Recently, away missions have become somewhat trivial. One of two things will usually happen for gateway explorers, they either rush through the loot fest that was once known as a challenge course and loot super gear, due to the trivial nature of cheesing the gauntlet, or they just ignore it / mess around with xenos / beach party. I really think this is a disservice to the away mission system, and we could do better.
I've been brainstorming and I've come up with a concept to try to re-energize interest in away missions and make them more fun, keeping in mind feedback given on github to the proposed removal of away missions, as well as some ideas from Kei.
1. Make gateway explorer a karma job (this, combined with corner, would mean there is now a karma job in every department)
2. Make it so that any "lethal" or otherwise "high value" loot is removed from your inventory upon returning from an away mission.
3. Change away mission fluff to be more about going to off-site locations and "securing" (stealing, in some cases) high value research data to further NT. This research data could be used in RnD to progress research much quicker.
4. Add more away missions overall, some of which would be considerably more deadly, some of which would be more mundane.
5. Missions would in theory, be designed to test different aspects of the players abilities. One might require knowledge of engineering to get power back online, while one might require you to be robust
Notes:
*Job would probably be around 30 karma mark, maybe more, as it is meant for experienced players.
*Should make away missions useful, without them becoming a loot fest
Thoughts?