News Implementation of a dedicated mission server

When I board flip there are basically 2 reasons:
* BGS - as other have stated. Here I want max INF - I do not care about CR
* Mats - here I want max mats reward. I think they scale with CR - can you confirm they will scale? Will I see 6 EFC, then I would be :D

Mats will subtract 500,000cr from your reward for each G5 material. Lower grades are "cheaper", but it's more cost-efficient to take missions for G5s and trade down where possible.
 

Deleted member 110222

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Since board flipping will be a thing of the past can we do any of the following:

* Double or triple the number of available missions to compensate for the loss in a fair way
* Replace the Wing cargo missions with missions that are reasonable for solo players

Also, can you share with us the percentage of players that takes Wing Cargo Missions? For me those are just clutter :(

Agreed on both points. That's constructive talk.
 
EDIT: to add - nobody likes to board flip. It is a necessary evil because of the way the mission board work. We've suggested for a long time that it should be a "query": select target faction, select mission type, generate missions.

I've argued for this approach in the past as well. Since players can effectively carry out multiple missions in parallel, the current board semantics cause lots of manual clicking busywork to find a 'load' of missions to the same volume. A query model could also save mission server i/o bandwidth (at the cost of CPU, obviously).

Should the new mission server work that way, then this is all good. However, if this just means we'll have a single mission board, missions for BGS becomes far less effective than other activities.

Unlikely, they'd have to redo the UI as well. I assume they are just moving existing services around on the backend.
 
In principle a great move and to be honest all board hopping/instance resetting should be removed from the game provided realistic methods of achieving progress exists for commanders. However, at first thought, I would raise the potential issue that commanders supporting a specific faction may be presented with a mission board that contains only missions they do not want to do. This is because mission rewards are unbalanced and some missions are extremely annoying to do due to RNG spawning of the Mission USS and entities.

Thus, for this to be successful the missions have to be truly rebalanced to reflect their difficulty and time to complete. Dav mentioned the terminal hack missions in your live stream & commented, if I recall correctly, on the fact they are one of the less popular missions. I would speculate the reason why this is the case is because in the length of time it takes to complete one of these missions you can make more credits with virtually no risk by doing delivery missions or just trading if you have the right ship & route. The situation is similar with massacre missions were even including the value of kills they pay 2-3 times less than delivery missions for the time invested. Salvage missions meanwhile, when last checked, still suffer from RNG Mission USS spawning that can leave a commander orbiting a planet for 15 minutes or more.

Therefore, to conclude, although in theory excellent news it requires missions to be balanced properly to prevent commanders doing BGS becoming disenfranchised by a mission system that needs across the board reworking in regards to the player rewards.

CMDR Justinian Octavius
 
while the advantages sound awesome, the removed board flipping sounds bad with just a 10% increase.
so unless the amount of missions is also increased then, i would bet there will be a lot of salt again.

you said its just 2.8% who use it, but 2.8% in total or only from those who actually play missisions?
 
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Yes, the amount of missions generated limits your ability to influence the BGS through missions. This is working as intended, Frontier put hard caps in place for every lever you can pull to affect the BGS, including missions.

There are no hard caps
 
The problem with mission board is that most of the time...it doesn't offer the mission type you want and/or the reward you expect.

Can we hope a global balance of all kind of missions to get rid of this ?

I am neutral with board flipping but I do have problem like this before. (Too much much kill mission or data mission , ....I think people here know what I mean).

I hope it doesn't get into a failure.

Work hard on =)
 
Greetings Commanders,

In the next chapter of Beyond (3.3), we will be implementing and migrating mission data to a new separate server. While this mainly affects the back-end of the game, you will see some changes to missions in-game.

As it currently stands, missions are on a shared server with other elements of the game. This has the risk of problems with missions causing outages and stability issues for the rest of the game if there are technical hiccups.

So, what benefits will we see by moving missions to their own separate server?

  • Any issue (generated by missions) which can cause a server outage or stability problems will no longer result in players disconnecting. Instead the missions will be unavailable for a period of time.
  • If such issues do occur, the previous servers will be able to act as a back-up, offering better opportunities to recover game content as quickly as possible.
  • We may see a slight decrease in mission board loading times.
  • Missions will now be consistent across game modes (Solo/Open/Private Group).
It's also worth noting that, as a result of a dedicated 'mission server', there will be a removal/significant reduction of the method of refreshing mission boards by logging in and out of the game ("board flipping"). While we understand that this is a practice utilised by some* players, this was never the intended use of the mission system.

Even though there is a small number of players doing this, we will increase the credit payout of missions (by 10%) across the board so all players using the mission boards as intended will see a net profit. As a result of this, some mission reward choices will see boosted influence, reputation and rank gains. As always when it comes to missions, we will continually review and balance them where needed.

Ultimately, this is a healthy step for our overall servers and game experience.

If you have any questions or would like to share your feedback with us, please post below!

*we found that only 2.8% of daily online players were using the mission system in this way.

Very nice. Thank you.
 

Jenner

I wish I was English like my hero Tj.
Faster load times and mode consistency are big pluses in my book. Awesome news. :)
 
I think this sounds great! Board hopping was always a shady thing in my eyes and non immersive. I do wonder how it will affect some aspects of the game where it seemed board hopping was incorporated into the game such as the guardian blueprints.
 
Add me in to the group that would like to know if we can actually fill our missions up then. There's a lot of us that can fly a lot of missions in parallel, and space truckers, like normal truckers, don't like having empty space. That's unfulfilled potential.

Will we be able to max out missions from point A to B, or is there a time gate being introduced here because someone thinks people are making (un-shareable) money too fast?
 
Wait wait wait... if the missions are going to be consistent with the server and not change on modeflips or whatever...

Does that mean that if I see an unavailable mission worth changing/refitting my ship for it'll still be there when I come back to the mission board?
 
I think this sounds great! Board hopping was always a shady thing in my eyes and non immersive. I do wonder how it will affect some aspects of the game where it seemed board hopping was incorporated into the game such as the guardian blueprints.

Great news ! Hope missions board will offer more missions and that we'll be able to have more filter to chosse specific type / factions / etc.
 
Yes, the amount of missions generated limits your ability to influence the BGS through missions. This is working as intended, Frontier put hard caps in place for every lever you can pull to affect the BGS, including missions.

Now you are just making stuff up.
 
Stockholm syndrome

you ppl giving praise to fdev for nothing are seriously troubled or something. theyve been ramming us long and hard for the last few days with no content updates , congrats you can throw a few spoilers around(literally and figuratively) and claim to be fixing the game with cheap Gnothing's and no content. wonder how much praise the zombies give when next update you're telling us you're closing doors. It's a matter of time before servers cost outpace paint revenue.
 
So now what? I need to wait 15 minutes for the mission board to refresh so I can get more of the missions I'm interested in, even if I'm at a station with a population that rivals that of a small nation? Screw that. This sounds like yet another one of your half-rear ended "solutions". You need to significantly increase the number of available missions.
 
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