mission server - the death of ED

sollisb

Banned
But game doesn't let you specific thing over and over and over and over again. It clearly tries player to change roles, figure out new things to do and so on and so forth.

This is entirely untrue!! The game goes out of its way to have you doing the specific thing over and over again!! USS, Mat collecting, exploration, trading.. They're all things you do repetitively to achieve some goal.

It is by design. It is stupid for player to expect game to serve his needs if game isn't designed to do so.

The 'game' is not a game though is it? How do I win? Whereis the end game? Where is this 'design' you speak of?

What we actually have is a universe of system and planets, where-in, the player can perform a limited set of actions, and those actions are then used to acomplish what they call gameplay. Missions, Material gathering, trading, thoargoid hunting, res combat, supercruis and other are all actions the player can perform. The problem is, to them are added highly over-used randomisation to appear as rewards, where they are in fact cheap coding tricks.

If that means player wants to leave? Please, do so. Problem is, you never do,

Telling, or insinuating, that players leave, is nothing more than a cheap shot and a 'get out clause'

despite not playing ED at all.

You yourself, have stated on more than a few occasions, that you play Elite for as little as a few hours a MONTH! Yet you feel you have the right to pontificate to those of us with 3000+ hours in the game?? I have 5 accounts, each worth around 5bn in liquid assets, with full fleets of the highest tier ships. I have done everything this game has to offer, except Thargoids. If you need.. I can show a screenshot of a 15bn liquid asset account. That same account is triple Elite, has never traded and never travelled more than 1000ly. That's how broken this game is.

Now.. What have you actually got that allows you tell other people to 'leave' and claim they don't play ED at all?
 
Regardless of the metaphysic discussion, I think that many people don't know exactly how the mission board servers work. Well, nor do I exactly, but IMHO, there are not "server per instance". I believe there are several (but not many) mission board servers, that you have the chance to connect to when changing instances, depending on load, your connection health and performance, etc. Each on a 15 minutes refresh. Each board is downloaded by the client, so you cannot take a mission and have it disappears for other players.

Let's assume for the sake of the argument there are currently 3 mission servers that you currently can access when repeatedly switching instances (open, PG, solo). After the change, there will be only one server, but we know nothing about the number of generated missions. What we know is the reason Frontier changed the architecture: they said that currently the mission servers are sharing resources with other server roles and that they think a single but dedicated mission server will be better. All in all, this could just be an internal thing, with no impact on the game (besides less error messages). I believe that the issue that born this thread is just a collateral byproduct of this architectural change.

Maybe... maybe they will increase the number of generated missions (since the performance of the new architecture will be better presumably). They did some testing on a beta after changing the way packets are received by the clients (when they changed the bulk "receive all or nothing" mission board) and they've shown that a lot of missions on a board is possible.

Even currently, I see passenger missions in Robigo Mines with 150 missions from the 3 factions but only like 5 non-passenger missions on the same outpost. So, the only thing they need to do is to give us a reasonable number of missions, since there are no technical reasons not to, like before.
 
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?

That's a pretty bad analogy. Presuming being "Dealt a hand" you're referring to some sort of game of chance. Finding missions of interest on the mission board should not be a game of chance... things like destinations, reward types, cargo types, chance away. But the mere presence of a particular type of mission should not be a game of chance.

Currently, it is. There is minimal difference between the underlying types of missions you can be dealt between government types, state or economy. There *are* effects, but they affect the underlying attributes of the mission (and that is fine), and not the base mission type. Copy pasta from my own post elsewhere, to exemplify this:

War missions:
- Massacre warzone targets/deserters (Massacre)
- Assassinate Deserter/General (Assasination)
- Deliver war supplies (cargo delivery)
- Deliver strategic information (courier)
- Source war supplies (source cargo)
- Wartime surface scan (surface scan mission)
- Wartime salvage of Black Box (salvage mission)
- Liberate assault plans (legal cargo hijack)
- Support the cause (donation)

Meanwhile, in a Boom state, we get:
- Massacre pirates (Massacre)
- Assassinate Pirate Lord (Assasination)
- Deliver (random cargo) (cargo delivery)
- Boom time delivery of information (courier)
- Source (random cargo) (source cargo)
- Surface Scan Mission (surface scan mission)
- Salvage Black Box/Commercial Samples (salvage mission)
- Liberate precious gems/hostages (legal cargo hijack)
- Support the cause (donation)

This is the space that shouldn't be a game of chance. There *should* be predictability around the underlying type of mission given government states. The same old example, but a Democratic[1] faction should *never, ever* offer missions to assassinate political opponents during an election... meanwhile Dictatorships[1] should always have that sort of mission available during an Election. Conversely, Democracies should have plentiful missions to courier polling data, and Dictatorships should never have them. During an outbreak, a Corporate faction should have missions purchase or deliver medicines, while an Authoritarian should be out destroying plagueships.

The pilot should be able to make sensible decisions around where to find what types of missions... I don't think anyone would complain that they could never find Assassination missions offered by a Democratic faction in a boom, if they knew a different faction/state/economy combination could reliably generate them (until that state/economy/government combination changes).
 
Missing the big picture there.
The primary reason for the change is server stability - that's a no brainer.

The secondary benefit is that once mission spamming doesn't really work, FD can finally get to grips with mission balancing, both in terms of how many of various types of mission get generated under various circumstances, but also balance the rewards relative to each other and to other game activities.

Server stability, there are some minor issues but those are irrelevant regarding playerbase stability.
3.3 with static mission boards accross all game modes, refreshing once every 10min will have negative impact on playerbase.

Happy playerbase > minor server issues

 
Server stability, there are some minor issues but those are irrelevant regarding playerbase stability.
3.3 with static mission boards accross all game modes, refreshing once every 10min will have negative impact on playerbase.

I may be wrong but I got the feeling that they were doing this in part because the current system puts a bizarrely huge load on their servers. Ignoring the performance issues, that might actually be getting expensive if they're charged for CPU usage (Amazon Cloud stuff isn't it? Do they charge for CPU use?)
 
As always with FD, adding another layer of cosmetics in order to hide problem but not fixing it.
It is an on going pattern for 4 yeara now.
 
I may be wrong but I got the feeling that they were doing this in part because the current system puts a bizarrely huge load on their servers. Ignoring the performance issues, that might actually be getting expensive if they're charged for CPU usage (Amazon Cloud stuff isn't it? Do they charge for CPU use?)

Difficult to know what they have set up, but assuming scaling ECS instances would be a reasonable guess, yeah cost scales based on instance size, essentially memory + cpu.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

From what I can gather Frontier seem to have a bunch of stuff shoehorned into a single "service", they're separating those out.

Benefit is probably not to do with cost because it's a bit difficult so say if two smaller instances is cheaper than one larger one. It's more architectural, if mission generation is pulled into its own service rather than running locally you can do the shared service thing, you get benefits of isolating a service ie resilience, being able to more closely manage infrastructure for that service, and probably makes developing + deploying code easier too.
 
As always with FD, adding another layer of cosmetics in order to hide problem but not fixing it.

On the contrary, board flipping was never an intended part of the game (the fact that they consider it ok is neither here nor there), and board stability and resource consumption are being improved.

They do, however, need to get the balance right for number and type of missions offered. Not saying you should get perfect missions every time, but there should always be something you can take.

And they need to test it thoroughly beforehand. Which would, I grant, make a pleasant change.
 
I'm excited for no board flipping. They'll be able to improve the game now. The instancing is dreadful. And they'll balance the payouts. Yes, we won't be able to make as much money, but that'll be the same for everyone. Wealth is relative. But I'm most excited that it may help them improve the instancing.
 

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
“I SHOULD BE ALLOWED FIVE ACES!”

Yeah, that how it sounds like.

Server stability, there are some minor issues but those are irrelevant regarding playerbase stability.
3.3 with static mission boards accross all game modes, refreshing once every 10min will have negative impact on playerbase.

Happy playerbase > minor server issues


You mean "3.3 with static mission boards accross all game modes, refreshing once every 10min will have negative impact on the small part of playerbase that use board flipping" of course.
 
Server stability, there are some minor issues but those are irrelevant regarding playerbase stability.
3.3 with static mission boards accross all game modes, refreshing once every 10min will have negative impact on playerbase.

Happy playerbase > minor server issues


I will not miss those who quit the game about not being able to use exploits.
 
Server stability, there are some minor issues but those are irrelevant regarding playerbase stability.
3.3 with static mission boards accross all game modes, refreshing once every 10min will have negative impact on playerbase.

Happy playerbase > minor server issues


If this thread is anything to go by, the 'playerbase' is divided on this issue.

Many fear what will happen to the board in the short term.
Many can see the potential long term benefits.

Either way it's all hot air - FD will do what FD are going to do.
 
I am coming back for some destructive criticism. For me the whole mission system, as is, could be trashed. I would not shed a single tear. Missions is one of the sloppiest, most neglectable part of the game - in my eyes. If I don't have to, I don't touch those mission boards and if I have to, I go and clean my hands asap afterwards.

Honestly missions can only improve. There is no real way they can get worse. Massacre mostly bugged. Liberate mostly useless. Wing missions are a good start for something better. But stability (dropping at beacon) can improve. Chained missions - what are they? Random generated randomness? Nah. Surface scans? A joke? Or shooting sitting ducks eh skimmers? What fun is this? What kind of immersion? It's utter nonsense at best. Maybe mining missions and the new better payed fetch-missions make a bit sense. But else... not my cup of fun.

Really I am glad I don't need to touch this random stuff and I can find a lot of opportunity without those underpaid and moronic missions.
 
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You mean "3.3 with static mission boards accross all game modes, refreshing once every 10min will have negative impact on the small part of playerbase that use board flipping" of course.

In fairness you have no idea whether it's a small part of the playerbase or not.
 
Would you care to rephrase that in the form of a wager? :)

Ok, guess I can't ruin my rep anymore. So I bet: missions will be as bad or a bit better then today, after first series of patches after the first release chapter of the next episode (except they have something to do with multicrew...). I'll bet a load of 30 tons fresh LTD on this.
 
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Ok, guess I can't ruin my rep anymore. So I bet: missions will be as bad or a bit better then today, after first series of patches after the first release chapter of the next episode (except they have something to do with multicrew...)

Don't worry, I was (mostly) jesting. I'm hopeful that the new mission system will be an overall improvement in terms of balance and stability. It's just that Frontier don't have the best track record when it comes to problem-free rollouts of new or drastically altered features...
 
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