Gameplay: Endgame Options

[Mechzz]

Not sure if the Devs come here, but this idea came out of the endgame thread over on the forums. Strikes me as something that could help peeps to carry on playing the game.

Background
I totally love planetside. I've played it more than I've played any other computer game. About 6 months of my life went to it. And I don't think I'm unusual, lots of peeps played for a year or less.

Good as it was, it got samey and there was no real sense of over-arching story or achievement. So you move on once it gets stale. SOE obviously want to avoid that, so here's an idea to help me keep giving them my money.

Idea
Incentivise the empires by spawning special empire mission choices when a certain condition is met. The condition can be good (we got Indar, yay!) or bad (we got pushed off Indar, boo!).

So when somebody gets continent lock on Indar the CR5's get to choose from 3 options:
1. Hold at least 60% of all resources for next 24 hours
2. Hold at least 3 out of the 6 main bases continuously for the next 48 hours
3. Stop any other empire from taking 1 main base for the next 72 hours.

Or when you get pushed off Indar completely:
1. Retake 1 main base within 12 hours
2. Take 50% of resources within 24 hours
3. Achieve continent lock in 48 hours.

2 riskier than 1 and 3 riskier than 2, so a bigger bonus would apply if achieved.

Bonus = greater resource generation, bonus to empire health or armour for a short period. Mission medals could be handed out to the "vets".

These would be missions you could choose to take part in, and would spawn all the sub-missions you could want.

And the zerg could still zerg. This would allow peeps to find their niche within achieving the overall mission.

I also don't think it would get stale too quickly because it is a natural extension of the basically exciting gameplay.

You could track which empire wins the most missions each months, adding another level of metagame.

Downsides
I'm not too good at foreseeing these, but empire hopping is obvious. Would we need to lock players to an empire in the bonus mission period?

Oh, and to avoid ghost hacking problems, set a minimum number of kills to be suffered and/or deaths to be inflicted to meet the mission success criteria.

Summary
This idea fits well with the natural flow of the game. It rewards an empire for doing well in a concrete way and doesn't require the top level players to disappear into their own "end game world". In fact, it encourages them to stay and lead us zerglings to greater victory.

I'd love to hear the Devs thoughts on this, but I know they have other things on their minds right now.

Thanks for reading this far.