Flipping the board
- Thread starter Snowymonk
- Start date
And you think a refresh button will solve mission abuses? That's kind of like giving a wife beater a bottle of Jack Daniels, isn't it?
The only people affected by the latest change are stackers who sit in one spot. Does not affect my gameplay in the slightest.
Not everyone who sits in one spot are stackers - not in the ostracized sense anyways. If one is working to expand their influence with Sirius, to gain access to Marco Qwent, one is likely to sit in one spot.
Likewise, a clever trader who happens upon an Agricultural system in a state of Famine, but is still producing the food they need (ie, is available in the market), and is "market mining" commodities isn't about to move until the mission well runs dry.
And then there are things like Navy Promotion missions... let's not even step on that grave.
So there is some call for it, but I would wager the largest part is just from those wanting to load themselves down with identical missions - the "stackers" we like to shame around these parts.
Perhaps a compromise could be struck however - rather than a "Refresh-Until-I-Get-What-I-Want" button, a limited-use "Refresh", say, once per hour, to repopulate any given system's mission list? I do know I have seen plenty of times where I've stopped in a particular system, looked at the job list and gone "Is that it?" and actually moved on because I didn't want to/wasn't set up to Mine 18, 20, 22, 36, and 48 tons of Crystal Meth, nor did I want to donate 100k, 250k, 250k, 375k, 500k, 1m, and 1m credits to fend off famine among the system's 1%.
Please, don't tell me FDev does not know basics of procedural generation now
You take Hash of (Player_ID, Station_ID, NPC_ID, Current_10min_slot )
This hash will give you RNG seed. Then you you this RNG to populate board.
You don't have to store the board, and each time you re-generate it it will be the same - but different for each player and will change each 10 mins.
Only thing you need to remember, is which missions were completed (only for 10 mins anyway).
As with many other "exploits" FDev could've fixed this ages ago - but they have "other priorities" apparently.
What is this obsession amongst a sub-section of the player base with worrying about what missions other players are doing and whether they are doing them in one or more places, whether they are sitting around like a lemon for ten minutes at a time waiting for board refreshes, etc, etc?
Umm, even while I play solo, I'd kind of worry about it.
Because FDev balances things based on global stats. So, say FDev makes money and rare materials drop reasonably without need to board flip. Guess what - lot of people start flipping the board and get uber-amount of rare materials and money really fast. FDev sees this on their sensors - "oh god, our global economy is collapsing!" (remember even if most of these people are in solo they are concerned they will take their ill-gotten gains to open or some CG some day). Then, instead of fixing board flip itself, they just make everything harder to obtain - so even when flipping the board, they won't get past unreasonable. And people who are just want to play game like a game a bit screwed - but I guess its for a greater good so just have to tough it out, right?
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Here, have a tin foil suit.
Sorry, what suit? Its not a big secret and was kind of leaked couple of times (mainly via talkative QA chaps) how FDev uses global stats and how they balance difficulty of things. Its not like they are unique in this respect, its ABC of modern MMO balancing & design.
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Somehow you don't think FD are able to tell how many times your account logged into their servers with your theory.
While I agree with your simple' synopsis, this is not really the case.... I work in an organisation with hundreds of load balancers and thousands of servers spread across 4 continents. If we were implementing the mission boards we'd have multiple dedicated servers handling the selection, and multiple DB servers behind that, and the whole thing wrapped in load balancing architecture. Then in front of that multiple traffic servers, again, load balanced.
I think, what you omitted, is effort vs reward vs cost..
FDev use the cheapest available.
They are. They just don't care about it. Because they've decided not to prevent it and "fix" it just by overall drop rate.
As they don't care people sitting at Dav's hope re-logging every minute (even when their servers perfectly show amount of re-spawn requests from given client).
If it was single player offline you would have a point.
I don't believe FDev intended the game to be played by continually refreshing earnings options, so the massively increased payouts obtained by mode switching missions is by definition an exploit.
Whenever you meet an exploiting player in a competitive MMO you are disadvantaged.
What is it that you don't understand?
Dav's hope? What's that?
Its an abandoned surface base. Each time you go there, it has random rare components lying around.
And guess what - if you log in and out it forgots what was here, and spawns random ones again. That's why it has been known as "rare component supermarket" for ages (there is even thread about it on this forum - how to best exploit it). https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ED-List-of-Materials-at-DAV-S-Hope(Pictorial)
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Yet there are two threads on the first page of the forum with a lot of posts expressing the opinion that neither money nor rare materials drop with anything like sufficient frequency.
There is no global economy in that sense though, a galaxy-wide economic collapse isn't really possible. As an example of just how unrealistic the galactic economy is, go to the galmap and set the filter to show system state. Turn off 'none'. Now one by one, turn off every state other than 'boom'. That is some remarkable economy.
But see my first point - all FDev have to do is drop mission rewards by 10% and the toys come flying out of the pram from a lot of players. You or I can think what we like about those players but I'm sure FDev recognise that they are paying customers and one of the battles with a game like this is keeping as broad a spectrum of the player base happy as possible. The fact is that even now, when I can make 50m credits an hour without breaking a sweat (or board flipping) some players won't want to do the things I'm doing to make those credits and if the most they can bank from the things they do enjoy is 5m credits per hour, some of them will simply quit, which is money walking out of the door.
This whole debate/discussion about board flipping has been going on since the day I started playing and although they have taken some action to mitigate it I've never seen them dispute one of the main reasons that people do it, which is simply that with 10 or more types of mission even a board that displayed 50 missions per faction would potentially limit some gameplay styles. Before the most recent mission board changes I would regularly dock and find literally nothing that I had any interest in doing on the boards in systems with populations of over a billion. When you consider the size of some systems, what we would realistically be doing if the servers could handle it is simply deciding which of the 25 pages of X mission type we wanted to browse first.
Then you chuck in the variety of player opinion. Some people think any stacking, even taking two trade missions to the same location, is an exploit. Some think doing five stacked is an exploit, but some other arbitrary number that they think 'feels right' is fine. Some think that doing any number is fine, as long as you just take whatever is on the board when you arrive. some think waiting for the board to refresh is fine, but relogging to force a refresh isn't. Some think that pretty much anything goes. There just isn't any middle ground there at all. I mean this thread is quite polite so far, I've seen earlier ones about the topic degenerate into people getting dog's abuse.
Yet throughout all of this, FDev are monitoring the game. They know what we do. They knew about Robigo. They knew about Quince. They know about Rhea. They know about Dav's Hope. They probably know about the other two or three or fifteen similar cases that haven't made it to the forum hall of fame yet. They know I can make 50m an hour running passenger missions to stations that are a long way from the system entry point. And if they actually wanted to stop all of it dead, they could not only do so tomorrow, they could have done so a year and more ago.
Logic suggests to me that the reason they haven't is because they are perfectly happy to have some edge cases in the game and that the reason for that is they recognise that without them, some players just won't be carrying on. That's no better for the future of the game than the scenario you described in my opinion.
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Oh, but there is, at least for them. I know second hand (from one of aforementioned leaks *wink*) that, for example they know how many players have got Cutters and 'Vettes, what is overall distribution of average wealth, how many people unlocking how many engineer unlocks and how fast by each level - and they have own ideas of what these numbers should be.
For example, they don't particularly care that *you* got Cutter overnight somehow. But they do care that not too many players have Cutter - because they "want it to remain somewhat rare & unreachable". And so on.
Nope, the reason is that there is game balancing person and programmer person.
Game balancing person sees stats and how board flip affects the whole balance - but he can't fix the board mechanism, he only can twiddle with generator parameters.
Programmer can fix the board, but busy with other stuff. Always busy. Then left the firm, and new guy didn't learn enough about existing code yet - can break things, dangerous.
So game balancing person does his job - trying to balance overall stats by only means he can, tweaking generator parameters, without much needed deep change to core system.
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No messing with the boards.
Im trying to grind a Corvette.
Im trying to grind a Corvette.
Ah! That! Dav's Hope.. There's a bit more you can do there too..
I'm pretty sure we're doing the same ones... (40mins travel) I've only seen one other CMDR doing it.
Why you interpreted my post as me supporting exploits.
My opinion by the way is that FDev are a bit brighter than many players seem to give them credit for. I certainly think they're bright enough to know exactly what they do and don't deem to be acceptable. It's not that I support it, I simply don't give a crap about it one way or the other.
However since you raised the issue, we're talking specifically about about mission board flipping here so in view of that, what aspects of your competition with other players do you see as being directly affected by mission board flipping, as in what things are players achieving by doing it that you feel can only be achieved by doing it? Genuine question by the way.
I can think of virtually nothing because there are ways of making credits that can at least match what board flipping will provide and don't require it and even when the amounts of rare commodities that are available from missions isn't bugged again (as it is at the moment) I can think of just one desirable material that can only realistically be obtained from missions, namely EFCs.
If you were thinking more in terms of BGS effects rather than direct conflict, there are also far more effective (and more exploitative) ways of affecting that than anything you can do via the mission board.
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