[Proposal]: Add time limits to ALL missions

[clintonmead]

Suggestion

All missions (with the possible exception of story line missions) should have time limits. In many cases (for example, bulk cargo), perhaps these should be very generous, but things like patrol and assassination missions should have reasonable time limits, for both gameplay and realism reasons. The gameplay reason being to prevent ridiculous stacking and the realism reason being that presumably the people who are paying for these tasks to be done want them done sometime in the relatively near future.

Note that these time limits should all be TIME limits. I believe currently assassination missions have a hidden number of jumps limit, but not a time limit. A time limit would encourage people to use faster (and hence, presumably smaller) craft. Perhaps the time limits could be such that larger craft would be likely to make it only just on time, whereas faster craft might have the leisure to make fuel stops/stop for other missions on the way. Or perhaps the time limits could vary by mission/target craft size, with missions with tighter deadlines paying higher rewards.

Seek and destroy missions probably need a time limit for each "leg".

Whether these time limits should be transparent to the player or hidden is debatable, although I'd lean towards transparency, at least initially.

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[bobbens]

I'm not sure I would go all onboard with time limits on everything. For repeatable missions like assassination and such, I don't think it would be an issue as long as it's clear to the player. Give them a nice count-down in the on screen display (OSD) so they can track it and such. Things like patrol missions and the likes would also make sense with this.

However, for story missions and the likes, I think it adds a lot more development overhead (have to make it clear to the player, track it, and update the OSD all the time, so it's more work for not much gain.

I would also note that there is an implicit mission limit, where non-mission computer missions decrease in frequency when the player has too many missions to sort of stop the player from accumulating 20+ active story missions.

[tpalmerstudios]

Agree with @bobbens. If all missions had a timer, I think a whole rework of the mission display would need to be done.

In addition to severely limiting how many people a player talks to, it rushes players through the Spaceports and Bars so they can hurry, and taking missions becomes a risk that players don't want to do because they might not have time.

A lot of missions seem to be low-ish priority, and I think most people like collecting them and doing them when they're in the neighborhood.