mission server - the death of ED

[CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost]

…
Either way, it's dumb to complain about the new system on the basis that the current system sucks.

The complain is that the new system won't change the problems of the current system while taking away the workaround.

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?

No, it's more like demanding that the deck of cards is properly shuffled before the cards being dealt out. Board flipping in that case is throwing away the given hand and demanding a new hand.

The current mission generating system doesn't always give a good mix of possible mission, but instead often only offers missions of a certain type per refresh.

For example:
refresh: only massacre missions and a few scan missions.
refresh: only massacre missions and a few scan missions.
refresh: mostly cargo hauling missions and data delivery missions.
refresh: only massacre missions
…

To me it looks like there is a bug in the way the missions are aggregated for the board - fixing this bug would help tremendously in my opinion and make the change to the single mission server absolutely no problem.

… I'm hopeful that the new mission system will be an overall improvement in terms of balance and stability. …

FDev clearly stated that they have no intention (at this time) to change that much about the mission system beside the new server architecture.
The result is the new system will inherit the problems of the old system.

I absolutely understand why players dislike board-flipping and why they get agitated about it and see it as an exploit. At the same time I think all this dislike about board-flipping is fogging their view of the underlying issue.

But, since nobody here can change anything all we can do is wait for the change and see how it turns out.
Those who think the change will cause problems voiced their opinion (maybe a bit to harsh, but I hope that FDev is cool enough to see past that and understand why they complain), others have offered their point of view.

 

[Julio Montega]

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.

Better paying, but not better fitting your playstyle.
There is no "getting to know each other", although
you always have that one face as your ultimate ally contact.

You read into it what you want to read into reputation.
That is not what i meant.

Reputation is this:
- progress bar on "rank progression" with a minor faction with decay
- same for naval rank only static
- same for engineer, only static
- unlocks better paying missions

It is a named progress bar.
It is no reputation.
It does not factor in heroic or dastardly deeds.
It does not simulate the faction getting to know you
and your competences/playstyle.
It doesn't tailor job offers to your playstyle.
It doesn't mean anything as credits don't mean anything.

 

[Darkfyre99]

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.

My understanding of it is that currently the same virtual server that tracks the status of entities within an instance (NPCs, salvage, USSs, POIs, etc.) also handles the mission boards, if there are any. So whenever the matchmaker spawns a new instance, the server that spawns will have a new mission board as well.

So if someone like me, whose "weekend" is in the middle of the week, is playing concurrent to the European prime time (aka during "peak players") in Open and I pull into Jameson Memorial, since my connection to whoever's hosting the instance in Europe will be rubbish, the matchmaker spawns a new instance for me, which doesn't share the same NPC traffic, passenger board, or mission board with the European host.

I could be wrong, though. I'm not a fan of spending ages searching mission boards for "perfect" missions, so I just grab whatever meets two or three of my criteria for my current goals, and get back to flying my space ship. My home system is a heavy traffic system, however, and I've never noticed any particular problems with mission variety there, even on those occasions where I've felt the need to swap ships.

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.

That's my understanding as well... until the moment you leave the board, either to switch ships or to go to the other board to see what's available, you can take that mission. Once you leave, your client is no longer storing that mission board, so when you return, your client retrieves the current status of your instances mission board, so if you're not alone in an instance, other players can grab that mission right out from under you.

That's one of the reasons why "perfect" missions can disappear right out from under you when you leave a board.

The other is that the refresh timer starts ticking the moment a new station instance spawns, so if you're one of those players who uses a docking computer, or takes forever to dock their ships manually, you're a lot closer to the board refresh than you think you are. If you're also the type who only wants "perfect" missions, by the time you've searched the whole board, swapped ships, and returned, the board's already refreshed.

In my opinion, far too many people are focusing on the end of board flipping to realize what the effects sharing a single board across all instances are going to be, especially when combined with the reduced refresh timer. Even if I'm wrong about how mission boards currently work, there's still going to be new obstacles for players to overcome if they're particular about the missions they take.

I anticipate there's going to be much salt generated on these forums, and as a player who prefers to have obstacles in her way, I'm going to be one of those people who are enjoying themselves, both in the game and from all the salt being generated.

 

[che_don_john]

I'm in Robigo and there are no missions at all in any of the three stations, save for some charity ones for one of the minor factions (I need an Empire one to rank up). Is this something that's likely to be fixed with the mission server, or is it an unrelated issue?

 

[bitstorm]

2.8% looks small to me!

2.8% of people misunderstand simple statistics!

 

[Vorxian]

The problem for me is fixing a workaround, not fixing the main issue which is a variety of missions for specific professions with adequate pay.

For me, I would like to feel motivated to engage in high capacity delivery missions, utilizing my expensive ship to max efficiency, and be compensated fairly.

Never in my time have I heard of a fedex A300 flying from New York to London with a kilo of sugar on board for £1.45.

What you do is load it to max capacity ~50,000kg of sugar, then make the journey, and profit heavily.

Mode switching was like the all important 'lets load this baby up' work around. Now that's been fixed, we're likely to see more employed mechanics of 1/3rd capacity runs. Sure one can load up on regular commodities, but, it's no where near as an efficient exercise. Lets face it, the payments scrooge at the best of times, so efficient is the only way to really be effective in the cr/hour calc.

Delivery missions should probably dynamically scale with your ship capacity. If you have 500 units cargo free, missions should take advantage of that, which means you get compensated for investing in more capable hardware.

If you think i'm talking rubbish... why not go out and hire a

to deliver a banana to your cousin 300 miles away.



a) you wouldn't travel 300 miles to deliver a banana, b) but even if someone offered to pay you £300 to do it, you'd probably use something smaller more efficient and faster like a motorbike.

So either missions need to pay out well to deliver that premium banana (which means I can use a super fast long range ship) or let me load up to max capacity and max payout and I'll use my unshielded cutter to max out profit (incurring risk).

Back to mission board flipping, it helped to effectively fill the cargo.

(for the record I'm pro board flipping fix - but, they really need to redesign how missions are baked first).

 

[Darkfyre99]

The problem for me is fixing a workaround, not fixing the main issue which is a variety of missions for specific professions with adequate pay.

For me, I would like to feel motivated to engage in high capacity delivery missions, utilizing my expensive ship to max efficiency, and be compensated fairly.

Never in my time have I heard of a fedex A300 flying from New York to London with a kilo of sugar on board for £1.45.

What you do is load it to max capacity ~50,000kg of sugar, then make the journey, and profit heavily.

Mode switching was like the all important 'lets load this baby up' work around. Now that's been fixed, we're likely to see more employed mechanics of 1/3rd capacity runs. Sure one can load up on regular commodities, but, it's no where near as an efficient exercise. Lets face it, the payments scrooge at the best of times, so efficient is the only way to really be effective in the cr/hour calc.

Delivery missions should probably dynamically scale with your ship capacity. If you have 500 units cargo free, missions should take advantage of that, which means you get compensated for investing in more capable hardware.

If you think i'm talking rubbish... why not go out and hire a



to deliver a banana to your cousin 300 miles away.



a) you wouldn't travel 300 miles to deliver a banana, but even if someone offered to pay you £300 to do it, you'd probably use something smaller more efficient and faster like a motorbike.

So either missions need to pay out well to deliver that premium banana (which means I can use a super fast long range ship) or let me load up to max capacity and max payout and I'll use my unshielded cutter to max out profit (incurring risk).

Back to mission board flipping, it helped to effectively fill the cargo.

(for the record I'm pro board flipping fix - but, they really need to redesign how missions are baked first).

Problem with that analogy is that when I picture our role in the Elite universe, I picture us less as FedEx, and more like a bicycle courier or similar "on demand" delivery services. If you need a package delivered ASAP, and you don't have your own delivery vehicle, you don't ship it FedEx, and you end up paying a small fortune it. Which, IMO, is exactly what happens in this game. Most of the mission rewards I see are in the "you could buy your own ship for that!" range. I can only conclude that smaller ships and modules are heavily subsidized by the Pilots' Federation, as a benefit for its members.

 

[fu9ar]

Fuel is free and there is another Commander waiting to take your place. Jumping to another station one jump over is like asking someone to pop down to the shops for you, it takes minutes, but without an FTL ship carrying the data securely, it would be intercepted and useless. Same with goods, it takes minutes to jump a system over. We're Johnny On The Spot delivery.

When I am playing courier boi, my ships will carry data, cargo, and people all at the same time, not try to focus on one to the exclusion of the others. There are the bulk cargo ships for those jobs. That's not what Commanders do...

If you want to do trading, you can fill up your ship with Commodities and trade to your little heart's content, but that's not what missions are for.

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.

That is a flatly incorrect analysis of the experience of popping from supercruise to realspace around a station. Yes, there are technically loading screens to load in the station assets, but they are almost imperceptible, and lining up your approach properly in supercruise means your approach in realspace is also lined up properly, which helps to uphold the illusion of continuity. If all you do is point directly at a destination station and pull back to blue at 7 seconds, you are not taking full advantage of what supercruise has to offer! Furthermore, any time I am running courier missions heavily (to "grind" rep or influence), I'll fit a docking computer so that those moments are a momentary break from needing to focus on the game 100% and so I can take a moment to stand up, stretch my legs and fingers, maybe even put the kettle on for a cuppa!

 

[CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost]

…Most of the mission rewards I see are in the "you could buy your own ship for that!" range. …

The highest paying cargo delivery mission I've seen in the last weeks was a 10 Mcr. Palladium mission - 180t. For 10 Mcr. you won't get a ship that is able to deliver that amount of cargo to an outpost.

Not complaining about the payout. It was really good.

I just usually don't see cargo mission rewards that would allow me to buy a ship able to do that mission. Thinking of it, I've never seen one at all. The only cases I've seen mission rewards that are close to the cost of a ship capable of doing that mission are fringe cases of VIP sightseeing missions (small economy cabins) and some data delivery missions.

 

[Stealthie]

The complain is that the new system won't change the problems of the current system while taking away the workaround.

Well, firstly, I don't really buy the whole "workaround" thing.

If you can board-flip to stack missions that you want, then the missions are available but they're spawning at a rate the player isn't happy with, leading to them board-flipping to get more of them.
That isn't a "workaround".
That's an exploit.

As GreyArea said, that's like saying it's justifiable to search through a deck of cards as a "workaround" to ensure you get a royal flush with every hand of poker.

If the board isn't providing the missions you want at all then board-flipping won't help.
At that point, you need to either go to a different station to get the missions you want or you need to do different missions instead.

Fundamentally, players need to set aside this faulty idea that the game should provide them with a "royal flush" every time they look at any mission board.


Moving on to the actual problems with the mission-board....

Yes, it's probably fair to say that the mission-boards don't currently offer a sufficiently diverse selection of missions and it's probably fair to say that mission payments aren't what they should be.
Both of these problems are intrinsic to the current system though.

If, for the sake of discussion, a board currently offers 4 types of mission and people are flipping to stack 2 of these mission-types and that's causing the mission generator to run somewhere near full-capacity then adding another 2 types of mission (especially if they're desirable types) is likely to push the mission-generator beyond it's capacity and provoke connection errors and disrupt gameplay.

Once mission-generation is swapped to a dedicated server, thus removing the ability to board-flip, FDev will be able to see how well the server can buffer missions and then make a decision to add a more diverse selection of missions and/or increase the spawn-rates of existing mission-types.

Equally, with missions being generated on a dedicated server FDev will be able to look at mission payments and adjust them without constantly being forced to consider whether the payment is at a level where those who exploit the current system can make unacceptably large sums.

No doubt there'll be people who'll say "But, they haven't sorted this out for 4 years so why should we expect they'll sort it out now?!" but that ignores the fact that for the last 4 years FDev have been working within the constraints of the current system.
With the new system in place, this should no longer be an obstacle.
We will, fundamentally, get the mission boards that FDev want us to have with no compromises.

 

[CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost]

…
If the board isn't providing the missions you want at all then board-flipping won't help.
…

But it does. That's exactly my issue with the current system. That's the issue I am talking about.

Doing board-flipping to get more missions, to optimize profit - I completely agree that this is an exploit and I'm happy that it will get fixed.

 

[Vorxian]

If you want to do trading, you can fill up your ship with Commodities and trade to your little heart's content, but that's not what missions are for.

I agree, but were it not for commodity trading, or commodity commuting being mind mindbogglingly ineffective as a means to make money compared to mission stacking, then one gravitates to which ever is more lucrative. Unfortunately there's a bell-curve where mid range ships actually make more than large ships vs their cost. Which may indeed be the ultimate goal, but then one asks, if bigger ships are indeed goals for pilots, there's no further need or incentive to have one other than just to 'own one'. Which again, may be the the FDEV goal.

Whatever happens now, will only truly affect the newer players. Older players that ripped the old mechanics a new one and made billions will be ok, but ultimately never caught up by 'fixes' that are there to impede. I could say "I'm alright Jack", but it irks me that friends of mine can never catch up. When they turn around and say... "nah I'm too far behind now", it's demoralizing for everyone, and I wander the loneliness of the void with my sack of gold, and no one to play around with and share it with. It's like the old addage of being the 'richest person in the grave yard' vs 'the average Joe at the party'. Again, perhaps that's the goal of the game.

I kinda sound doom and gloomy, i'm not; just thinking out loud. I happen to be looking forward to many of the exploration changes and reworks coming our way. Time will tell!

 

[Stealthie]

But it does. That's exactly my issue with the current system. That's the issue I am talking about.

That's a contradiction in terms.

If you can board-flip to find a type of mission you're looking for, it IS available and is simply intended to be rare.

If it genuinely isn't available, no amount of board-flipping will allow you to find it.

 

[CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost]

…
If you can board-flip to find a type of mission you're looking for, it IS available and is simply intended to be rare.
…

If a mission type was supposed to be rare, then that mission type wouldn't show up "a lot" in one refresh of the board and on the next refresh not at all.
I would expect a lot of missions of type X and occasionally a mission of type Y.
What I see is on one refresh a lot of type X missions and on the next refresh a bunch of type Y missions.

To me it looks like a problem with the method used to populate the mission board.

 

[fu9ar]

I agree, but were it not for commodity trading, or commodity commuting being mind mindbogglingly ineffective as a means to make money compared to mission stacking, then one gravitates to which ever is more lucrative. Unfortunately there's a bell-curve where mid range ships actually make more than large ships vs their cost. Which may indeed be the ultimate goal, but then one asks, if bigger ships are indeed goals for pilots, there's no further need or incentive to have one other than just to 'own one'. Which again, may be the the FDEV goal.

Whatever happens now, will only truly affect the newer players. Older players that ripped the old mechanics a new one and made billions will be ok, but ultimately never caught up by 'fixes' that are there to impede. I could say "I'm alright Jack", but it irks me that friends of mine can never catch up. When they turn around and say... "nah I'm too far behind now", it's demoralizing for everyone, and I wander the loneliness of the void with my sack of gold, and no one to play around with and share it with. It's like the old addage of being the 'richest person in the grave yard' vs 'the average Joe at the party'. Again, perhaps that's the goal of the game.

I kinda sound doom and gloomy, i'm not; just thinking out loud. I happen to be looking forward to many of the exploration changes and reworks coming our way. Time will tell!

So take your bros along on the newly minted wing missions and give them a leg up? That's clearly the intent, like why they have lower payouts than commensurate solo missions.

 

[Stealthie]

If a mission type was supposed to be rare, then that mission type wouldn't show up "a lot" in one refresh of the board and on the next refresh not at all.
I would expect a lot of missions of type X and occasionally a mission of type Y.
What I see is on one refresh a lot of type X missions and on the next refresh a bunch of type Y missions.

To me it looks like a problem with the method used to populate the mission board.

Can't say I've noticed that, TBH.
In my experience, things like "Smeaton runs" show up reliably, but always in small numbers.
Course, I don't board flip very often so I'm not really qualified to comment.

Perhaps it'd be an idea to conduct some kind of "study" by deliberately board-flipping, say, 100 times and listing all the missions which show up on each board?

If the results showed that a mission-board provided, say, 60 missions and that 25 of them were "Type A" missions (thus implying they were intended to be common) but then refreshing the board only provided 2 "Type A" missions (implying they were intended to be rare) then it certainly might be something that'd be worth drawing to FDev's attention so they could look at the RNG parameters of their mission generator in order to make it more consistent.

 

[bitstorm]

As GreyArea said, that's like saying it's justifiable to search through a deck of cards as a "workaround" to ensure you get a royal flush with every hand of poker.

I don't really like this analogy because it implies you're in direct competition with someone, and cheating someone out of money.

Cheating in poker is clearly wrong for any right thinking person, but were talking about refreshing a board here for more missions at the expense of no-one. I don't think the comparison makes much sense tbh.

 

[Jukelo]

I don't really like this analogy because it implies you're in direct competition with someone, and cheating someone out of money.

Even in a solo game you are in a (usually friendly) competition with the game designers, who try to provide you with a degree of challenge, whether through a test of skill, intellect or patience, to obtain what you want.

 

[Audaxxx]

For a lot of us the mission system has been poor for a long time and I've heard many youtubers and forum goers discuss the topic thoroughly and actually come up with great ideas to completely eradicate the need to board flip. The problem for me is there's not enough variety to choose from and sometimes (passenger missions for example) there's just outright not enough of them to load up my ship. There's also the need to flip to get the materials I need to engineer stuff as without it just takes forever.

Looking at Fdevs replies in the OP it seems these changes are definitely going ahead and Fdev seem to think everything else is all ok but i'm fairly sure when this gets implemented there'll be a surge in complaints about the mission system as the workaround's been taken away without putting something else in place to prevent it from becoming even more of a frustrating experience.

 

[bitstorm]

Even in a solo game you are in a (usually friendly) competition with the game designers, who try to provide you with a degree of challenge, whether through a test of skill, intellect or patience, to obtain what you want.

So the poker hand analogy really means you're cheating the designers of poker??? (rather than the opposing player)

C'mon, if were gonna try to make an analogy let's not made it so loaded.