Stop those followers!
Myrmidon
Baron von PuttenhamCalifornia Icrontian
A quick PSA:
Don't level all your followers to 100.
I've been digging through the web, and it looks like those of us that have done so have experienced a DRASTIC reduction in missions - I have six. Four of which, I'm not qualified for. Compare this to two days ago, when I had an average of 13 missions available.
Keep one follower at 90-95, and another at 96-99. That is, assuming you still want those lucrative, lucrative garrison resource missions. From what I read on the web, this solves the problem and repopulates your mission list.
I'm reactivating one at 95 now, and tomorrow a 97 - will let you know if it works.
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Comments
No wonder things were rather dry this morning. I am up to 6 or 7 100's and I could only get 12 available, instead of my usual 17 after everything was completed.
From what I've seen, the system populates the mission list by the assessing the followers you have (as you have pointed out.) I don't think I've had more then 5 lvl 100 mission. Vast majority of lvl 100 missions are 3 man missions with a fair amount of twos and very few if any 1 mans. The rewards for these missions are either scaled up versions appropriate for the higher level (more exp, more gold, more resources, gear improvements, legendary quest line drops, etc) Most people will have 20 active followers which means 5-6 100 missions at least. So theoretically your still getting the rewards you should be getting. It seems less since you are sending them out on less missions. The Garrison Resources are still Garrison Resources no matter what though. However there appears to be a set limit/algorithm-related-thing where you'll only get so many of these missions at once and the lvl 100 versions typically award about 3X the amount of 1 regular resource mission. So I'm not sure if there really is a sizable difference between your average daily results. I would need inside data to know that.
Main problem I see here is similar to the MoP Dailies at launch. In that case, you had no limit to how many dailies you could complete in a day, and had 6 (and later 8) daily quest hubs full of quests to do. A lot of people felt like they weren't do well in the game or getting adequately prepared for raids and whatnot unless they did ALL of them EVERY day when that wasn't true at all. In the follower missions case though, this is still about feeling like you need to do the most amount of missions that you can, but your still getting the same amount of reward and progress since the rewards are increased for lvl 100 missions and that followers only get 10% of the experience if they are not >= the missions level. It's a minigame using passive/idle game design like all them clickers and some mobile games. In this case though it's used to give your Garrison more "umf" in both populating it and making you feel like the Commander/General you're supposed to be, and give an slight alternate path for professions and gear. Also the longer mission times intent is to keep you from constantly going back to these every couple of hours, and acts as a buffer to keep you from burning out on this feature alone.
I'm pretty sure I'm looking at this in a different light then you all. I'm in this to feel like a Commander. To recruit "all da followers" and train them all to Purple Status, and gear them up. The personal material rewards this mini-game provides are just bonuses to me. Eeking out all the resources (both Garrison and otherwise) is just trying to progress at a rate that was not intended for the game (Follower missions being a passive/idle mini-game meant as a complement to a huge game designed to take hours to complete.) Or at least not intended to be fun. If that's fun to you then by all means continue.
Summary:
This appears to be intended design but has little conveyance on how this provides the same rewards if not better relative to your level of capability. This is a complementary mini-game to most of the other stuff going on in WoW.
BTW as of this post I've got 28 followers, 25 of can be active, 17 lvl 100s, 1 Complete, 5 Epic, 6 Rare, and 5 Green. I've got an average of 13 missions available so far.
I have one level 90 and a 96 that I don't level. I average 10-15 missions at any given time. Garrison resource intake is swift, and this is more or less the only aspect of missions I currently care about.
My priorities may change slightly after I get a level 3 salvage yard.
Have not received any lvl 100 garrison resource missions. Each mission I go on has a chance at a salvage crate - therefore, I am doing the @Thrax and increasing my mission pool by keeping two followers underleveled. Mo' missions = mo' crates, and mo' missions = mo' chances for one of those missions to be a resource mission.
Promised I'd report back:
Day 1: activated a lvl 95 follower. Started to see resource missions, one at a time, and somewhat sporadically.
Day 2: activated a lvl 97 follower. Started to commonly see resource missions again, sometimes up to two at a time.
Day 3: received a lvl 100 resource mission along with a lvl 97 resource mission. Bang. Recruited a lvl 90 follower. Three hours later, lvl 100, lvl 95, and lvl 97 missions, all at once.
Could be the placebo effect, but seems like this helps.