I am not sure if the problem is that there is a lack of mission planners, or that the mission is "no fun", nor "innovative", but rather a lack of mission participants. I don't care how "innovative" a mission is, if there is a minimal amount of flyers, it will be "no fun".
Putting together a mission is really no big deal due to the fact that they can be designed with certain objectives in mind and then saved for later reuse. Therefore, in a matter of an hour, you can design the "core components" of a fair amount of missions, that can be recalled at any given time and activated with a small amount of setup time after activation.
Giving the mission planner a flat perk number for planning/activating the mission would be simple, but would also lead to what AKDejaVu pointed out. That would be ugly.
Trying to calculate perk points for the "success" of a mission could be real messy for HTC to try and figure out how many perk points to award. How could HTC determine the actual "success" of the mission and reward accordingly ? Hmmmmm ....
I know they could figure this out, but you have to ask the question .. "why and at what cost". Why - Perk Mission Planners ... At what costs - Just a guesstimate (200+ hours) = I don't think so !!! The failure point here is the benefit would only affect the few. Now if the cost/effort were to benefit the majority, now that is something that HTC might take into consideration.
To get people to participate in a mission, now that is another story. I believe that something solid can be done here. What if HTC were to add .XX to the perk multiplier for every participant in the mission. The mission must contain more than X amount of people. The multiplier would only be available to any participants that joined the mission up to X minutes after the mission launched. This would discourage missions being launched with 2 people, and that mission taking advantage of the elevated perk multiplier along with missions that might be launched with ridiculous "you may accept until" times. I don't want to hazard a guess as to what the X's are ... that would be up to HiTech and "crew" to establish the numbers. I am just trying to establish baseline variables that may already be available and could be easily obtained, evaluated, and implemented.
Therefore, whether you land, ditch, bail, or die, and you have inflicted some sort of damage, you will have picked up more perk points than if you didn't participate in a mission and tried to inflict damage on your own. I think if this or something along these lines were implemented, we would probably see an increase in mission participants. The mission planner would obviously/hopefully be part of the mission and would benefit from the modified perk multiplier.
I understand that "perk" points and their values are very integral to the "play" of AH and taken very seriously by HiTech and "crew", so anything that would impact this area would be highly scrutinized. I hope that maybe I have generated some "food for thought".
For me, there is nothing more exciting than participating in a mission of 20+ people all with the same objective in mind, never mind looking around and seeing all those planes launching at the same time. Incredible !!!
Missions, IMHO, are an integral part of the game and are the real key to winning a war (real or virtual) and anything that HTC can do to promote participation in missions would only strengthen the vein of "WWII realism". WWII was not won by attrition but rather by cooperation.
