That's not even close to what FDev said in the original statement.
2.8% of players who access the mission board do board flipping on any given day.
This doesn't allow any assumption how regularly specific players do board flipping.
mission server - the death of ED
- Thread starter Bionic Bytes
- Start date
That's not even close to what FDev said in the original statement.
2.8% of players who access the mission board do board flipping on any given day.
This doesn't allow any assumption how regularly specific players do board flipping.
Well I'm not talking about moaning I can't fill my passenger cabins. I'm saying that if you have a board full of boring sucky missions, you'll have to wait 10 minutes and could quite likely get another board of boring, sucky missions and then it's 20 minutes.
I already addressed this. So it's a concurrent figure and a daily one meaning after 100 days 280% of the player base board flip.
It's worse than we thought!!
What we know is that if it's a daily figure, that's way more then 2.8% of the player base.
Each time you board flip you run the risk of getting a less that perfect selection of missions. How long does it take to fill your holds while flipping? The log in sequence isn't particularly quick. Just because you feel like you are 'doing' something, doesn't mean you are being more efficient.
Fair enough.
The fact remains that there's a point, somewhere between "normal use" and a "gold rush", where the mission-generator can't handle the load put on it and we know that board-flipping contributes to this problem.
This is why FDev have decided to take action to separate the mission-generator from the main server.
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if FDev don't really know what effect this is going to have on gameplay - and that's why they're not making any promises.
Maybe the inability to board-flip will only make a small difference to the load on the mission-generator in a busy system.
Maybe it'll always be running near to maximum capacity, even without board-flipping.
In that case, if it gets overloaded it'll work as intended; the mission-board will be inaccessible for 10 minutes and everybody else will, at least, be able to keep playing.
OTOH, with no more board-flipping, maybe the load on the mission-generator will reduce dramatically, especially in busy systems or at gold-rushes.
In that case, maybe FDev will decide to take advantage of the newly available "headroom" to add a more diverse selection of missions or adjust the spawn rates of missions.
Point is, they're making the change to prevent a problem that DOES already exist.
Having fixed that problem, maybe they'll be able to make further improvements or maybe they won't.
It isn't really reasonable to expect them to make promises about what they will or won't do until they see how much of a difference the new system makes.
Well, i don't know if they already implemented it, because now i'ts VERY HARD to pick up new mission across the boards.
The timer seems to be 15 minutes yet - now filling a Anaconda with passengers to 2 systems with VIP and Bulk Transport missions Takes 1 hour or more - sometimes i need to leave with half of the ship empty.
Also, i've noticed a decrease on the rewards.
The timer seems to be 15 minutes yet - now filling a Anaconda with passengers to 2 systems with VIP and Bulk Transport missions Takes 1 hour or more - sometimes i need to leave with half of the ship empty.
Also, i've noticed a decrease on the rewards.
It is equal to refreshing web page when waiting for news. Same chemical brain reaction. People trained themselves to 'like' it, to 'expect' that it has brought something new despite it isn't.
Also staying on same board might be form of 'fear of missing out'. What happens if that mission I want appears when I move to other station?
I don't think so - there was supposed to be a Beta test first.
Cheers, no I didn't know empirical was observational.
Empirical fact, empirical evidence?
If a dev said it I spose so, I will just have to take your word for it, not sure how I'd find the quote.
But for me I just don't understand how it would, I thought mission generation behaved as follows :
- Player views mission board
- Do we have missions cached, if so (5)
- Generate missions with a 15 minute expiry date
- Cache missions
- Serve missions from cache
It might not I don't know. But if it does where's the overload on the above?
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Board flipping was a broken mechanic to begin with. I also did it but it really kills immersion. I think it's a good change if implemented correctly
I haven't logged on in four days. Is it board flipping if I log off, after finding nothing but undesirable missions?
Only if you log on again.
Well, I'm no expert and, to some extent, I share some of your confusion.
I suspect that a big part of the problem is when people get really aggressive about manipulating the mission-boards.
At the last skimmer gold-rush (I forget where it was), people weren't just board-flipping to grab the desirable missions.
They were taking every available mission and then keeping the desirable ones and abandoning the undesirable ones.
This sort of behaviour (multiplied across 3 modes) was probably something of a "high-pressure enema" for the mission-generator cache.
As I've said before, we don't know if the mission generator struggles to keep up with "normal" gameplay or whether it can manage without breaking a sweat.
All we know is that under a heavy load it does fall over.
And, at the moment, that causes connection problems as well as mission-board problems.
I guess part of the reason this might be happening now is because it's a response to a problem that's been growing in size.
Most people have probably board-flipped once in a while, even if it's just to try and spawn a permit-mission or naval rank mission, or maybe to spawn a mission that'll allow them to fill up their cargo hold or whatever.
These days, though, pretty much everybody knows that it's THE way to maximise your opportunity in a gold-rush, there's umpteen YT channels telling us how to do it and we've got players routinely "flushing" the mission-generator cache to generate new missions.
I'd bet that's a significant change from the way things were 3 years ago, or 2 years ago.
Thus we've ended-up in a situation where the existing system flat-out cannot handle peak-load and a new system had to be found.
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
The problem with boardflipping as I see it is it makes it impossible for FD to balance the game economy.
Worse still there is a temptation for FD to see a set percentage of flippers who are billionaires and increase the price of new content taking them into account
.. which means those who only earn a moderate amount based of playing the mission board fairly get screwed.
Above is a concern and may not be valid . What is indefensible however is the massive effect it can have on the BGS. If 1 group of players who boardflip decide to attack an NPC faction and a group who don't flip choose to defend them... It will be a massacre with the flipper steamrollering the legit players.
Worse still there is a temptation for FD to see a set percentage of flippers who are billionaires and increase the price of new content taking them into account
.. which means those who only earn a moderate amount based of playing the mission board fairly get screwed.
Above is a concern and may not be valid . What is indefensible however is the massive effect it can have on the BGS. If 1 group of players who boardflip decide to attack an NPC faction and a group who don't flip choose to defend them... It will be a massacre with the flipper steamrollering the legit players.
Perhaps FD should have a look at those folks laid off there, they know a thing or two about story telling and writing.
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That was implied...
How long do I have to wait, until it's not board flipping? I should be dead by 2029....
I only hire the pretty ones (very rare), only Harmless, and give them enough for a starting Sidewinder. It's under 20 fired (and the last one got half a million).
I would say on average 9 flips.
Man that sounds dull.
In the post they say :
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/446165-Implementation-of-a-dedicated-mission-server
Which doesn't really say that mission generation gets overloaded, more any crash of the mission system (literally could be some mission bug) brings down other services resulting in disconnects.
When the mission system is getting a lot of use clearly there's going to be a higher chance of a crashe simply due to a greater chance of some catostrophic bug being revealed.
To really oversimplify it if 50 people are using the board as opposed to one, there is a 50x chance of the bug occurring and the board crashing. Aye I know it's really not that simple but you get the jist of what I mean, essentially this scenario is nothing really to do with cpu/memory load as such, but it may be indirectly to do with "load" in a way.
Anyway they say isolating the mission system will stop the disconnects when one of these bugs occurs, and just mean no missions for a bit.
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