Now, I've been sitting on this one for a bit. I was thinking about only putting this out once the current mission was over, but at current pace that might be another five months out, what with this being day 6 of ten, and my memory is not reliable enough for that.
I want to preface this by saying that this post is at least partially based on me vaguely remembering that the Pacifidlog town chapter was longer than you intended it to be, and inferring that the same might be true here. If this is not the case and you are happy with the current pace, please ignore the rest of this post
@OxfordOctopus .
All those qualifiers out of the way, I think this mission is suffering from having too many good ideas put into it, if that makes sense.
This:
Duration: 10 days
Description: Reedpier Village, located north of a common Cloud Nine-line Swablu and Altaria nesting site, was protected in part by said Pokemon during the events that occurred some weeks ago. While the Pokemon left after the events concluded, a scouting team was sent to check on them, and found much of their territory heavily damaged by the storm, and many of the dragon-type Pokemon displaced into lower parts of the highlands, where they've come into conflict with other local Pokemon. Your job will be to help clear out the former nesting sites as well as clean it up, to encourage the Pokemon to return, and to discern if there are other factors driving the Pokemon off from their former nesting site. You will be grouped into pairs while at the nesting site.
No outside dragon-type Pokemon are permitted to be part of this excursion.
Threats to expect: displaced, agitated Pokemon, potentially Swablu/Altaria (deescalation should be easier due to high intelligence), unstable terrain.
This was the original description of the mission.
Now, I really liked the whole saga around the blockage, but it had very little to do with what we initially voted to do, and on top of that was long and complex enough in its own right to have been an entire mission in and of itself. Especially if one were to expand the actual digging work into a few days to be timeskipped over to give it a more "big mission" appropriate timeline without ballooning updates.
Likewise, the entire current military saga, while extremely interesting and well written, could have been enough complication and content to fill another mission in its own right, especially if there wasn't a Drake around to put his foot down. While it is more integrated into the Altaria situation, it still feels more like an interruption before we go back our actual work of dealing with the Altaria and Old Storm. The old military installations could have just as easily not been there.
In summary, I think this entire mission feels a bit like three distinct missions in a trenchcoat, and don't think maintaining this much content per mission is going to be a good idea going forward.
If you want to preserve missions lasting multiple days (which for the record I would be in favour of), I would prefer to maybe have multiple small timeskips with some easily summarizable drudgework (maybe taking down the blockage takes more time, or the mountain paths must be cleared carefully, etc.) over every day being its own Pacifidlog style mission day.
As is, I feel like the pacing of both our mechanical advancement and our relationship with friends we aren't actively deployed with is getting a bit skewed. If I had known we wouldn't be seeing Gretchen or Suzume for half a year, I would have placed a lot more emphasis on going with one of them at mission selection
Again, if you yourself are happy with the pacing, or the other questors don't share my concerns, feel free to just keep going like this. I'm still enjoying every chapter and eagerly following along, and that won't change either way. I just wanted to adress my concerns over the longer term.
