Below is a part of my response to a thread in the "General Discussion" Forum about perking mission planners. I left out the reasons as to why I don't think that mission planners should get perks. That, to me, is not a Gameplay issue. I believe that getting people to participate in missions is a Gameplay issue so I am introducing the idea in this forum.
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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.
