Check this one out as far as the missions, at least an initial idea.
http://gne.g33xnexus.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=62In one game they have Agents where you go an get missions from. There is a general bucket of missions and one is selected randomly. They scale with the level of the Agent so they are usable by noobies and oldtimers a like.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of this approach, at least not for this game. While this is certainly better than the usual "everybody accomplishes the same missions in the same order" kind of deal (leading to lines waiting for a particular boss monster to respawn), it still suffers from the same ultimate shortcoming - the world is largely static. Granted, it's more dynamic than the "everybody kill the Boss AssHat", but when you get down to it, everyone still has the same pool to choose from.
What I have in mind is more along the lines of the Total Annihiliation Boneyards, only done on a much larger scale (with some new ideas added). In Boneyards, everybody logged into the server and was presented with a galaxy of planets. Each of those planets corresponded to one of the multiplayer maps for the game. Players were associated with either the Arm or the Core (the two sides in the game), and they engaged each other in 1v1 battles on those planets. At the end of the day, the results for those battles were tallied, and the side with the most victories won control of the planet. When a planet was won by a particular side, the nearby planets fell into contention, and the process repeated itself until one side finally controlled all the planets. A very fun system... too bad 1) I had dialup, so I didn't play it much; 2) I sucked when compared to a lot of other players, so I usually lost when I played; and 3) Cavedog has since gone under, so the system is offline permanently, so I can't play anymore. :-(
But regrets aside... ;-)
Anyways, I gotta head out from work, so I'll finish this post later.
~Brian
