2.3 Mission Stacking Nerfs

[Jmanis]

Mission stacking isn't as bad as one ton selling for BGS purposes. Any time Fdev want to fix the one ton selling BGS exploit that would be great.

It's fixed. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/324764-Server-update

Just a really quick message to let you know that a server side update has gone live today.

It contains a single change, an adjustment to the background sim calculations to avoid exaggerated changes to influence and state values through the splitting of a single consignment into multiple transactions.

- - - Updated - - -

How much have these 3 stack missions been buffed in payouts?

Not a huge amount (i.e expect an extra 20% or so?)

Its fun how they can't fix this but all cargo missions have specific cargo that is needed to fill it, assassination missions have specific target and you can't stack those kills to fill multiple assassination missions, same with piracy missions. Why they can't take system they use for those to be "unique" mission target to these massacre/scanning missions. Now they do the worst thing nerf something else and don't fix the actual problem. We will probably see this same problem cause other issues/stacking etc. in the future because they don't fix it.

The long-term fix already exists in terms of mechanics... it's just a case of FD implementing it.

When you are pledged to a power and kill ships in a powerplay CZ, you get "tokens" for each kill. Those tokens get handed in for powerplay.

So if you kill a mission target, get a token for that kill from that faction. Then the mission objective is "Hand in 56 tokens", not "get 56 kills".

Problems:
- You could get a mission to kill 12 ships, and farm 100 tokens, then just wait for missions to spawn, hand the tokens in and not go out and kill ships. IMO, whatever, you actually killed 100 ships so if you want to "backdate" the kills, more power to you. There's no easy way to fix postmission stacking tokens (snipping the explanation of why this isn't easy). It's a far less grievous exploit than having a single kill count for 20 different missions though.
- FD made the (pretty dumb, if you look at the current implementation) move of making kill missions "Kill 20 of this specific type of ship from this specific faction" without any mechanism for spawning those ship types, *except* for CZ massacre missions. Regardless of that issue, rhis means they'd need to drill the token types down to specific ship types for specific factions, which is a new layer of complexity. Easy fix is to just get rid of the requirement for specific ship types. At least then these mission types would be mechanically feasible then.

 

[Rulyam Van Houten]

I seriously think that the problem lies in mission rewards;

The common nominator for all actions is credits. But if the mission rewards were always something else:
-rank
-reputation
-BGS
-materials
-equipment
-ships

But never, ever credits.

Then missions could be rare, getting one would mean something special. Currently missions are only credits/hour.