Hey everyone, I have a surprise release for you all today! As you're probably aware, I've been trying to amp up the social / community aspect of the site, but I've also been trying to build things to help us all clear our backlogs. The bounty system certainly helps in both of those categories, but given that they're only available for a limited time and for a limited number of games, it's not as effective as I'd like. And that's where the new system comes in...

Missions!

The overall idea / flow is this:

• Join the Mercenary Guild
• Wait for a mission to be assigned to you by other guild members
• Play the game that was assigned to you
• (Optionally) Track your progress with the playthrough that's created with the mission
• Enter a completion when you finish the game, which will complete the mission
• Wait for your next assignment!

Now, before I get into this any further, let me say that this is the pilot version of the mission system. I just finished writing the last lines of code for it, so this is about as fresh as it can get. It won't be pretty or optimized for all resolutions, but it should be very solid functionally. There are LOTS of enhancements already queued up and I'm sure you guys will have more. So yeah, just like we saw with the bounties a few months ago, let's focus on the structure / flow and make sure everything makes sense and is going to actually be fun to use and then I'll polish it off.

Okay, so now since I don't have any help / instructions on the site yet, I'll go ahead and go through it here. First off, you have to join the Mercenary Guild. You do this by going to your Account page and checking the corresponding box. You'll also notice a new "Mission List" dropdown. We'll talk about that in a minute, but don't worry about it for now. That's it, you're "signed up".

Once you're a guild member, you can be assigned missions by other guild members. You can also assign missions to other members. You cannot assign yourself a mission.

There's a new "Mercenary Guild" link in the header that will take you to a page that let's you assign missions. On this page, you'll see all guild members that use the Public privacy option, as well as those that use Friends Only, but you're friends with. You will not see yourself (assuming you're logged in) on this page.

You'll see two numbers next to each member that indicates how many missions they have available (i.e. "3 / 3"). For now, everyone can have up to three missions in progress at a time. Once you've completed a mission (i.e. entered a completion for it), you will gain a slot back.

To assign a mission to someone, just click on the Assign Mission button to bring up a search modal where you can find a game for them to play. By default, you'll be able to select any game that's in their backlog. However, do you remember that Mission List dropdown on the Account page? If you select one of those lists, then members will only be able to assign you a game from that list, rather than your entire backlog. This is helpful if you want to limit the games that could be assigned so you don't keep getting stinkers like Bad Rats or huge games like Xenogears. The only other rule here when assigning games is you can't assign a game again if the user is already on a mission with it.

Once a mission is assigned, the user you assigned it to will receive an email (unless they opted out of it on the Account page). The email lists who assigned it and what game was assigned.

There's a new menu item called My Missions that contains two sections. The top section shows the missions / games that have been assigned to you. The bottom section shows what you've assigned to other members. For your missions, you can click on the Manage Playthrough button to enter time and ultimately enter a completion for it, which will complete the mission (and open a slot back up for you).

And that's it. We can now work with our friends or the community at-large to help work through our backlogs! I feel this is a much more flexible system than the bounties since there's no time limit and you can play virtually any game (as long as it's backlogged / on your list). As I mentioned before, there are lots of enhancements on the way, so here's what I have on my immediate list:

• When entering a completion, should have option to remove from backlog (just like updating progress status)
• Mission Details page (you'll get to this from My Missions by clicking on a mission, will contain info on assigned by / to, when it was created, etc)
• Communication log on Mission Details page (The two members involved in the mission can talk back and forth about progress)
• Motivation feature on Mission Details page
• Cooldown / limit on how many missions someone can assign (right now you can assign any number of missions, there needs to be some limitation here so everyone can participate)
• Filter on Mercenary Guild page for viewing just your friends
• Filter on Mercenary Guild page for viewing users with available slots
• Bonus points for completing a mission (maybe)
• Achievements for assigning / completing missions
• Help page / popover or something (just like we have for bounties)
• Cancel a mission
• Email when a mission you assigned is completed (or cancelled?)
• Feedback item for being assigned a mission and completing one
• Hide the "No Missions Available" button if you're not logged in (I was lazy)
• Handle scenario where you delete a list that's your mission list (don't do this yet, it will break)

Signed up, tried to assign you a mission. Page seemed to display "loading" for a really long time, and nothing happened when it finally stopped.

Ugh, I think it's Azure SQL being stupid again since I'm getting timeout errors. It just behaves differently on certain queries and I don't know why. I had to completely rewrite the activity feed query a long time ago when it randomly started choking.

I just added an index that should help, but I'm not sure it will solve it. I'm able to run the query directly on the database and it's coming back in less than a second.

Can you try again and see if you have better luck this time?

Welp, it works! And I found a bug at the same time!

My mouse is being dumb, sometimes it doesn't always click, so I have a tendency to double-click things to be sure it goes through. I double-clicked the "assign" button and now it shows that I've given you the same mission twice. lol

edit: Not sure if you fixed it that quickly, or what, but now it's only showing it once.

Haha yeah, I received two emails and promptly deleted one of those missions :P I'll put some code in to prevent that from happening.

lol, damnit. I need a new mouse.

It just registered three clicks when I tried to assign a mission to DoktaC4ibby, and I only clicked once!

I was being careful this time too, because of what happened when I tried to give you a mission earlier moho_00 :/

Also, the e-mail heads up works great, though I had to update my spam filter on my secondary e-mail address apparently. Hope I wasn't getting too many e-mails from your notification system in the past because they sure weren't being forwarded to my primary e-mail that I actually check once in a while, haha.

Haha, I just pushed out an update that will disable the Assign buttons once you've clicked on one. Let me know if you still have the issue and I can enforce it even further. Also, I cleared out the extra missions for @DoktaC4ibby.

The only other emails that the site sends out are for registration and friend requests. Unfortunately, I don't have much control over things going to spam folders :P There's also the update emails I send out every few months, but those are handled by MailChimp and may not be as likely to be picked up by spam.

Are you keeping the current Bounty system as well? I like the Bounty system because it showcases games that I'm not familiar with that I might pick up if they look good.

Yup, I should've mentioned that before, but the bounty system will remain just as it has been and will co-exist with the missions system. We'll continue with the (loose) themes as we have been and maintain roughly the same amount of games up for bounty (speaking of which, I think we're due for some new ones). And I still have plenty of things on my list to enhance the bounty system even further :)

The disabling looks like it works to compensate for my hardware derpiness, haha. I managed to assign something only once for the first time ever. Third time's the charm!

I really like this system, it gives a bit of community feel to it.

Damn, I really gotta sort through my backlog again, I have a ton of crap on emulators

My backlog is in a bit of disarray as well. And it has waaaaay too much stuff in it. Why do I keep buying games!?!

Oh and welcome to the site, @DoktaC4ibby :D Let me know if you have any feedback while using it!

I'm in! If the community get bigger, it's gonna be a lot of fun! In the future can we imagine having different Guilds? I mean some guild dedicated to some kind of games or to some period of time, etc ?
For now we have not enough "active" members but that could be great.

I have a quick question. How do you create your custom potential Mission games list? I opted into the Mission system but haven't created my list yet (because I definitely want to specify a list rather than let people choose ANY game for me lol).

In your My Collection section, you can assign games to Lists that you create using the Set Lists button. Once you've added some of your games to a list, you can select it as your Mission filter if you like. Lists are great for other stuff too, like adding custom categories to track things. Some people use them to track what games were bought in certain bundles. I use them to track my ps+ freebies. Some people use them to make a playlist for themselves. Etc... They're handy!

Also moho_00! I noticed that Amiibos are showing up in the mission choices.

Hmm..that's a good point on the Amiibos. I'll put some code in to exclude those, Disney Infinity, and Skylanders (once they're added).

I think I might add an option to let each user specify how many missions they can accept at once, rather than just having a blanket 3 across the board. I'm thinking maybe you select a value from 1 to 10? I know the minimum should be 1, but not sure what the maximum should be. I can't imagine anyone needed more than 10 though :P

Also, what do you guys think about a rule that allows you to assign 1 mission at a time to another user? So I could assign a mission to EVERYONE, but only one mission per user. Once they complete it (or cancel it, once that's implemented), you could assign them another one. I think that would help spread the assignment a bit as more people start to use it. This would be in addition to the "cooldown" I mentioned previously, which I'm currently thinking will be set to 12 hours. So you could assign a mission to someone ever 12 hours. None of this is set in stone (obviously, since I haven't built any of it :P), just throwing out some thoughts / ideas here to try and keep things interactive and fun for everyone.

Not sure if a cooldown is really needed, but I guess it would help stop people from hogging assignments if that were ever to be an issue. I do like the "one mission per user" though!

Love this idea!!! As a newbie to the website and just finding out about the bounty system, I was hesitant to accept due to the time constraints and my limited availability to play and beat games. Now with this mission system I am much more likely to be an active guild member as I have more time to complete the said missions. Once again awesome update Moho!!

@Elfenix - I missed your post from before, but yeah, I definitely considered having different guilds in the future. I think it would be right in-line with how we've been doing bounty themes. The main hold-up here is we need to get all of the data entered for games so I can enforce the guild requirements (i.e. genre, platform, release period, etc). It's probably a ways off, but it's something I'd love to see added.

@Marcus - Let us know when you've finished putting together your list. I only see two games on it so far, so I'm assuming you're still working on it :)

@dhobo: Thanks! Was that lists button always there? Despite adding in a few hundred games by hand to my collection I somehow totally never noticed it, lol. It does sound like lists are a great feature, though. I know I tried to use the tagging on Steam before to separate games in certain ways (genres, want to play most, etc) but then it became too hectic so I gave up. Still, a neat thing to potentially use down the line.

@moho_00: Indeed, just got a few games in to test the functionality and then got overwhelmed recalling how many more games must be added to my collection here :P. Once there is more time it'll get filled out in a much more substantial form! PS: Just wanted to say I like the idea of achievements or points for completing missions. It would help give an added incentive to do them (at least for me).

Huzzah, just finished a playthrough of my first assigned mission. I like this system quite a bit. Much easier to hit these games at a casual pace and not feel too obligated unlike the bounty system. Not that the bounty system is bad, I love it, but my game time is super sporadic lately, so this is perfect for me. :D

Only thing I'd like to see is some kind of heads up to let me know if people have completed a mission I've assigned (unless it already does that, no one's finished any of my assigned missions afaik) Be neat to see their time, comments, etc... and eventually make comments of my own if that functionality gets added :D

Just a suggestion: It might be good to put a link on the Mercenary Guild and My Missions pages to this thread so new people can understand what they are about. Something like "For more information on how to participate in Missions see this link." I think if someone goes to those pages and hasn't participated all they see are blank pages, which can be confusing.

That's a good idea! I plan on adding some help text like we have for the bounties, but this will be a nice interim solution.

I'm on my first mission and I wonder if we should have a special place in the forum for missions (like we have for each bounty) to talk about difficulties or when is it considerate like finished. Maybe it should be a subforum dedicated to every playthrough (mission, bounty or normal playthrough) or maybe it fit in the existing subforum already.
I was thinking about it because I didn't know where to ask this : I have half minute hero as a mission and I don't know when is it considerate finished : the base game (Hero 30) or the base game + all the addition (princess 30.... hero 300...). I don't talk about completionated where I should find all the equipment and companions and alternative ways.

It's really up to you to decide what the criteria should be regarding completing a mission. Personally, my requirements are pretty low, so long as I get to the end of a game (ie: finished) then I say that's good enough to call that mission complete.

So for Half Minute Hero? You decide if beating the main story is good enough for a mission, or if you believe you ought to do all the extra content as well.

I'm sure other people have different ideas regarding what constitutes completing a mission, but the gist of it is that it's totally up to you to decide the rules and requirements for yourself.