"Choose a mission." Ask looked away, forcing himself not to think about questions that could not be reasonably explained, such as "Why are all the NPC girls in my team beautiful?"
"Can I choose all the tasks?" Nora also stared at the screen and began to copy the task content scrolling on it.
"Yes." Ask said, "You can accept all the tasks here freely. The only problem is the cost-effectiveness."
"Value for money?" Eleanor was puzzled.
"First of all, everyone should understand that the content, difficulty and reward of the mission are all given by the mission issuer himself." Ask pointed at the screen and said, "The Mercenary Guild is just a third-party platform for information exchange. It generally does not and cannot review or restrict the authenticity of the mission, so there will inevitably be problems with false reporting of mission information."
"For example, the enemy is a goblin tribe with ogres, but the quest poster is afraid that no mercenaries will take the quest, so he lies that there are only two or three goblins. This kind of deliberate lie to reduce the difficulty of the quest is the most common." Ask continued, "Another example is that the quest reward is 100 pounds, but the quest poster is a farmer from a nearby village. How can a farmer have the money to spend 100 pounds to post a quest? There is no doubt that the other party has falsely quoted the price, and has planned to underpay or even refuse to pay from the beginning."
"If we waste a lot of time on these tasks that have a problem with cost-effectiveness, it will undoubtedly be very detrimental to the development of the team." Ask concluded, "A senior who played mercenaries once said that the best mercenaries are not those who are the best at fighting, but those who are best at actually pocketing the mission rewards."
Nora listened nearby and nodded continuously, and wrote a sentence in her notebook: How to actually get the mission reward (emphasis circled).
"So how can we distinguish those tasks that are truly cost-effective and worth doing from the massive list of tasks?" Eleanor asked.
"This can only be learned through experience. Practice makes perfect." Ask stared at the screen and said, "Hey, Paradise Mountain?"
"Paradise Mountain?" Nora looked at the screen, but did not see any words related to "Paradise". She only saw that Ask had communicated with the lady at the counter, and it seemed that she was specifying a certain task. The latter answered fluently:
"The Blue Sword Mercenary Group, number MS-995017-247, requests to take on the 'Black Sea Fishing Boat Missing' mission, number 1000000012763212. The person who posted the mission has left a message, would you like to answer it?"
"Listen," said Ask.
So the lady at the counter took out a microphone from under the table and opened the corresponding audio file on the computer:
"I am the head of Burgas Village in the Thracian province of the Empire. Last month, several fishermen from our village went fishing in the Black Sea and disappeared that day and never came back. The last time the fishing boat sent a message, the longitude and latitude coordinates were 43 degrees 32 minutes 11 seconds north latitude and 32 degrees 2 minutes 26 seconds east longitude."
"The families of the missing and other villagers have collected about 3 pounds of reward. If you can find and rescue them, we are willing to pay you 3 pounds; if you only find their remains, we are willing to pay you 30 dinars as a reward."
"Let's take this one." Ask made the decision.