Maybe when it's released this kind of thread will have reason and purpose. Instead of the usual I want attitude.
The Mission Board - Single Server or not, its a flop.
- Thread starter Chaparral
- Start date
No, the OP specifically stated systems with billions of people in them.
One only has to look at the general use bulletin board of any town hall (yes, elderly folks still use them!). Good luck finding space amongst the hundreds of things being advertised. Or if you don't like that analogy, look in the window of your local newsagent or off license. Some things for sale, some jobs, some one off 'collect my garden rubbish' jobs and people looking for a watchmaker, cleaner, anything you can imagine. And that's from a small demographic of the population (those over, say, 50), in a town with only 50k inhabitants.
It is absolutely correct that a bulletin board which allegedly represents every member of every faction in a system, should host literally hundreds of offers for work, ranging from the highly mundane to the highly specialised. It IS immersoin breaking that even in a war, the most missions you'll see is around 32, and 20 of them are massacres, and 7 are wing massacres. Mercy! It;s crap and hopefully they'll fix it. Can't see what else there is to say about that, tbh.
It is absolutely correct that a bulletin board which allegedly represents every member of every faction in a system, should host literally hundreds of offers for work, ranging from the highly mundane to the highly specialised. It IS immersoin breaking that even in a war, the most missions you'll see is around 32, and 20 of them are massacres, and 7 are wing massacres. Mercy! It;s crap and hopefully they'll fix it. Can't see what else there is to say about that, tbh.
I actually like the way in which the missions are grouped (except for the overabundance of wing missions, which hopefully will be better moderated after Q4).
As I operate out of a home system and am allied to all the factions, I get higher-paid missions and just take those that interest me and ignore those that do not.
Delivery, assassination (when not biased to wing participation), discovery/salvage, it's all the same anyway. Yes, it takes longer to select the missions...but not as long as a 300,000ls journey to deliver something.
Currently, I do not engage with mining but that may change after Q4...or not. In short, I fail to see how grouping by activity will improve things.
Imo, It's the mission activity that is poor, not the selection method.
As I operate out of a home system and am allied to all the factions, I get higher-paid missions and just take those that interest me and ignore those that do not.
Delivery, assassination (when not biased to wing participation), discovery/salvage, it's all the same anyway. Yes, it takes longer to select the missions...but not as long as a 300,000ls journey to deliver something.
Currently, I do not engage with mining but that may change after Q4...or not. In short, I fail to see how grouping by activity will improve things.
Imo, It's the mission activity that is poor, not the selection method.
Yes. What there *isn't* on those boards [1] are people wanting international shipping of bulk freight, assassinations of "most wanted" criminals, donations of millions, recovery of black boxes, destruction of rival industrial facilities, etc.
Sure, there'll be millions of people on the planet below wanting a bit of work done. How much of that work will be of any interest to a spaceship pilot who's looking to make a few million credits? It doesn't feel unreasonable that the only people who can afford to hire you are the few corporations, militaries, governments and criminals operating on an interstellar scale.
[1] In my town, anyway.
Come off it, the town hall isn't the right fora for galactic deliveries, nor are we in the right time frame. You can surely see the extension. I don't want to make more credits, I want more VARIETY than three black box recoveries and a secure data delivery in a system that supposedly has billions of people and therefore millions of each type of person; entrepreneurs, criminals and vengeful types.
I'll be back with screenshots showing how crap it is. I don't mean to sound unfairly critical, I acknowledge huge improvements in the game in every patch, it's just with the various nerfs, the advent of wing missions, something went wrong with the variety generator of the mission boards. I hardly ever see planetary scans, even warring factions have maybe one or two at a time, while having the 24 massacre missions that NOBODY does for fun (only a masochist or someone playing the BGS anyway and getting a few extra credits for it).
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The only time I have even used the mission board in recent MONTHS was because I needed a cargo reward to unlock something.
The missions are not what I want to do, so I don't even bother. Not even the material rewards are worth it.
The missions are not what I want to do, so I don't even bother. Not even the material rewards are worth it.
^
This is a low tech example of the reality of soliciting employees.
+1 of course.
It is task oriented, not faction oriented. If you peek at something as clunky as Craigslist, it is the same concept. Task oriented, not political faction oriented.
It is the "Mission Board" not the "Faction Board after all.
Not in Kansas there aren't.
I get the joke though he did say planet Earth, not Earth.
Colonia has sufficient local hydroponics facilities to produce around 18,000 tonnes of coffee and 15,000 tonnes of tea daily, of which around half the coffee and a fifth of the tea are not required by local demand and are therefore available for export.
The question you should be asking: who is Colonia supplying all this coffee and tea *to*?
If there are wants for goods or services, there will be jobs. The thing is though, if I'm in a High Security Agricultural system, I'd expect to find more delivery missions and passenger missions than say, assassinations.
There is a point at which you have to remember; just because a job potentially exists, doesn't mean that you will be the one to work it. The only reason help would be solicited from a CMDR is if their people can't do it or they don't have enough people to spare.
Is this one of "those" rants that OP posts just so he/she can argue with people?
1) Yes, there should be a greater number of missions - but if that scaled linearly with population low pop worlds having one or two missions, then high pop worlds would have thousands or hundreds of thousands. Given that the current system falls over with only a hundred or so missions tops, on the board, I think this is a non starter. Doing something with mission numbers based on a function of the logarithm of population, and separating solo from wing missions would be nice.
2) Yes, there should be greater variety of missions - but the current BGS state system works quite well IMHO in providing *context* for certain archetypes of missions. What's needed is a bit more granularity (e.g. phases in a war influencing the *type* of combat missions being doled out), as well as better missions in themselves (recon missions, escort missions, stealth/heat mechanic missions, voice acting in missions, persistent objectives in multi-stage missions, chaining of missions/branching arcs of missions). Regardless, missions definitely should be biased towards prevailing system/faction state.
3) The original argument of 'the game exists for the player, so missions should be by type, not faction' is not something I personally would agree with. I prefer the 'lone pilot/group of pilots' looking for work from factions ethos. Simulate the galaxy and it's factions well first, then drop players into the mess you create, rather than design the game around players always having access to everything they want, is something I strongly believe in (See Falcon 4's manual and the campaign notes by Pete Bonnani for further details).
4) Should missions be the 'be-all-and-end-all' of Elite? To me, the 'core' activities of Elite (Combat, Trade, Exploration and Mining (would love to add salvaging and piracy there, but...) should be do-able/profitable *without* missions at all. I'd rather see missions as very lucrative 'one offs' or 'sidelines', rather than the main thing everyone has to do to 'keep up with the Joneses'. The previous two Elite games were better in this regard than E: D IMHO.
2) Yes, there should be greater variety of missions - but the current BGS state system works quite well IMHO in providing *context* for certain archetypes of missions. What's needed is a bit more granularity (e.g. phases in a war influencing the *type* of combat missions being doled out), as well as better missions in themselves (recon missions, escort missions, stealth/heat mechanic missions, voice acting in missions, persistent objectives in multi-stage missions, chaining of missions/branching arcs of missions). Regardless, missions definitely should be biased towards prevailing system/faction state.
3) The original argument of 'the game exists for the player, so missions should be by type, not faction' is not something I personally would agree with. I prefer the 'lone pilot/group of pilots' looking for work from factions ethos. Simulate the galaxy and it's factions well first, then drop players into the mess you create, rather than design the game around players always having access to everything they want, is something I strongly believe in (See Falcon 4's manual and the campaign notes by Pete Bonnani for further details).
4) Should missions be the 'be-all-and-end-all' of Elite? To me, the 'core' activities of Elite (Combat, Trade, Exploration and Mining (would love to add salvaging and piracy there, but...) should be do-able/profitable *without* missions at all. I'd rather see missions as very lucrative 'one offs' or 'sidelines', rather than the main thing everyone has to do to 'keep up with the Joneses'. The previous two Elite games were better in this regard than E: D IMHO.
I disagree with your fundamental assertions regarding play styles:-
- Bounty Hunters have various options to engage in bounty hunting - REZ sites and Nav Beacons being the primary ones
- Pirates can use RES sites, Trade Lanes, and Nav Beacons
- Traders/Smugglers have the trading and black market boards
- Militaristic Mercenary types can use the CZ sites
- Explorers can just pick a direction and go
- Miners have the trading boards to deliver their wares
- Mission Boards are not the primary vehicle for gameplay, they are BGS driven optional side-quests at best. ED is not primarily a player mission/story driven product, and has NEVER been advertised as being such - the player is not railroaded down a specific path or set of paths, the player has the freedom to choose and define their own path - the missions merely reflect the universe state in any given area.
As for Mission Boards themselves, the faction that is offering them is probably the most significant point since reputation with a given faction dictates what missions are offered to any given player. Further more, from a role playing perspective - some may choose to work (or not work) for specific organisations (or organisation types). There are mission type filters if you are only interested in specific mission types though.
Yes, as was pointed out by the OP, too, earlier. I'm guessing that if you were looking through a central listing board for job opportunities in say...Topeka Kansas, fishery jobs would be buried waaaaaaay down the list compared to a job board in Bristol Bay, AK.