Flashpoint missions – working for the common good?

Today when playing my ranger in Torden Incline I got a radio call from HQ and when looking at it, it turned out to be a Flashpoint mission. These types of missions had been mentioned before by the Tabula Rasa development team, but I had not quite had a good grasp what it would be all about. So this mission got me curious of course.

The mission was called Predator Hunt and the task was to take out some recon predators (one Alpha and 10 drones) before they were able to complete their sweep through the Rainbow Thicket area.

What was neat here was that this mission was obviously given to a number of players in the area and that players could work for a common goal here without teaming up explicitly. Soon after accepted the mission I saw mission updates on drone being killed, even though I was not close to anyone myself.

During my session in Incline the Flashpoint mission turned up 3 times. Of these three, one failed and the 2 other succeeded. In one of the successful ones I only killed one drone myself, while in the other I killed the bulk of them, including the Alpha. In both cases I got to choose from some good experimental (blue) armor suitable for my level and profession as a reward.

I guess this is pretty much the same idea as the Warhammer Online public quests from what I have heard, although I cannot say I know the details there since I don’t follow that game progression.

Whatever it is called, this is a good idea and I hope to see more of it later.