It isn't written in the instructions, it's just people giving their own estimates. You could check it yourself if you like, no one is trying to mislead but I'd guess few have sat with a stopwatch & actually timed it. I thought it was around 10 minutes myself but I don't purposefully wait for new missions.
News Implementation of a dedicated mission server
It isn't written in the instructions, it's just people giving their own estimates. You could check it yourself if you like, no one is trying to mislead but I'd guess few have sat with a stopwatch & actually timed it. I thought it was around 10 minutes myself but I don't purposefully wait for new missions.
20 minutes is the figure I'd always read. But you're right, I did a quick google too and I've seen mentions of 5, 10, 15 and 20 minute refreshes.
Here's my best understanding of it, based on a DEV live stream last year sometime.
Each mission server has a set of templates. Every 15 minutes (or thereabouts -- they said 15 in the livestream though) it chooses a bunch from the possible templates. When a commander requests the mission board, some sort of filling-in process takes place, to adjust the templates to match the parameters of the commander (such as ship size, commander ranks, stuff like that...I don't know the whole list).
To the best of my knowledge, that's the gist of how it works at the moment. I'm sure there's more to it now, with wing missions added, and etc. etc. And they changed ranking missions to be follow-on missions, which are handled differently. It becomes more and more complex as time goes on.
I'm not surprised they want to centralize all this stuff and eliminate board flipping in the process.
If you could find a link to that livestream it might be helpful. I remember it but not who was speaking or when it was.
As I recall they talked about a databurst, a lump of info generated & downloaded to your game when you click on the mission board (or passenger board). If the connection is slow or otherwise poor you get a reduced set, if the connection is really bad you may get no missions.
There isn't much FDev can do at their end to increase the size of the databurst, but filters could allow the same amount of data to contain only the kind of missions a player filters for. So the player doesn't see more missions than currently, but more of the missions they do see will be relevant to their interests. Something like this has already been implemented by splitting out passenger missions from the rest.
ETA maybe Dominic Corner could clarify, he is currently browsing the thread.
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Here you go Dominic.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...-on-passenger-missions-post-quot-balance-quot
Not just capable for Passenger Missions, also for all categories of Missions through enhanced filters.
Do it ground up and make it great again.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...-on-passenger-missions-post-quot-balance-quot
Not just capable for Passenger Missions, also for all categories of Missions through enhanced filters.
Do it ground up and make it great again.
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"some sort of filling in"
Yes, I've accepted missions in my DBX, swapped to a Corvette, and they have sent gnats after me.
Thanks for the responses about the time Commanders.[yesnod]
This is the livestream I was talking about, I'm pretty sure. LOTS of info but it's also really long. I didn't have time to scan through it all to find the relevant comment.
Anyone who's really interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff will find the stream interesting, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTXNK9Vuemg
Anyone who's really interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff will find the stream interesting, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTXNK9Vuemg
A man with a Hauler though? Scaling with rank and ship, has been suggested many times, I'm in the agreeable section of the asylum on that one. An enhanced Mission Filter https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...-on-passenger-missions-post-quot-balance-quot would cater for that from the Commanders perspective, not RNGesus'.
If you mean multiple opportunities for example...Cutter Trading and Hauling, that's exactly what I would expect in busy, well populated systems. Regardless of economic status, especially at the orbiting trading hubs. The pay off however, would define elasticity, lower in times of strife, higher in boom time. Affected markets dependent on system status could even be introduced off the back of a revised BGS with a high degree of efficacy through automation.
Plausible, but realistically, unless it's a ghost hub, it would be busier than that even.
And that's just for cargo missions. If you look at combat missions "I need you to kill 6 people every 20 minutes" then it becomes completely ridiculous how MANY missions there are.
Agree here. Combat missions are fine, if a little scary.
All this stuff had been debated at length many times before, but I appreciate the conversation. I just really hold out hope that we get something like the Enhanced Mission System as outlined in the link above with the move, and not just the same stuff we get now, on a dedicated server. With expectations at an all time low, I have the greatest empathy with those tasked to re-evaluate the situation around Missions, which is a core component of the game.
But I make no apologies for the opinion that the line "wait 15 minutes for missions to refresh if you don't fancy anything" is just an absurd notion for a video game. These things need to be designed in holistically, in order to enhance the gaming experience, not just excused at the door. That's what got many aspects and features of the game, into the state they are in to begin with.
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Sorry, Riverside, but that text is neither random nor flavoursome. More like repetitive and bland......usually little more than a single sentence to say "go salvage this", "go kill this guy" etc etc. Text for follow-on missions is a bit better, but still pants IMHO. Mission text should be about a paragraph in length, with strings used to fill in details specific to *this* mission (like planet names, system names, NPC names etc etc), & there should be about a dozen texts for each template, that the game can randomly choose from when loading the mission board.
Better still would be to have mission text sub-directories with mission texts specific to Faction Types (Criminal, Corporate, Democratic, Dictatorship), Faction States (War, Civil War, Boom, Famine etc) & Mission Ranks. Although you can never prevent these texts from eventually becoming repetitive, I do feel that my suggestion would help to reduce the likelihood of seeing the exact same text too often.
I also don't see how filters will help change the way that salvage missions always take place in orbit of a planet, & that you just randomly have to wait for the USS to pop into existence, & that doing the salvage is always simple......unless a generic, non-mission specific group of pirates just happens to appear......regardless of the rank/payout of the mission.
Board flipping won't fix any of these problems either......which is why I am so tired of certain people endlessly going on about that, & payouts, whilst ignoring the *real* problems with missions in their current form!
.....and here is the point. If Missions are on their own server, then the number of missions per template can be made significantly larger, which could lead to a larger mission list on the mission board *and* possibly shorter refresh times to boot. At least that is how I read it!
Here you go Dominic.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...-on-passenger-missions-post-quot-balance-quot
Not just capable for Passenger Missions, also for all categories of Missions through enhanced filters.
Do it ground up and make it great again.
MEGA? Make Elite Great Again!
WorldsGreatestForumDad
Banned
Or they can keep trying to build walls.
Hell I think they are tearing them down.
Could we get a "refresh Missions" button instead with a cooldown timer maybe?
Refresh the missions every say 3 minutes or so?
Or put import tariffs on Hutton Mugs.Or they can keep trying to build walls.
As long as it doesn't reload the list. I hate when you're reading an item in a list and it refreshes in the background and the focus row is reset to the first row. You have to scroll down to what you think it was and try to read again, and then it reloads again, and each time you get more frustrated. The worst ones will be the ones at the bottom. So... as long as it only adds to the end of the list without refocus, it's all good.
A little perspective, with some REAL numbers... (That took seconds to find)
https://www.inc.com/tom-popomaronis...ecords-selling-over-600-items-per-second.html
So, this report estimates that Amazon processes, at peak 636 items per SECOND! And that's only in the domestic "Earth" market for the current year, not counting 3 space stations orbiting Earth and another at the Moon, at least one at each major planet and surface bases on some of them.
There SHOULD be more than enough work to keep the space trucking fleets busy, IF FDev can capitalise on domestic work and factor that into the mission wrinkle system. "Thanks for bringing this shipment CMDR. We've only retrieved 75 of the 100 from your hold because we'd like to encourage you to take the remaining 25 to station z in the local system..." If you don't want to do it that's fine, that sub-mission could be re-listed as a top priority domestic job on the mission board for someone else in a smaller ship to take. The system could even say, "We've already spoken to the brokers there, and they're sitting on a 750 ton job going back to your origin but they're only willing to hold it for another hour before listing it on the general boards."
They can see you're flying a T9 and what you actually want to do is back load a full cargo hold to the system you just came from but you go into the SYSTEM map and plot course to the local station, the mission board automagically updates itself and hey presto, the NPC's have efficiently done THEIR JOB and dregged up something suitable from the lower priority end of the mission stack that should, in real world terms, with a 7.2 billion population, be able to supplement the 25 tons you already have with one or more domestic jobs that add up to the remaining 725 tons. You, as the pilot shouldn't need to know, or care that what they've done is split a consignment that's actually 2000 tons because their client is screaming at them to get at least part of the load there yesterday.
To make that number a little more realistic of course, consider that 636 per second figure to be a first world problem. How much of the 2nd and 3rd world are placing these orders? Probably not as many, so the mission server should be able to weight the more anarchistic systems for a lower number, and higher in high-tech democracies and corporate states, where the use of psychological warfare, oops, I mean aggressive TV advertising is more prevalent.
It's going to be impractical for FDev to present an infinite number of missions on one job board so, only present two, maybe three. Enough to give a spread of reward types, be it cash, influence, reputation or materials. Ok, so four of each type and based on the type of ship you're in or, just give us a drop down list to select a reward preference, kinda like it does now but don't show me the rubbish I've just told you I'm not interested in! Why would you want to see assassinations when you're in a cargo ship? Why see mining missions if you don't have a refinery? Why see salvage missions if you don't have a collector limpet controller? Why see any surface missions requiring an SRV if you don't have one? These are simple, self filtering triggers the mission system could easily look for when you place a query (open the mission board).
The current system is guessing, and it's not even an educated guess at what you might want to do, throwing as large a selection as possible at you in the hope you'll want to do one of them, hence the amount of irrelevant rubbish and the incentive to board flip. The player agency is being completely ignored, as is the domestic (BGS / player faction) market. Less is more FDev. The player is telling you what they want by flying the ship they're in, with it's current loadout and capabilities.
Maybe it's just me, but this seems like a total no-brainer to resolve. Ideally I'd really like to see a mission database query system though. What if I ONLY want domestic jobs, or find a commodity super cheap and fill my hold with them, then open the mission board with no destination selected in the galmap? Can the system present a list of source and return missions, weighted on highest ROI for distance traveled and biased towards unloading the whole shipment in one place? Why not? Could such a system consider thargoid damaged stations as the highest priority, or currently burning ones, since they're paying massive premiums, like almost 10,000 CR for Basic Medicines that only cost you 300? Why not? It seems like the left and right hands have no idea each other exist, or appreciate that both will be required to find your own ar$e.
This is NOT an "easy win" button, it's a way to simulate a massively busy galaxy, realistically.
Again, it's not the quantity of missions presented, it's the quality or, relevance to the player.
I must be suffering from a dearth of imagination today because I genuinely can't.
Edit: Perfect timing - poster above has explained why.
Far shorter illustration - in a system with an 8 billion population (which was the example my comment was made in relation to) even if the mission board included 10,000 missions, that would only equate to one delivery for every 800,000 people. These are not corner shops we're talking about, in the larger systems they are the equivalent of today's multinational multi-million/billion pound companies. The only six to eight organisations large enough to even be on the mission board and to control assets in a system. But yeah, all they need right now is about 430 tons of fruit, a nearby base checking out and two messages delivering to the system next door, everything else is sorted thanks
Not even getting into what has always been the single most ridiculous aspect of the mission board - in a system where a particular faction that I'm allied with controls three stations, why on earth would I have to be at station B in order for them to inform me that they would like me to bring them 100 tons of tobacco there? I mean they must be able to communicate with their own Station A in the same system, so when I land there and check the board why wouldn't they tell me 'Not much for you here today Red but if you can get your hands on some tobacco we could sure use some over at Station B. Could be a bonus for you if you can get it here fast.'
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