Mission Titles in I17 and Beyond

[Felderburg]

In the past, missions were accepted with nothing more than "Accept this mission", or a similar non-spoken text selection.  With I17 and GR, there are likely to be many more missions that use actual dialogue to accept a task. I noticed that in Jenni Adair's arc (http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Special_Agent_Jenni_Adair) those dialog choices were used as the titles of the missions.

Since most other contacts use the main mission goal, or the goal you see outside the mish in your nav window, as their titles, it seems that the same should apply to contacts with dialogue as mission acceptance (see http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Maxwell_Christopher or http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Azuria for examples of mission titles). Rather than putting "Mission Acceptance" in bold after the briefing text, it ought to have the green dialogue mission acceptance.

For example, check out Dean's arc (http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Dean_MacArthur#Lure_Out_Ajax). In the first mission, you can see the briefing dialog (hidden due to genders), followed by a green text bullet, followed by the mission acceptance text. The Nav Window goal is used as the mission title.

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This does become problematic with the way "parts" are currently formatted. Right now, we have mission titles, followed by a bold thing that says "Story arc title part X: part title." That's fine for a mission part that's only one mission long, but becomes inconsistent with multi-mission parts - a relatively new addition to CoX.

In Dean's arc, take a look at "My Worst Enemy." The previous three parts are named by their missions: "Lure Out Ajax", "Track Down Your Clone", and "Interrupt..." The fourth set of missions takes the name of the fourth part of the arc, because there is no single mission title to call it. I suppose with Dean, it could be called "Defeat Ajax", as that is the main mission of that part, but what happens when we get story arc "parts" that have multiple "main" missions? Leonard's arc (http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Leonard) comes to mind here: his second and third "parts" each have multiple substantial missions.

For consistency, I suggest that every "part" be its own title, and any missions it has be a subsection - even if a "part" is only one mission long... UNLESS there is a title that can be found that reflects the entire part - for EVERY part in a contact's arc; Levantera's first mission (http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Levantera#Join_the_Vanguard) is an example of that.

[eabrace]

The mission's title should always be the green text you click to accept a mission.  If you're looking for a particular mission from a contact (i.e. a contact's badge mission, or the proper mission in the Ouroboros crystal to start a particular arc), you won't be able to find the correct mission if you're looking for an objective since you won't see that until after the mission has been accepted.  It just happens that with most of the contacts that have been in the game for a long time, their mission acceptance text usually matches the primary mission objective.  Over time, it's become more common for the two not to match.

"Mission Briefing" denotes that the text that follows is the contact's briefing for the mission.  "Mission Acceptance" denotes that the following text is the response the contact gives you after accepting the mission.

Missions with "parts" are only labeled to match the labels they are given in the game.  If a mission is labeled "Story Arc, Part X" in the game, it should be labeled so in the contact's article.  If a mission is not labeled in that manner, it should not be labeled so in the article.  (These labels were only introduced with the Ouroboros contacts in Issue 11.  Missions from most contacts do not have these labels.)

The standard we've used with other contacts with multi-part missions is to use the mission acceptance text for the contact interaction as the section title.  Again, this is so that you can easily figure out which mission you want to select during contact interaction and matches the format for missions that are only single part missions.  Sub-missions in a multi-part mission aren't always labeled as such, but when they are, the individual mission's primary objectives are most frequently used as the subsection headers.

For example.  In the first mission briefing from Keith Nance, the contact interaction will specifically show the text "Twisted Reflections, Part One: Government Boy".  The second part of that mission is assigned without having to return to Nance, and is actually labeled "Twisted Reflections, Part Two: Just a Misunderstanding" in the game.  The next part also starts without any interaction with Nance, but is not labeled as Part Three.  The next part is also started without returning to Nance, and is labeled in the game as "Twisted Reflections, Part Three: A Brand New Me".  And so on.

[Felderburg]

That makes sense. I can see how that works, but I personally don't like it. I mean, "Funny, Nance. I'll get to the dam and put an end to this." just doesn't sound terribly professional/formal like most other contacts' mission titles.

[Aggelakis]

You say that like most other contacts' mission titles aren't the green acceptance text. Pointing out your examples, for instance, Maxwell Christopher:

4.1 Find out why Nemesis is concerned with the weather
-- the mission objective is "Defeat Nemesis troops for cover", which leads into the rest of the missions.

5.1.2 Find solid evidence of the connection between Lockhart and Nemesis
-- the mission objective is "Find evidence", which leads into a second mission.

5.1.4 Interrogate Sky Raiders
-- the mission objective is "Defeat 25 Sky Raiders", which leads into a second and third mission.

5.1.6 Stop Nemesis/Council battle
-- the mission objective is "8 people to rescue"



Almost every single other contact on the Wiki is set up exactly the same way. If they're not, they should be. (Standardization is huge on Wikis.)

[Felderburg]

It's been a while since I played the, I just assumed that was the case, since "Find out why Nemesis is concerned with the weather" is a far cry from something like "We're on it".

[GuyPerfect]

Felderburg is bringing up the case where the actual mission acceptance text is dialog, such as the following:

Dean, can you get to the point sometime today?

When you click that, you get the mission. This is a lot different than, say...

Send the Envoy of Shadow back to Hell

...which is a green, clickable mission acceptance link exactly like the one above.

When you click the Envoy of Shadow link, your navigation window says "Defeat the Envoy of Shadows," which is an objective of sorts, but it's the title you see in your missions menu rather than a proper mission title.

Thing is, "Can you get to the point?" is not a viable mission title. It's likely that we'll encounter many more instances of this in the future, so we should figure out what to do about it now.

[Sekoia]

I agree with Felderburg and Guy. When a standard ceases to make sense, it needs to be updated. Section headings with names like "We're on it" do not make sense.

[eabrace]

Just to be clear:  I'm not saying I don' t think it would be worth coming up with something that makes more sense.  My response was to clear up any misconceptions about the state of things as they are and provide a bit of background on how we got to this point.

I will say that as I was entering in the info for Nance and Adair that the acceptance text did strike me as being somewhat less useful as a heading than it has been in the past.

The hard part here is going to be a) figuring out exactly how we want to approach this if we're changing the standard and - more importantly - b) going back through and modifying all of the existing contact pages to update them to the new standard.  I think that we need to put some thought into a) and make a serious effort to minimize the time and effort required for b).

[taosin]