I don’t believe the 2.8% board flip statistic has been presented correctly, can FDev please clarify?

[Julio Montega]

Not really. You can get Depot access true, but cargo still has to come from market.

Depends on mission type and a well working mechanic should be expanded upon all where it is appliccable.
Didn't the devs say they constantly work on improving the mechanics?
If that is true we see the mechanic to be usable on every mission type that is compatible with it in Q4.

Funny you say that because many of us use example of WoW as MMO we want to get away, not get towards to. Grinders will always want shortcuts. That's human psychology 101.

Funny you say that, cause people who wish for immersion would request immersion and consistency.
That results in a believable and logically connected galaxy we could immerse into

Ohh old trick of "you don't know more than me". As I said, I am going with information provided by FD. Read that announcement once again.

Funny old trick of reading things into the article, you want to be true.
If you were truly positive you are right here, you'd quote the phrases and show what there is to reinforce your argument.
As i said i do not form an argument on that basis, as it is speculation.

It could be cost saving measure. It might be not. Most likely it is neither, and it is aimed to separate process so more stability can be acquired when problems arise, along with more flexibility of using mission system (hopefully).

We do only get informed about the measure taken, we are not fully informed of all the factors influencing the decision,
we never are, we are customers.

 

[Maro-Val]

Kofeyh, I don't always disagree with you but when I do I try to do so respectfully since I value your opinion. So please don't hit me with the White Knight hammer!

I think having a seperate mission server is a good thing. It will make transactions faster, more stable, reduce server load and fix an exploit a considerable amount of people have been complaining about since a long time. It also opens options for improvements for the future, more about that later. I also would like to see the game taking a more immersive approach and constantly relogging to get the best missions is certainly not immersive. Why do I care if I don't need to use it? Well because as long as it's possible I am tempted to do it.
That said, it does seem like the change is going to address the symptoms rather than the cause. People flip the boards because they don't get the missions they are interested in, and that's a problem the change is not going to fix. Apart from an immersive experience the ultimate goal of a game should be to provide fun and I can see how waiting for the mission I want to do is not fun at all (that's by the way an issue that is present in the whole game, regardless if you look at missions, overly tedious engineer unlocks like rares, USS, planetary POIs, etc). So instead of complaining about the upcoming changes, how about lobbying for an improved mission board that actually fixes the issues? Like different categories for the various mission types which makes sure that there is something for every type of player (taking the various system states into account of course!)?
Sure, the proposal isn't new and I am asking for this since ages, but it seems like now would be the perfect time to remind them of it in a collaborative effort.

Most of the times i dont agree with what you post. But when i do, is because you posted something wonderful like the above

 

[MadDogMurdock]

I can quite easily see how they got that figure.

How many unique commanders accessed the mission board in a day.
How many of those had several relogs and repeat mission requests in a short period of time.

So 2.8% of commanders could easily be spamming 75% of the mission workload.

 

[babelfisch]

Can I just ask, you say it seems pretty accurate but what do you think that 2.8% represents?

In say a single sentence, it accurately represents what?

I believe it represents the percentage of people who regularly relog to refresh the mission board.

Upon base reality.

That's just silly.

 

[JesusRocks1988]

It really doesn't matter about the percentage. The move to a dedicated mission server is a good one and needs to happen, but it carries with the the consequence of ending the ability to board flip - as far as I can tell, that doesn't sound like FD went "how do we stop board flipping? Let's put in a dedicated server. Yeah great idea! And a side-effect of that is better mission boards", it sounds more like they went "How can we stop all these crashes and make the mission board more reliable? We could go with a dedicated server, but that means players won't be able to board flip anymore." and then they decided that ultimately it was worth losing board flipping to have a more robust system.

No amount of scrutiny of the numbers is going to bring board flipping back.

I'd say we just let that figure go. It's clearly an out of context figure because not all of the people who do missions do so daily, and therefore not all of those who board flip will be doing it daily.
I board flip, I board flipped to do my superpower rank, I board flip to find a mission I want to do, I board flip to get a full complement of missions that I want to do. I was introduced to it by some friends, and it quickly became a normal part of my gameplay and a way to get around the shortcomings of the mission board - not to get more profits often, but to get the gameplay I fancied during that play session. Examples include:

- Finding a board full of good looking passenger missions to interesting destinations. Swap to the correct ship, only to find the mission board now completely devoid of those interesting missions. Time then to refresh the board and see what I get on the next spin.
- Friend is parked up in station with ALL the factions in some kind of war or unrest state. He states the board is full of massacre missions. We're both allied to the factions, but when I dock and load up the board, there are no massacre missions whatsoever. My friend is still seeing them, and taking loads of them and having the gameplay he wants. I am sitting there flipping the board to see if I can get even one.
- Naval rank up missions not spawning in a reasonable time at any of the three stations I was going between. Three stations, six mission boards. Routinely flying back and forth trying to find one naval rank mission. Having six mission boards to choose from rather than 3 doubles my chances of getting that navy rank mission.

Now, I know some changes have been made since I was doing the navy rank stuff, but there remain quite a few issues that can crop up with the mission board. I may have used board flipping a lot in its time, and I probably will continue to do so until its demise. But as long as FD also put in some methods to address the reasons why board flipping happens, I shall not mourn its passing.

 

[bitstorm]

I believe it represents the percentage of people who regularly relog to refresh the mission board.

How regularly, daily?

Is it the percentage of people relogging to refresh on a daily basis? Monthly?

I imagine daily and monthly are going to be significantly different.

 

[Aashenfox]

How regularly, daily?

Is it the percentage of people relogging to refresh on a daily basis? Monthly?

I imagine daily and monthly are going to be significantly different.

I've been through all this above (I agree with you, the metrics are needed if the data is to be trusted...here again in case you missed it...)...

Because mistakes get made in these kinds of statistics gathering exercises. Here's an example of what I believe...

First let's determine what cut off they used in terms of activity (was this a sample of active accounts, how was 'active' determined? Online in the last year? Let's go with that). I reckon out of the people who have come online in the last year, only 50% are today active players. Now take what percentage of players are actually running missions as their main gameplay, say, 60% (you can plug in your own numbers to this little formula afterwards if you like). Now let's see what percentage of those players are playing seriously, I.e. Getting all factions allied before expecting the best results (that's just knowing how to play the game), let's say it's 20% of the 60%, we're now at 6% of total population and you can probably rightly tell me that those board flipping are half of those, 3%. And we arrive at FDs figure.

The fact is though, you can cut out all that fluff that are players not playing the mission boards seriously and consistently and say that in fact it's half of those players who are board flipping. A very different result from the same statistics.

 

[M00ka]

How regularly, daily?

Is it the percentage of people relogging to refresh on a daily basis? Monthly?

I imagine daily and monthly are going to be significantly different.

Does it care what the number is, what difference does it make. FD made a decision to port the mission boards to a separate server, and guess what, they can do it and no amount of second guessing, arguing or wild theories is going to change that!

 

[bitstorm]

Does it care what the number is, what difference does it make. FD made a decision to port the mission boards to a separate server, and guess what, they can do it and no amount of second guessing, arguing or wild theories is going to change that!

It's important for the figure to be accurate.

If we are going to use a figure presented to one decimal place of accuracy, it should represent what it's claimed to represent.

In the first 3 pages of this thread I counted 5 instances of the figure being misrepresented to mean something it may not mean. (IMHO, but I could be wrong)

If discussions on the forum are arguing based on bad data they are not going to be good discussions.

I don't see any reason why it couldn't be clarified, Will even welcomed questions.

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

I also don't understand why people are arguing for it NOT to be clarified.

 

[M00ka]

It's important for the figure to be accurate.

If we are going to use a figure presented to one decimal place of accuracy, it should represent what it's claimed to represent.

In the first 3 pages of this thread I counted 5 instances of the figure being misrepresented to mean something it may not mean. (IMHO, but I could be wrong)

If discussions on the forum are arguing based on bad data they are not going to be good discussions.

I don't see any reason why it couldn't be clarified, Will even welcomed questions.



I also don't understand why people are arguing for it NOT to be clarified.

If the original document had a typo and instead of 2.8% it is really 28% you would still be complaining. And if FD has said 'due to the large number of players...' instead of quoting the percentage, you will still be arguing. And if FD hadn't quantified anything, but just said 'We are going to migrate the mission system to a separate server' you would still be complaining. And if FD didn't introduce this change you would still be complaining …...

 

[CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost]

I don't think that the number of people board-flipping matters.

The reasons why people are board-flipping are the real issue and the change of mission server architecture is an opportunity for FDev to address those issues in a way that is beneficial to all players.

Some of those reasons can be addressed with an "all modes mission server", others are probably something FDev wants to prevent.

I think most of the reasons why people board-flip can be solved even with a single mission server for all modes.


The discussion about the 2.8% looks to me like people fighting about who was right in an other discussion. Not very helpful in my opinion, but maybe entertaining for those who want to be right. (Oh: I told you all that board-flipping isn't a problem )

 

[Red Anders]

Sorry; the entire thing is funny at this point. It's a christmas miracle! You get a wing mission, you get a wing mission. Everyone get's a wing mission. People will justify the most hilarious things.

E D players react:

[video=youtube;viAF6CFwU0E]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viAF6CFwU0E[/video]

 

[babelfisch]

How regularly, daily?

Is it the percentage of people relogging to refresh on a daily basis? Monthly?

I imagine daily and monthly are going to be significantly different.

Doesn't really matter if it's on a monthly basis or a daily basis since it's probably an average. You are asking if the sample size / duration of monitoring is big enough. I honestly don't know. It's possible that they looked at 30 days or it's possible that they looked at 1 or 7 days. However, if you take a look out of the window and count how many people are wearing a red shirt per day the results will probably not be very different if you do it for 30 or just a few days.
In any case it doesn't really matter, they are fixing an exploit and that's a good thing. If they should also make more various mission types available is a different discussion that I agree with.

 

[kofeyh]

Exactly, so you're suggesting it's not 2.8% of people board flip.

No, I'm pointing out the bloody obvious that if it's a small percentage, for one person, then across the entire player base, it's going to be even smaller because not everyone board flips (I haven't ever once, people have exclaimed on this very thread).

My point is, quite simply, it's a low number, because that makes sense across some sort of broader player count. It's not a big number because a big number means everybody, almost every session, for hours on end, all the time.

..or it is but it's just that it is indeed much lower than expected.

Occam's Razor. Frontier have nothing to gain by claiming a small number. It doesn't support their change reason, which is actually shedding some load out the core servers; it also sheds and some light on what the actual situation is, and of course people cannot accept it, because the assumption doesn't match.

Frontier is probably not far off; if not everyone, not all the time. It's only going to be a few percent, across the entire player base. Apparently, enough people are running missions to strain it, but not enough flipping is going on to be more than barely a margin of error.

--

Frontier's primary focus is solving load; that's it. Nothing else is really on the table. Frontier shared an observation and are being crucified for it, without any real cause to do so.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

I don't think that the number of people board-flipping matters.

The reasons why people are board-flipping are the real issue and the change of mission server architecture is an opportunity for FDev to address those issues in a way that is beneficial to all players.

Some of those reasons can be addressed with an "all modes mission server", others are probably something FDev wants to prevent.

I think most of the reasons why people board-flip can be solved even with a single mission server for all modes.


The discussion about the 2.8% looks to me like people fighting about who was right in an other discussion. Not very helpful in my opinion, but maybe entertaining for those who want to be right. (Oh: I told you all that board-flipping isn't a problem )

Some of issues from board flipping are real, but some are 'I just don't want to play game it is designed to'. That means some players will have to adapt.

 

[znôrt]

Turns out Frontier can solve the unsolvable (remember, this wasn't possible to fix a while back)

they said (more than a year ago?) that this would be solved by having all mission servers share the same seed across modes, so it was very fixable. seems they decided to go for a partial redesign of the architecture instead of a quick hack, which doesn't seem a bad approach.

It doesn't matter how they arrived at the statistic.

2.8% really looks weird. i'm always glad to be presented eye-opening facts and i don't really dispute the number because i don't know where it came from, but that's actually the problem and as you say context is all: "2.8% of daily online players", what does that even mean? if it's a daily average, over what period? flipping is not something people do systematically but in bursts. was this before or after material brokers or all summed up? are we comparing the guy who plays 30min a week and barely knows about missions to someone regularly grinding a few hours daily for rep or materials? i can imagine a very big portion are casual players giving the game very short attention.

i do think will should clarify how they got at that figure, if only because it looks suspicious. also, i would love to see some richer stats just for curiosity. but just sputting out such a figure out of the blue doesn't cut it.

that said, board flipping was an oversight and really lame game design, was about time this was fixed. if the fix highlights other shortcomings then so be it, let them fix those too (in another couple of years ).

 

[kofeyh]

In any case it doesn't really matter, they are fixing an exploit and that's a good thing. If they should also make more various mission types available is a different discussion that I agree with.

Move it, bump numbers, tidy it. Seems fairly reasonable.

 

[JesusRocks1988]

Turns out Frontier can solve the unsolvable (remember, this wasn't possible to fix a while back).

Row Row Fight the Powah

 

[CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost]

Some of issues from board flipping are real, but some are 'I just don't want to play game it is designed to'. That means some players will have to adapt.

To be honest, the way the mission board currently works is not very good. I don't see a pattern in the board system that would indicate how this game is designed to be played.

I think more choice and options for players would be good. Some adjustments to the way missions are generated would be nice.

Sure, not everybody will be happy.

If you want you could explain how you think that the game is designed to be played. I'm honestly curious and learning how others see the game is something I find interesting.

 

[Cmdr Eratosthenes]

As per usual, wouldn't want to solve the issue of 'why', though...