News Implementation of a dedicated mission server

[Polaras]

*we found that only 2.8% of daily online players were using the mission system in this way.

You are fooling yourselves. Try running these numbers:
To grab your pool of accounts, get weekly online players and pull 4 samples over the last year to not miss anyone who might have board flipped during the gold rushes. This is a game that very much supports "off and on" and those people need more cr/h then "daily online players." If Fdev does not feel the popularity of flipping during gold rush “bugs” is an appropriate statistic, I feel that is insensitive to how the eldar player manages credits and woe is anyone who wants to start playing this game.
Next define board flipping as any rapid consecutive re-log to menu while docked. Remember passengers are boards too.

I think Fdev will find that if they expand the search for people who have recently been weekly online players, and have ever board flipped for multiple days, you'll get a much larger percentage. This player does not board flip because its fun. I did it cause I had to. See larger discussion about income balance. That said, I feel most players will only "flip" enough to get what they want, then stop. Those people count. As other commanders have said, we don’t trust you. I don’t trust that number means what you think it means.

If the mission board would offer missions befitting a passenger liner, or cargo vessel, of large size and rank, the captain would not need to "flip" to get filled. Its insulting. A counter argument might be that the station can't pay what a top tier commander's time is worth, and no station ever has, unless it was edge cased or flipped. Since no one offers what an Elite commander is worth, the price should rise where they are needed. Certain stations should be able to attract endgame commanders to work for them (see topics on Artificial Gold Rushes), and no, CG's do not pay enough.

My suggestion is that Fdev implement a mission board that continues to scroll, generating more missions, so we don't have to hammer the back-end just to do what we are there to do. Put a short timer on it if you want to govern it.
If Fdev wants to put a realistic spin on it, enable game play where the commander publishes their itinerary and the station's residents OFFER MISSIONS to fill the ship's data, cargo, and passenger cabins over time. The more complex or POI filled the trip, the faster and better missions. The commander accepts what they want on this trip and when full, they go. After all, It's my ship. Notice that I believe all in fight mission diversion gameplay was dead on arrival. Not because it took the mission out of the "stack" but because it was never worth it if the pilot had even one other mission to the original destination. It also diverted the player's gameplay loop, which is not what they want if they are going for money or standing. In other words, those slavers should be buying me half a ship if they want me to pick up the phone and risk my purpose which is transcendent of theirs. 5x those “offers” or remove them.

Board flipping has been in the game since 1.0 and I'm sad to see it go with nothing even close to an interesting replacement. Simply calling it something "never intended" and leaving it in the game for over 5 years doesn't get you any points in your bankrupt community account.

I can only think of one time I have used the board as intended: Rescue missions. I had fun, but those are special, like decal CGs.

 

[Manticore]

Board flipping has never been part of my play style. I don't really care about it either way.

Sounds like a lot of thought has gone into this and the devs listen to reasonable and decent comments on these boards.

Thanks for that..... o7!

 

[Marc_Hicks]

Quite, please consider this!


Choose the faction, choose the mission 'type' more generally .. like I'm in a combat ship, stop showing me ANY cargo missions at all (perhaps with a toggle - in case we're thinking of swapping ships).


Yeah, this issue is killing us.. literally.


Good idea!


This issue is real and affecting a large number of players. Please prioritise it.


Actually, I suspect that this change makes development on missions and the mission boards easier, as it's going to be a separate piece of code/server which can be indepdently updated and changed without necessarily affecting the other servers.


Initially, perhaps. But, I think it likely paves the way for future improvements.


Or, at the very least have an indication on available missions to tell you how many ly the target is from a mission you've already selected, to make it easier to cluster them ourselves (without having to go to the galmap to check) .. of course, we'd need more missions to spawn for this to work, or for the mission generation system to take our existing missions into account and spawn a personal set of missions.


Perhaps, but if so it's currently well out of balance with at least one other effect, murder. Bring that one in line, and there will be fewer complaints of this sort.


+++ to all of this. I am hoping the move to new servers will make things like this easier to develop.

By moving missions to a dedicated server, one hopes that a key change we might get is the ability to filter missions-by Mission Type, by Rank & by destination......at the very least.

 

[KING-TYPO]

If you are really going to do this. you need to make sure to have enough missions on the board cause there will be tons of people rushing to get the same mission or just the high paying ones. you need to take your time and do this right. ---AND TEST IT BEFORE RELEASE (by actually playing with the new system IN ALL MODES)---. we will need the ability to store more missions in our computers as well. as well as have a system in place that will quickly replace the missions that have been taken out of the menu. so there is always the same amount of missions on the board at any given time + the board will need to refresh very quickly and constantly.. so..

QUESTIONS: will the missions be unique to each station? or will the missions cover all stations and more or less be generic without really being faction based? 10% seems low like peanuts, instead of STATING a pay increase how about you ASK the community (for once) how much we would like the see the payout increased too??. what about adding exploration missions to the mission board? also we need mission filtering of some kind to make sure that our TIME is not wasted by giving us crap that does not pertain to us, or that the missions pay out so little we skip them. qhy cant payout be based on rank for the mission type? there are alot of people with really high rebuy costs and these poultry missions rewards make it nearly impossible to break even. hence even hunting thargoids is not profitable cause rebuy/repair costs are so high they make a loss and it's not worth it.

rant: IM SURE we as a community will tell you how much we want to see in fair payouts that actually MATCH the mission since fdev seem to have problems respecting community wishes (which far out weigh fdev) to which of course you pull the god card (which you always love to do) to trump everything the players want.. then your left wondering why fdev get hate so much. i say this cause i love this game. and i would love to see it be 10000x better than 1x it currently is. but that wont happen till you take what players want into account instead of trying to make up our minds for us or more or less FORCING us through the use of god cards.

 

[Jimmy Joe]

Fantastic news, thank you!

 

[Fyrefly07]

10% increase in payout is nice, but having more missions available to choose from is far more important! That's why we needed to board flip to begin with! And by more, I mean a lot more!

 

[Olivia Vespera]

This is excellent news!

 

[Marc_Hicks]

Interestingly, this very issue turned up during a suggestion of mine regarding the creation of a bubble-wide "virtual mission board"......where nearly every in-game activity could potentially generate a mission. Maybe thry read my thread .

Big part of this is how they implemented the mission generator....


It is housed on the instance servers, that we are connected to. Each instance servers generate their own set of missions, so this is why board hopping works, you are changing instance servers. This is very costly, and before when they added passengers mission, the systems sort of broke down for while, when there was hardly any non-passengers mission generated.

We have two kind of instance servers
Solo
Open/Private group


This is most noticeable when doing board hopping during off hours, like very early in the morning. As switching between Open/Private group will give you the same mission list, but going to Solo always gives you a different mission list. This is not so unexpected, as they dynamically add/remove servers that act as instance servers based on load, so
many players = many instance servers
few player = few instance servers.

With few instance server, the chance to get on the same you previously was on, increases alot. This is why board hopping works best when doing it during peak hours, as the risk of hitting the same serve twice is very small.



Some redesign to add mission servers, would solve this, as these would now be responsible to generate the missions and keep an updated list of valid missions for each station, so instance servers now simply asks for the mission list and receives the current one, and during the same time frame all instance servers would have the same list. This would kill board hopping...


---------------------------

With the above change it should be trivial to add a galaxy wide mission list, that we could access from our ships etc. And we could have the Pilots Federation as the quest giver(acting as proxy). And there could be several different categories of missions on this list, dictating on how they are delivered to players, visible on the mission list, ship presenting an offer, "random message", etc, etc.
It could also affect explores that if they are in the region X of space, they receive a request to scan a "nearby" system/systems, and it is about 1 000 - 10 000 LY away from your current position and if scanning the requested systems, you will get a nice bonus payout when handing in the mission. just brain storming new stuff for explorers to give them some incentive to go to different places, and perhaps visit some remarkable systems...

 

[NUMBERZero1032]

Stop flooding the board with Massacre missions, especially since you can't do multiple at a time. They take up too much of the real-estate for other missions that you could possibly stack.

Also 10% increase is laughable. Since getting rid of board flipping is going away, that effectively slashes profits in half. Double it, or at least 75% increase.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

To be fair here, they did hugely increase the number of missions available on the boards with one of the earlier updates but had to roll it back and if I recall correctly the problem was basically lots of missions on the board + commanders constantly relogging to refresh the board = total server fail.

Between the move to a dedicated mission server (separating any excessive load from the actual game servers) and the fact that it will make relogging pointless, that should remove the reason for the actual number and variety of missions needing to be as low as it is, so I'd hope that a significant improvement to the current availability of missions would go hand in hand with this change.

If not and it just ends up being a nerf by any other name, I'll probably be done. Not even specifically because of reduced earning potential but because of what it will tell me about the underpinning mindset involved.

Edit: Incidentally, just checked the board in a system I'm working a minor faction in at the moment. Population 1 billion. Faction is in boom. Mission board has six missions for them; three ice mining, one data delivery paying about 200k, one single hop cargo delivery and I didn't even check what the sixth one was because my ship is too large to take it.

So if I want to do anything to push the faction, or to make some money and I'm not going to do exploity things, what are my options? Oh yeah, sit here doing nothing for about 15 minutes to wait and see if anything better appears. This is about as far away from compelling gameplay as it is possible to go and is one of the reasons that people flip the board.

Indeed. If the missions are bad, board flipping will not fix it. I just go out exploring when this occurs. Note: I stay solo-only.

For once, I think Frontier is doing the right thing. From a technical standpoint, this will help. Now, we just need better missions.

 

[Lee Archer]

new content heals all issues- look to the future.]

 

[Valethar]

A 'slight decrease' in load times? LOL

Might want to do a little better than that. While you're tinkering around under the hood, throw some code in there to give a better mix of missions. It's pretty damned silly to hit a station, open the board, and see 75% of the missions are all massacre or something equally useless.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Greetings Commanders,

In the next chapter of Beyond (3.3), we will be implementing and migrating mission data to a new separate server. While this mainly affects the back-end of the game, you will see some changes to missions in-game.

As it currently stands, missions are on a shared server with other elements of the game. This has the risk of problems with missions causing outages and stability issues for the rest of the game if there are technical hiccups.

So, what benefits will we see by moving missions to their own separate server?

• Any issue (generated by missions) which can cause a server outage or stability problems will no longer result in players disconnecting. Instead the missions will be unavailable for a period of time.
• If such issues do occur, the previous servers will be able to act as a back-up, offering better opportunities to recover game content as quickly as possible.
• We may see a slight decrease in mission board loading times.
• Missions will now be consistent across game modes (Solo/Open/Private Group).

It's also worth noting that, as a result of a dedicated 'mission server', there will be a removal/significant reduction of the method of refreshing mission boards by logging in and out of the game ("board flipping"). While we understand that this is a practice utilised by some* players, this was never the intended use of the mission system.

Even though there is a small number of players doing this, we will increase the credit payout of missions (by 10%) across the board so all players using the mission boards as intended will see a net profit. As a result of this, some mission reward choices will see boosted influence, reputation and rank gains. As always when it comes to missions, we will continually review and balance them where needed.

Ultimately, this is a healthy step for our overall servers and game experience.

If you have any questions or would like to share your feedback with us, please post below!

*we found that only 2.8% of daily online players were using the mission system in this way.

Yay at last step in the right direction. Now hopefully going forward mission numbers on the boards will go up too

In a time where ED/FD is taking a few punches this is brilliant and I hope is a sign of good things to come RE missions.

 

[Patrick_68000]

Good news, now start working on atmosphere landing.

With fauna and flora of course

 

[ThirtyWorse]

and just like that, the tyranny of the majority struck down yet another playstyle.

RIP BGS. It was pretty awful while it lasted.

 

[kromc5]

I think 10% is just to generous, I see plenty of people making a lot of CR on youtube. I have to believe its take a lot of time for frontier to keep nerfing stuff in order to make the game fun. After removing the exploit/cheat board flipping they should just cut all mission payouts across the board by 50-60% to help invigorate the base and which should help EH sales.

 

[Jo`Baccaroo]

As a Member of an Minor Faction Clan and as an active Player, who tries to to something within the background simulation I can only say: wrong turn. How will Minor Faction players be able to do their work for their MF in Future with much too few missions available? I knew FD was not pleased by the community to get Clans and the Commanders to consolidate. With every decision FD makes it gets clearer and clearer that FD's goal is to make our lives ingame harder and harder. For myself, I am an fulltime working man with only 1 to 2 hours per day time to play Elite. How should it be possible for me in future to support my Clan, my MF, when I am not getting any *** Missions to do that? 10% more credits? That don't matters. You dont count Credits when you try to support your Minor Faction! This is not just my opinion, but I know others of my Clan think the same way. If you go on this way Elite future will be an game for retirees and unemployed people who have whole days of playing time.

 

[Patrick_68000]

Don't count your chickens before they're hatched though

And do not put all your eggs in the same basket

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

and just like that, the tyranny of the majority struck down yet another playstyle.

RIP BGS. It was pretty awful while it lasted.

You have it wrong way round. The way it is now means that those who want to play BGS but NOT cheese the game have their input reduced to the point of pointlessness. Rather than increase pay outs across the board I hope they can increase the number of missions on the board back to the levels of..... 2.3 beta was it?
But this is not the majority removing gameplay of a legitimate playstyle
It is about stopping the minority abusing the game either forcing other players into it to stay relevant OR making the majorities input less valuable.
How people could argue it was not exploity I will never know

 

[bookmite]

I agree with your principles behind this decision. Please consider you are effecting BGS players hugely. By all means remove the ability to board flip, but please give us more ways we can choose which factions we can trade with, ie not just the controlling faction for trade and cartography.

Whilst you’re at it, please rebalance the rep . ie exploration rank for pax missions should never have been introduced. It only led new players to jump on the cash cow exploits and made them elite status and admirals before they had been playing a week .

Imho this both devalues the status of being elite in exploration and the same goes for trade.

Let’s go back to basics, trade, exploration and combat rep needs clearer lines . You’re making the game too easy.

Get those thinking caps on and design new multi faceted missions which can use combinations of disciplines and player skill .

or if you cannot come up with any , let us suggest some new mission types, run a comp . You will get a huge player support you know it .

Thanks for your continued development of this game, for me 2500 hours in and it’s still the only game I play ...testimony indeed .