I my dream, the mission board would have heaps of missions, but with a rule put in that if person X asks you to do Y, then the SAME person X would not ask you to do the exact same Y until the mission you already have is done.
if we are in a system with 5 billion people then you would expect there to be a lot of missions. maybe we could get lucky and double dip if 2 different people wanted "pirate lord Blue beard" taken out.
this would need pretty complex filters to stop from being too daunting, and then once you have taken a mission to go to system "Z" there would be another filter to "filter for other missions to go to the same system".
on one hand people may argue that this is too much data to hold on FDs server to generate 1000s of missions, on the other hand I say well screw that then, let our own machine generate the missions for our own character, based upon a set of critera on the system status and our own pilots standing... this is the info our machines should be taking from the network, not the exact missions........ then of course if i am in a wing, we would share the mission board among ourselves.
yes this may be open to cheaters.... but then the current system is open to cheaters as well....
generic "destroy X number of random pirates" for instance missions, should actually be limited imo to local system security missions where the mission giver would be the security forces in that system in a "patrol this system and apprehend 20 criminals".... everyone else should give us specific targets imo. On the flip side, for gods sake when i have one of these missions, please spawn said targets within a reasonable time frame, not one every 5 minutes which is a lone eagle, not when i have upwards of 50 of them to get!.
PS one of the biggest errors FD made imo was nerfing the missions so that there were not missions only for "dangerous and above". etc. it completely takes away part of the hook for "levelling" up.
We (by we I mean FD) have sacrificed far to much in this game for the notion of competitive multiplayer imo (this is the only reason i can think for not trusting our own machines to do some of the work)..... sadly what FD cut, it is the players who feel it
