Normal Shuttle Missions

Flemming

This is probably a dumb question, but that has not stopped me before.
I've been running a lot of the same shuttle missions the past few weeks and getting a very familiar trend. Even though I've locked Favored Status, the missions still increase in difficulty, even though I use the same crew.

Is there a mechanic in the game to keep increasing (or decreasing) the success rate accumulation as successes occur?

For example, running the Klingon victory missions earlier this week, using the same crew, I was accumulating 90+% success rate. Later in the week, same missions, same crew, I'm lucky to get 85%. But I also noticed the success %s were getting lower and lower each sortie.

(I know the success rate is mostly meaningless to the final outcome, but am I right that the missions still gradually get "harder", even at the max faction level?)

DavideBooks

Someone here discovered that the game is set to keep successes somewhere around 66%. I think that was the number. It keeps getting harder until you fail enough, then it gets easier again until you succeed enough. I don't think there is a cap.

I also have personally found that difficulty seems to go down if I lay off the missions for a while. For example, I was running a lot of Federation missions straight for most of a week and the difficulty got so great I was failing at least half. I didn't run Federation missions for a little over a week and when I ran the next one, I was getting in the 80-90% range.

Data1001

Flemming wrote: »

Is there a mechanic in the game to keep increasing (or decreasing) the success rate accumulation as successes occur?

Yes. And it has nothing to do with that faction's "reputation".

Conversely, purposely failing a bunch of missions (by scrolling down to the very bottom of the crew selection window until you find crew who do not match any of the skills) will slowly start to decrease the difficulty level, and if you do that long enough, it will also decrease the length of the missions, until you get to :30-second missions, the shortest possible time. But even those will start to build up again in difficulty and length unless you keep failing some of them, while letting a few come back successful.

As far as David's contention that difficulty decreases after a period of inactivity with that faction, I have no data (heh), other than to relay that one time about a year ago, I suddenly found the Romulan faction at :30-second missions (and I had had it to Honored status already), so it's possible that something like his suggestion is what was responsible for that, but that's just speculation.

Dirk Gunderson

I will also second the speculation on a time-related component to faction mission difficulty. I don’t run Ferengi or Ferengi Traditionalist missions unless they are in events and while burning off leftover transmissions I have found that they tend to have very high success rates compared to factions I run heavily (Section 31, Augments, KCA, and sometimes Terran Empire).

<TGE> Clifford

I don't think it's time related, I think it's that your crew is getting stronger, so the difficulty seems easier in comparison.