Frontier, want to stop board hopping? here's how!

[Toval]

I will be using the most common reason for board hopping in this example, combat zones.

As things sit now...

Gather 20 CZ missions, kill one ship, it magically turns into 20 kills (one for each mission)

how to fix...

Make each kill drop a kill record (call it what you want, dog tags, confirmation data...)
Now, the missions don't ask you to kill XX amount of ships, they should ask you to turn in X amount of kill tags.
This way, if the player is having fun, but he has enough kill tags, they can continue having fun, because they are still earning tags, they can turn in those tags to a mission if they grab one later.
isn't fun what games are about? is board hopping fun?

this way, one ship kill, is one ship kill, not 20. Players can board hop all they want, it wont really matter because they are not receiving multiple items for a single action as the current system allows.
this method of reward items can be used for multiple types of missions, give the player some type of data item for completing the objective, and have the missions ask the player to turn in said item(s)
No reason to board hop because the player will not be multiplying a kill, thus doing 20 hours of missions in one hour.

 

[sewerratuk]

It's a bit of a mute point seeing as they are limiting similar mission stacking to 3

If they want to stop board scumming they could increase the number and variety of missions

 

[Alex Brentnall]

They answered this in a previous livestream. Apparently it's really not that simple to have kills only count for 1 mission. Gets incredibly complex to determine which mission gets the reward and will probably lead to instances of nothing being recorded for any mission.

Easier just to limit the mission stacking. Not the root cause of the issue you are correct but it's the simplest solution as they can limit it by mission type already so it's just tweaking a formula, adding a few rules, testing it, balancing it and off we go.. (Yeah, I say "just", still lots there).

 

[Toval]

With what i proposed, you dont need to account the kills to a specific mission. you would be rewarded with a tag, the missions just want the player to turn in the tag.

 

[Alex Brentnall]

With what i proposed, you dont need to account the kills to a specific mission. you would be rewarded with a tag, the missions just want the player to turn in the tag.

So you get a massacre mission tag. Whats to stop you getting hundreds from one faction and handing them in for another.

So ok, now each mission has to have a unique identifier for the faction or material or whatever it is. Seems like an incredibly complex solution. Even to get that list up and running in plain text is probably a good 2-3 days work without even thinking of coding it into the game...

Much easier to tweak a number in code you already have...