You are absolutely right. I don't think missions should ever be readily available to anyone. First of all missions are not even an integral part of the game and are in no way related to progression, rank, money or.. you know: fun. I really don't see why people would want to do them in the first place. Personally I find supercruising from station to station without any reason other than the game wasting my time so much more enjoyable. The game is already a big win button anyways. We don't need people doing the activity they build their ship for whenever they want. What is this, a game?
mission server - the death of ED
- Thread starter Bionic Bytes
- Start date
You are absolutely right. I don't think missions should ever be readily available to anyone. First of all missions are not even an integral part of the game and are in no way related to progression, rank, money or.. you know: fun. I really don't see why people would want to do them in the first place. Personally I find supercruising from station to station without any reason other than the game wasting my time so much more enjoyable. The game is already a big win button anyways. We don't need people doing the activity they build their ship for whenever they want. What is this, a game?
In my opinion, one of the biggest side effects of a dedicated mission server is that there will be one board for a station. Currently, it's one board per instance of a station. So let's take, for example, at a very busy station during the European Prime Time, where we currently have 30 players docked at the a station. Of those, we have 22 players in Open, six in private groups, and two in solo. Of those in private groups, four are part of a single private group flying in a wing.
When we look at the total number of station instances, we would have:
- One board for the Open European Players (12 players)
- One board for the Open North American Players (3 players)
- One board for the Open East Asian Players (3 player)
- One board for each of the Open Players (4 players) who don't have a low latency connection to the host of the European, NA, and EA instances, for a total of four instances
- One board for each private group with a member at the station, for a total of three
- One board for each solo player in the system, for a total of two
That's about a dozen different boards offering players missions, and that's not even counting board flipping. However, twelve of the players have to share a single board, so they may find the selection a bit limited, especially if they switch ships in order to take lucrative mission, only to find that that mission has vanished because one of the other eleven snagged it while they were switching ships.
Meanwhile, the competition over in North American and East Asia instances, due to most of their actual competition still being at work in the case of the North American players, or asleep in the case of the East Asian players, is much less fierce than in the European instance. The winged up players in a private group are in a similar position.
Finally, for four of the Open players, the two solo players, and two of the private group players, they each have a board all to themselves. They have the wealth of options available to them to choose from, and can select mission at their leisure.
Now, imagine what would happen when all thirty players end up sharing the same board.
I can almost picture the dawning looks of horror right now.
Whether you think this is a good thing really depends upon what you're seeking from this game.
I, for one, am already enjoying thinking about ways to modify my ships to adapt to this new reality, refining my board navigation techniques due to no longer having the luxury of being a non-local prime time player, and most importantly of all, considering how to further manipulate the mission board to my advantage in regards to BGS work.
Putting regions aside, I have no idea what goes on there.
It's the same board for open and all PGs isn't it. So solo players see one board, everyone else sees another.
Is that the way it works?
I might be wrong but I always assumed the tracking was done client side, so if multiple players were looking at the same mission board they could all take the same mission.
I did not catch on until the last line, lol.
Thank you, you've proven my point exactly. Dissecting someone's argument into pieces and not using the parts that prove you wrong IS ridiculous.
So you are saying, the missions will get populated with missions that everyone in Sidewinders can take, and will barely pay for fuel for people in big ships?
Ferry 4t of goods to station B - will pay you 3000Cr +10% "balancing". Uhm no thanks, I rather do something profitable.
Yes, I know, personal narrative etc - As someone with limited time, I will want to get somewhere. When I spend 2 hours of my time playing a game, I want to be able to see some progress. Credits go up, mats go up, I get something engineered, you name it. But playing for 2 hours to get a few thousand credits isn't going to cut the mustard. What if I get a rebuy screen in between, that will set me back about 10m to say the least (cheap jumpaconda). That's not progress.
Up until now there was a workaround for the flaws (or what some people consider to be flaws) of the current system. That workaround is being taken away. Other than that the system remains exactly as it was before.
Presumably, what you're describing as "workarounds" are what FDev have described as "undesirable behaviour" and what other people describe as "exploits".
With the new system in place, maybe people will be justified in complaining about the operation of the mission-board.
In that case, and if FDev find the complaints justifiable, it should be much more straightforward to fix the problem without constantly having to worry that "workarounds" will allow people to indulge in undesirable behaviour or exploits.
Either way, it's dumb to complain about the new system on the basis that the current system sucks.
So explain what you mean by "the mission system does not provide a level of game play that offers decent value for the player's investment of time."
I've had 20 missions stacked without board flipping, many times. It maybe took me a little longer because I had to actually fly to different stations to turn them in when I was done, but I was actually experiencing a level of game play the whole time instead of spending most of my time "playing the game" logging in and back out again only to make a single jump from one station to another or whatever.
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If they don't close the loophole they can never fix the balance. It's impossible to have a well-calibrated selection of missions with an appropriate range of challenge and reward if there are two totally different ways of accessing the board, where one method produces outrageously different results from the other method. Right now everything has to be calibrated for the most extreme case, or they have to split the difference in some weird way, which serves nobody. Plus it makes it harder to track what people are even doing.
Frontier still has to make the whole system work, they have to balance it and fix the functionality where it is broken. That's going to continue to be the case one way or the other, and a unified mission server won't fix that problem. It is however a necessary precursor to any meaningful improvement to the mission system.
Well your "game play" sounds like it sucks and I can understand why people would want to avoid it. Jumping in and out of supercruise over and over again is just a different kind of loading screen and not much of an improvement over logging in and out of the game over and over. In fact it's practically the same activity the only difference is that with board flipping you don't have to do as much of it.
Unified mission server is a good thing. But Frontier need to make changes to accommodate the players who felt compelled to board flip, i.e. players who want to fill their entire cargo hold with mission delivery goods and do one jump to one destination. The new cargo depot feature is a good step in that direction now we just need a broader range of delivery quantities and payouts that scale. (eg get rid of wing mission payout duplication and quadruple the payouts for all those 2000 ton cargo missions, etc.O
When playing cards do you expect to be dealt a perfect hand every time? After all it’s a game, right? Who’s going to have fun with a bad hand?
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I don't think most here are asking for a perfect hand of cards, but they are asking for additional decks they can sift though to get the perfect hand every time …...
“I SHOULD BE ALLOWED FIVE ACES!”
Didnt realize any form of winning in Elite Dangerous was predicated on what mission I got offered.
I don't think I ever bested someone because I saw 5 Cargo missions at once.
Edit: Actually that sounds like fun satire
CMDR A: "Alright I filled up my Beluga with Passengers without board flipping once, what do I win?"
CMDR B: "...Have you done the missions?"
CMDR A: "No but I-"
CMDR B: "Then you win nothing"
CMDR A: "But thats so r-"
CMDR B: "Go do the missions"
Ect ect.
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Or better:
Aksing for the CMDR to form a REPUTATION, something that
minor factions hear about and evaluate when the CMDR is in range.
"I heard you brought in the bounty of that general.
Well done! Would you work for us along the lines?"
Immersion starts with minor faction and CMDR reputation
meaning something and opening job offers.
Wait one, are you suggesting that it is difficult to increase one's reputation with minor factions? That you need to stack the deck by board flipping to gain reputation that you can't do normally? I gather you are suggesting that it is difficult to gain reputation now, that the specific rewards being offered for ++++ or more reputation isn't working? Are you really suggesting that you need to board flip to ensure you get maximum reputation on every mission, and if not, the game is broken?
No you are reading that into it.
I am saying reputation has no meaning, other than pay,
but minor factions don't know you and don't give you missions tied to
your preference and competence. It is RNG.
Also rep is a progress bar, not something delicately coded.
Disagree that reputation means nothing. Half the arguments here are about complaints that the mission boards aren't giving better paying missions, yet if you get fully allied with the factions, better missions are offered are they not? Of course some will still complain that they aren't getting perfect mission boards without flipping but I would suggest they would complain even if they did get the missions they wanted.