I’ve been talking with AndyB in the gameplay channel about this issue, i decided to create a ticket here anyway for more visibility and for people to acknowledge this.
V for Vampire Soup is a very profitable agent mission in tier 5, here’s why:
Basically, the following arguments make this mission unfair because only Templars can have it appear:
Petru is the best agent for the mission, he can get 92% success chance with a purple Utility Belt, and 100% with a yellow one. Since the most important consideration for vanity bag missions is the Outstanding chance (the only way to get the vanity bag), having this mission with a high success chance with Petru will on average guarantee a way bigger number of vanity bags obtained in the long term.
The blue agent gear bag out of this mission is guaranteed on success, even if no Outstanding is obtained. That pretty much means a “free” blue agent gear bag for every attempt of the mission.
Why the previous arguments are important ? Because basically it means a very high potential of profit and marks of favour gains for Templars in the long run:
Vanity bags have 1 chance out of 11 to drop Shocking Steps, which some people are willing to pay 2M+ mof.
Vanity bags have 1 chance out of 11 to drop the Rocketeer’s Pack, which still sells for a big amount of mof (500k+).
The blue agent gear bags can drop from blue up to yellow (mythic) quality agent gear. For instance, the highest yellow agent gear (Specialised Weaponry) can easily sell for close to 1M mof.
The prices above are obviously examples and will change over time, but the main argument is that there is unfairness for Illuminati and Dragon to not have this mission ever appearing.
AndyB escalated the issue and Funcom are looking into it. Possible solutions would be:
Make V for Vampire Soup available for all factions. By reading the description, the following sentence justifies it in my opinion: “The relic is being “borrowed” from the Templars.” It can imply that it has been stolen, or anything else, hence justifying the possibility of this mission being available for other factions. Note the presence of the double quotes around “borrowed”.
Create 2 other missions exclusive to Illuminati and Dragon, with EXACTLY the same stat requirements and EXACTLY the same rewards.
It still seems to be this way. I’ve seen it multiple times on my Templar alt despite using it irregularly, but never on my Illuminati main.
This issue is actually funny to me because the “borrowed” in quotation marks implies the relic is being taken from the Templars without permission. So if this mission really had to be blocked (and I don’t think it should be blocked for anyone), it should have been blocked for Templars. A Templar agent doing business behind the back of their faction is less appropriate than an Illuminati or Dragon agent “borrowing” something from the Templars.
I mean, unless there’s equivalent faction locked agent missions for the other two, then that just means that Templars have another arbitrary bonus over other faction players.
Working as Intended doesn’t mean that what’s intended isn’t flawed.
Yeah, I think this is stupidly unfair, especially given that the 3 faction agents are identical to avoid this very situation. Why not do the same thing with the missions?
EDIT: and I have to add that this is the first time that being of a different faction give some advantage and not only cosmetic differences, so I think this issue should be resolved soon.
Just because a Templar is allowed in the library doesn’t mean they can take stuff from Special Collections without asking. ETA because I wrote stuff then edited it and forgot to re-add: There’s already canonical evidence of Templars acting on their own initiative and then getting chewed out for it later, so “borrowing” something and putting it back later doesn’t sound like too much of a stretch.
This one probably fits for everyone. It’s not on the same order as helping the Lumies be better Lumies; it already has the proper writing in it for stealthy faction shenanigans that many of the other faction specific missions are played far too straight for.
