I think we may be over-extending the analogy a wee bit guys
How's about: it's like asking for more and more decks of cards until you find the one that will allow you to deal the perfect hand of Solitaire?
Look, at least it's not a car analogy, ok?
mission server - the death of ED
- Thread starter Bionic Bytes
- Start date
I think we may be over-extending the analogy a wee bit guys
How's about: it's like asking for more and more decks of cards until you find the one that will allow you to deal the perfect hand of Solitaire?
Look, at least it's not a car analogy, ok?
You were attacking the poker analogy based on the fact poker is a competitive game whereas ED is generally not.
I'm not defending the poker analogy, I'm just saying don't be too hung up on the competitive (multiplayer) aspect since it's not a prerequesite to game balance.
It'll make no difference at all to the whinge level, just alter the subject for a bit.
"I demand X right now" will always be a thing for a minority of people.
See, this is a classic example of the sort of cognitive dissonance required to justify board-flipping.
The fundamental issue is that in both cases a game is capable of providing the player with a range of outcomes ranging from lousy to superb and it's faulty thinking for a player to assume they're entitled to a superb outcome every time.
Those gold rushes usually result from issues with the way new missions work and/or fringe cases for the mission objectives of a certain mission type - basically the lack of a reliable edge case handling for missions.
Those things are certainly something where the mission system could benefit form improvements to prevent such fringe cases.
That indeed would be a helpful "study". Not sure I I would want to do that though. Board-flipping is absolutely no fun. Maybe…
That "making the mission generator more consistent" is what I want - nothing more.
The assumption that hauling a plane full of sugar should be profitable because you have a plane and want to haul sugar, is both a great analogy for what board flippers seem to want, and also pure insanity.
The profit from the sugar you can fit in an A300 isn't going to cover the cost of fuel for the trip, nor should it in any plausible scenario, no matter how much someone wants to haul sugar at 15 cents profit a kg with a hundred-million dollar aircraft.
This is entirely backwards.
You get more capable hardware to handle larger jobs. If those jobs don't exist, and in many places and situations they shouldn't, the hardware capable of handling higher volume is a waste.
You are in direct competition, probably with quite a few others.
For example, the BGS isn't irrelevant to everyone, and if you are board flipping twice a minute for two hours to spam the crap out of donation missions, you could have easily negated a month of honest gameplay on my part. We are both throwing influence at our chosen factions as fast as we can, but I won't cheese the system with exploits.
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I think we may be over-extending the analogy a wee bit guys
How's about: it's like asking for more and more decks of cards until you find the one that will allow you to deal the perfect hand of Solitaire?
Spose so, I guess it depends whether you consider logging on/off a valid mechanism, or part of the "game".
It's hard to reconcile that it's not when you look at things like Guardian Blueprints where (presumably) you're expected to fly up in the air (out of the instance) and back down to get another blueprint.
Or Dav's hope where you're supposed(?) to fly into space and back down where stuff magically reappears, or if you're there in open switch to solo cos someone took all the stuff.
I suspect you could compare it to save-scumming in something like Doom, it's technically outside of the game but it's actually there in the game. I can be "abused" depending on how you want to define that, but in the end it's just a game so who cares anyway a player is just leveraging a "feature" to make the game more "fun" (by their criteria).
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Lots of people complaining about the removal of board flipping claim that they need it to influence the BGS in the most efficient way, which is cheating those who don't use out of game actions / exploits.
Now if you aren't interested in the BGS but simply want to get assassination missions because that's the only thing you are interested in I kind of agree with you, something should be done about that. But in the meantime board flipping should still be stopped, even if it means no more work around for you. I don't necessarily think every faction in every system needs to offer assassinations all the time though, that should be tied to the system state, the economy type and the political type of the issuing faction. I think certain mission types shouldn't be available at all to certain factions, similar to how power play has different actions, etc. I hope you get the idea and my reasoning.
I said I didn't like it because it was loaded, that's not cognitive dissonance.
Unless you're saying I know it's not loaded, which you're not.
I think your examples are more like shortcomings of the game than deliberate design decisions.
Personally I'm not asking for them not to do the work, I'm asking for a bump in the number of missions per faction by around 25% under the new system.
This should hopefully bring parity (ish).
The issue is choice will be reduced with this change, that's the net result for players, a reduction in choice. (Also an enforced period of inactivity where the player does nothing instead of "doing stuff" as they do now) . And Frontier being Frontier, it will be 6 months to a year till they get round to looking at missions again.
ie in a similar way they turned the galaxy beige then left it "broke" for 16 months. The degradation of a feature because it suits Frontier priorities, with very little thought to the impact on the player.
People are making many assumptions in this thread. Yes this change makes a good starting point for a rebalance, but it's worth noting Frontier have said absolutely nothing about improving the mission systems, this is simply an infrastructure change that makes things better from their side with the side effect that there will be a reduction for players in mission choice.
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Except that this is, undeniably, a multi-player game - where players are in competition with each other on some level or other.
That being the case, people shouldn't be surprised when a loophole that only some players choose to exploit is closed.
That's the kind of "you can buy your own ship for that" mission reward I'm talking about. For 10 million credits, a prospective client could get a very nice Type-6 transporter, make two trips, and at the end of the day they'd still have a very nice Type-6 Transporter and over five million credits in their account. That's the kind of mission reward that makes me question the sanity of my client... especially since they're inevitably a milk run.
Hello,
@ Vorxian
you wrote some of the worst arguments i ever read in a game thread.
We only can work with the stuff we have. And we don't have space ships with the dimensions we need to fly. Where to store our hydrogen, the engines would be much bigger and never fit in a sidewinder.
I couldn't go on a long exploring trip. Where i'm supposed to store my water, the toilet paper, food and all the stuff you are supposed to need for such a long trip.
In an Asp? You're kidding.
Besides, coming back and the home planet would be thousands of years in the future!.
It is a game!
Back to topic:
Going to the mission board there are 80% massacre/assasination missions, 10% trading and 10% on Planet or salvage.
THATS the reason i have to flip between solo, group and open play. Because the balance of the different mission types is lousy.
@ Vorxian
you wrote some of the worst arguments i ever read in a game thread.
We only can work with the stuff we have. And we don't have space ships with the dimensions we need to fly. Where to store our hydrogen, the engines would be much bigger and never fit in a sidewinder.
I couldn't go on a long exploring trip. Where i'm supposed to store my water, the toilet paper, food and all the stuff you are supposed to need for such a long trip.
In an Asp? You're kidding.
Besides, coming back and the home planet would be thousands of years in the future!.
It is a game!
Back to topic:
Going to the mission board there are 80% massacre/assasination missions, 10% trading and 10% on Planet or salvage.
THATS the reason i have to flip between solo, group and open play. Because the balance of the different mission types is lousy.
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OK, I understand. I keep forgetting that now we can split up the cargo missions.
I don't think logon/off is a deliberate design decision.
But I do think Frontier accept that it's here to stay and everyone uses it, so implement <stuff> and balance that with an expectation the player will probably logon/off and that's fine, ie Dav's Hope, Guardian Blueprints.
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As far as I am concerned, if my CMDR, existing wholly within the game, couldn't pull it off, it's not a legitimate tactic for me to use as a player.
This means I do not mode switch, board flip, sever connection, log off, or even reinstance too frequently, with the intent of manipulating the functionality of the game to my CMDR's advantage, as these are all blatantly out-of-character actions that have zero context within the game's setting.
I even go so far as to avoid most 3rd party tools, though I can see how such information would spread to my character via various means that are not explicitly detailed in-game, and do not consider such information abuse.
My CMDR has been in three Dav's Hope instances, total, with months of time between them and sees no reason to go back as he's operating under the logical assumption that Dav's Hope has already been looted and that no one would be replacing materials specifically for him to steal.
Likewise, my CMDR has no Guardian equipment, mostly because he thinks the effort/reward ratio will be poor if he has to visit countless ruins to gather the materials for a single piece of tech.
Fortunately for my real-life entertainment, none of these things are remotely required for the game to be enjoyable, or for my CMDR to be competitive in non-BGS-influencing scenarios.
The distinction between what Doom Guy(TM) is doing (killing demons) and what I'm doing (manipulating game menus, and DoomGuy) is quite clear.
However, I have no issue with 'save-scumming' in single-player games because the player, perforce, makes all the rules where they are the only player, nor can one cheat in a single player game as there is no victim to be cheated. Such is not the case in multi-player only titles that have shared elements than anyone can, and nearly every does, influence.
I suspect you are in a minority, can't back this up with stats though (2.8% etc).
It's kind of ironic to suggest somebody is in a minority because they say they don't board-flip and then attempting to apply the "2.8% meme" when the 2.8% statistic is alleged to be the number of players who DO board-flip regularly.
I'm with Morbad on this - I don't board flip and once I figure out that an activity such as Materials CGs or the Guardians actively encourages logging, I stop doing it.
I appreciate those who are concerned that FD have not explicitly said that they will revisit missions after the switch.
It's evident to me that greater levels of persistence are badly needed in many areas of the game.
Any step towards that should be encouraged even if we don't know what FD intend to do with it.
Many of the mission nerfs in the past have been a direct result of their stackability through mission logging.
Once mission logging has been invalidated, then perhaps some of those nerfs can be rolled back.
The idea that FD will not continue to tinker with the mission system after this change is laughable - it's the one thing in the game that has been constantly revisited.
The key to the server change is that now FD will be in a real position to reward missions appropriately based on their difficulty or effort required and most importantly begin to properly manage their rarity - any effort towards that has been completely wasted up until now because of board flipping.