not a trivial mission, but hardly challenging, really.

[Nikitian]

Well, personally, I'd say it was a well-accomplished mission which accidentally took not too much effort. And then had a "bonus coins level", luckily.

And as for loot, well, not all missions are against UWM, and even then we got lucky that there was little of that life-locked equipment we encountered in Battle for Hephaestus. Between that and the original purpose of HMRC which we still carry out (visiting nightmarish hellzones and retrieving alien can openers), I'd say mission with lots of usable (salvageable, sellable) loot is a rare lucky one; and without the loot the pay would have been just "above average" of 6 tokens per person, as I mentioned before.

Actually, I'm rather a bit concerned about M20 here; sure, the person or two to retrieve the brain might be showered in tokens, as might be those directly contributing to them finding it and digging it out, but as for others I wouldn't be surprised if the payment was "okay" at best on average (with maybe a few other people perhaps standing out to "above average"). I really would like to be mistaken on that, but it appears too close to the Hephaestus missions parameters (in size and force composition), and as you know there were far too many people for not nearly enough big token pool, even with looting and all.

[Lenglon]

Eh.  Just have 80% of the team do nothing during diplo, get Steve to take out the failure chance from orbit, (which was smart, mind you, but he used it like two weeks previous), followed by a dozen turns of weapons-free murder against defenceless "hostiles".  I do remember you complaining about not making clean kills of three battlesuits in one round with your +3 amp and perfect decomp.

Not a trivial mission, but hardly challenging, really.

it wasn't challenging because we approached it seriously and with a plan. we spread out, prioritized threats, supported each other, and made it into a weapons-free-murder. lets say that the battlesuit depot had been ignored long enough to get them online? or if early on I hadn't had a specific "defend teammates against rockets" action when they opened fire with rocket launchers? or if rennen hadn't come to the rescue when someone got pinned down?

or what about if, during the diplo, our "doing nothing" people had instead been making speech rolls instead?

seriously, that was a perfect mission because we handled it appropriately. the payout from it was about as high as we can hope to get on missions without fuckups + exemplary anti-fuckup people. the way for one person to get a ton of tokens is for others to mess up and said person to handle it.

[Radio Controlled]

Eh.  Just have 80% of the team do nothing during diplo, get Steve to take out the failure chance from orbit, (which was smart, mind you, but he used it like two weeks previous), followed by a dozen turns of weapons-free murder against defenceless "hostiles".  I do remember you complaining about not making clean kills of three battlesuits in one round with your +3 amp and perfect decomp.

Not a trivial mission, but hardly challenging, really.

I have it from pw that the mission wasn't supposed to have gone that well, he expected us to fail at some point or other. The base assault was a little tacked on cause we didn't trigger the failure !fun! stuff.

@nik: it'll depend on how the token distribution will go. It isn't exactly standardized yet. Maybe a base pay based on how well we did they mission, and some bonus tokens we can divide ourselves.

[Devastator]

Eh.  Just have 80% of the team do nothing during diplo, get Steve to take out the failure chance from orbit, (which was smart, mind you, but he used it like two weeks previous), followed by a dozen turns of weapons-free murder against defenceless "hostiles".  I do remember you complaining about not making clean kills of three battlesuits in one round with your +3 amp and perfect decomp.

Not a trivial mission, but hardly challenging, really.

it wasn't challenging because we approached it seriously and with a plan. we spread out, prioritized threats, supported each other, and made it into a weapons-free-murder. lets say that the battlesuit depot had been ignored long enough to get them online? or if early on I hadn't had a specific "defend teammates against rockets" action when they opened fire with rocket launchers? or if rennen hadn't come to the rescue when someone got pinned down?

or what about if, during the diplo, our "doing nothing" people had instead been making speech rolls instead?

seriously, that was a perfect mission because we handled it appropriately. the payout from it was about as high as we can hope to get on missions without fuckups + exemplary anti-fuckup people. the way for one person to get a ton of tokens is for others to mess up and said person to handle it.

Let me know when you do everything right, and end up with dead characters anyway.  That's when you have a challenging mission.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Let me know when you do everything right, and end up with dead characters anyway.  That's when you have a challenging mission.

I find your avatar highly appropriate to that comment.

[Parisbre56]

Let me know when you do everything right, and end up with dead characters anyway.  That's when you have a challenging mission.

Nope. That's when you have bad luck.
Unless for a mission to fit your definition of challenging the GM has to arbitrarily kill a set number of people each mission for no reason.

[kj1225]

Let me know when you do everything right, and end up with dead characters anyway.  That's when you have a challenging mission.

That's not challenging. A challenge is when your mess up means that everything goes wrong and you have to salvage what you can. When things go wrong because of something that's not in your control, that's unfair.