Board flipping is a very popular method used by a lot of Elite players. It has been for a very long time. Pretty much every credit exploit over the history of the game utilized board flipping to gather up lots of similar missions. Even more common though are the players who aren’t using exploits yet still board flipping. The people who just want to find a surface salvage mission, or a miner who just wants to find an ice ring mission.
The question is, why? Why is board flipping so commonly used?
The root reason is because many people find it hard to get the missions they want to play. They need to sift through randomly generated boards full of missions they aren’t interested in just to find a couple that do interest them. Wing missions in 3.0 has made this worse by further increasing the pool of mission types generated. Some people claim that it’s a good thing to have a variety of missions on the boards, but most passenger ships aren’t set up to trade in bulk. Most combat ships can’t carry VIP’s to the Crab Nebula. Most traders can’t fly their T9 on assassination missions.
Today Paige posted this in a thread about the skimmer exploit Yamik posted about the other day:
So Frontier wants to improve the mission boards with regards to board flipping in a fair and balanced way. One way would be to make all modes share a common board seed, so that solo, open, and private modes all supplied the same missions. However, that would only remove the actual act of board flipping itself, but it’s not addressing the reason why board flipping is so commonly used. The boards themselves would be just as cluttered with unwanted missions as they are now, there just wouldn’t be a way to deal with it other than tepidly waiting for the seed to refresh.
I think a better method would be to make the need to flip boards unnecessary in the first place. This can be accomplished by allowing the player to request a type of mission before the board is generated. Think of it like the mission givers asking the player “So, what kind of work are you looking for?” and then they see what they have available which would interest the player.
For example, if a player wants to do some mining they could select “mining missions” at the mission board interface, and then the boards would populate with only mining missions. No salvage missions, no data point scans, only what they are looking for and lots of them. They might not have any missions of that type, maybe mining missions aren't currently being offered in Deciat, but at least the player could easily see that right away rather than flip the board for 15 minutes only to leave frustrated. There would still be an option of “random” which would provide what we have now, lots of different types of missions if players wanted that.
This would make the game much more convenient for people to play the way they want to rather than need to fight the boards themselves. It also makes adding future new mission types to the pool very easy for Frontier without fear of board real estate being compromised. And it would greatly reduce the need to flip boards in the first place, if not outright make it unnecessary for 99% of the players.
The question is, why? Why is board flipping so commonly used?
The root reason is because many people find it hard to get the missions they want to play. They need to sift through randomly generated boards full of missions they aren’t interested in just to find a couple that do interest them. Wing missions in 3.0 has made this worse by further increasing the pool of mission types generated. Some people claim that it’s a good thing to have a variety of missions on the boards, but most passenger ships aren’t set up to trade in bulk. Most combat ships can’t carry VIP’s to the Crab Nebula. Most traders can’t fly their T9 on assassination missions.
Today Paige posted this in a thread about the skimmer exploit Yamik posted about the other day:
So Frontier wants to improve the mission boards with regards to board flipping in a fair and balanced way. One way would be to make all modes share a common board seed, so that solo, open, and private modes all supplied the same missions. However, that would only remove the actual act of board flipping itself, but it’s not addressing the reason why board flipping is so commonly used. The boards themselves would be just as cluttered with unwanted missions as they are now, there just wouldn’t be a way to deal with it other than tepidly waiting for the seed to refresh.
I think a better method would be to make the need to flip boards unnecessary in the first place. This can be accomplished by allowing the player to request a type of mission before the board is generated. Think of it like the mission givers asking the player “So, what kind of work are you looking for?” and then they see what they have available which would interest the player.
For example, if a player wants to do some mining they could select “mining missions” at the mission board interface, and then the boards would populate with only mining missions. No salvage missions, no data point scans, only what they are looking for and lots of them. They might not have any missions of that type, maybe mining missions aren't currently being offered in Deciat, but at least the player could easily see that right away rather than flip the board for 15 minutes only to leave frustrated. There would still be an option of “random” which would provide what we have now, lots of different types of missions if players wanted that.
This would make the game much more convenient for people to play the way they want to rather than need to fight the boards themselves. It also makes adding future new mission types to the pool very easy for Frontier without fear of board real estate being compromised. And it would greatly reduce the need to flip boards in the first place, if not outright make it unnecessary for 99% of the players.
