News Implementation of a dedicated mission server
If there's a finite limit to the number of missions that can be sent to the local client while maintaining performance, lets say a total of 60 to keep the board loading time under 15 seconds...
So, you've got 6 local factions, that's 10 potential missions each. More than enough to provide a sensible reward selection but you have to actually accept one of them to bring the one underneath it in the priority stack to the top, where you can see it. If the mission server refreshes itself EVERY TIME YOU ACCEPT A MISSION instead, or as well as by using an arbitrary timer and each time you exit the station you should always be seeing missions that are more relevant to your play style, as indicated by the player because of the ship they're in and what they have selected in the galaxy or system map(s).
Who actually wants to scroll through a massive list of jobs? I don't, that's a waste of my time. All I want to see is a limited list of relevant items so I can pick and go with the fastest possible turnaround time. NPC's, do your own bloody job instead of making me do it for you, please!
Here's my ship, here's where I want to go, what have you got THAT'S RELEVANT?
Example: I'm in my FDL, no cargo space, and I'm in a CG station going to a haz-res, bounty hunting. I already know I'm going to ringed planet 9 and there's an outpost that I can stop in at for fuel and ammo on my way. Why can't the mission monkeys show me domestic data missions I CAN carry and drop off, on my way? I only have two hours to play, so taking a huge stack of massacre missions is impractical, I only have time for say, 3 of them, if they want a dozen each instead of some ludicrous amount that will take hours and several repeat trips. In this case, supplementing my income with as many local data missions as I can carry, during a trip I'm going to be doing each time I collect my bounty vouchers anyway is a win+win for me, AND the businesses in the local system, surely? Or, does logic not exist in the ED galaxy?
Is nobody familiar with the business efficiency mantra: "Work smarter, not harder"? Why force players to manually hunt through a gigantic list of irrelevant rubbish when the system really should be smart enough to realise most of the missions it's generated simply cannot be completed in the ship I'm in? And why can it not look at the parameters on the mission I just accepted to further refine what it's offering me so I only see more of what I've just indicated I actually want?
I want to feel useful. I'm going to x anyway. Have you got anything I can help you guys out with that is also going to x, and is suitable for my ship, cos I ain't changing it? Considering the distances I cover with an empty cargo hold and mission stack because it's a complete waste of my time trying to find anything relevant there is a huge opportunity to make the players happy being utterly wasted.
Hopefully a dedicated mission server can fix this, remove the frustration that causes people to board flip in the first place and give FDev the opportunity to more effectively balance the rewards.
The key, I think, is actually offering LESS (is) MORE, RELEVANT opportunities.
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.'
Exactly. Adding galaxy wide instantaneous telepresence unloaded both barrels into the same foot!
[edit: Which reminds me of another massive annoyance... Why, why, why can I not check for a suitable materials broker near the engineer base I'm going to and divert at the destination end of my route instead of trying to find something within 40LY of Dav's Hope?]
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Oh, and most importantly - People in Solo should not get Wing missions!
Great idea. +1
That video is interesting, but also somewhat concerning.
One point I just picked up on was that the reason only a very limited number of missions are being generated is due to timeouts sending the mission data to the clients. The timeout they mentioned is -30 seconds-! That is an eternity in IT (even networked IT).
The take-away I got is that mission board updating can fail due to flakey or overloaded network conditions rather than other technical limitations.
This is so trivial to fix (from an engineering perspective):
Instead of using RNG to generate missions, use a deterministic algorithm seeded off something (such as location + time-of-day). Missions are generated on the CLIENT SIDE. Clients can generate a large number of missions in that timeframe. Moreover, you could do mission-type filtering on the client side so the player only sees they missions they are interested in. Eg, for a particular faction, a particular type, destination system(s), etc etc.
Next, when a player accepts a mission, that particular mission seed (or set of mission seeds) along with a checksum of the mission details is sent to the server. At that point, the server VERIFIES that the missions are valid (ie, prevent hacked client from generating bogus missions), and simply acknowledges the mission list to the client. The server would only need to generate the mission list on the server side if it wasn't already generated for that system/time combination (and time can be made more granular, eg, every 5-10 minutes or whatever).
Bingo - you have offloaded most of the mission logic to the client and cut network transmission by orders of magnitudes saving both CPU cycles on the server as well as network costs.
EDIT: And this approach would have automatically fixed the next question, "board flipping", as well, since it doesn't matter where missions are generated; they are deterministic hence no need to synchronise anything (except for time, which should be sync'd already anyway).
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Wing missions shouldn't need to be isolated at all. Just offer missions with clearly defined parameters and objectives so the player can choose what they feel they're capable of in the amount of time they've got to play.
Instead of a wing mission for 3000 units of cargo, offer to fill their hold on the first trip and suggest the next full hold if and when they come back for more as a follow on wrinkle [edit: or offer to pre-book another full load on successful delivery, plus a full load going back that way to get it], provided someone else didn't already show up and take some or all of what was left over.
Shifting a complete order shouldn't be the players problem. It's the freight allocator's job to make sure the customer gets the complete order, even if that means they have to deal with the hassle of splitting the load over multiple deliveries.
Also, instead of removing wing assassinations from solo because they might be too hard, what's wrong with offering the player an option to forfeit part of the reward, or share it by hiring one to three temporary NPC wingmates who don't get paid if they get themselves killed?
(Why do crew mates still get paid when they're not actively on board your ship? Insanity!)
Here's an idea for OPEN when considering the above - Instead of 1-3 temporary NPC wingmates, what's wrong with using difficult missions to match-make players docked at the same station, or even floating around in space nearby together in a co-op mode if they're all in the same type of ship (combat focused)? Could this be integrated into the comms panel options in a similar fashion to the 'looking for multicrew' system? Plenty of other MMO's provide ways to find a squad of people wanting to complete the same instance / goals. Why doesn't ED have that?
[Edit, edit: Come to think of it, some MMO's must be making quite a nice income from selling "World-chat-tokens", precisely so people can ask for help across the entire server - Revenue stream being left on the table here FDev!]
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Or they can set up a dedicated mission server that fixes the exploit that had the people hammering the mission generation algorithm in the first place. There was probably a queue involved, and the timeouts were happening because it was so long from the people refreshing the board far more than it was designed for.
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Which appears to be what they're doing. Still doesn't help with mission filtering/querying and the mission server is still having to generate billions of missions which are never accepted wasting precious CPU cycles and network bandwidth.
Given that board flipping was apparently only used by 2% of the player base I don't think it had THAT much of an impact on the servers.
Right, because they're mostly irrelevant window dressing. Work smarter, not harder!
Then have a filter button added to the UI. Doesn't seem that hard.
At the fastest rate, I will ping a mission board about once every five or ten minutes while I am jumping between stations and stacking them up, because it takes a bit of time to undock, spin up my FSD and redock somewhere else, and then it sometimes takes me hours to complete them depending on what missions I stacked up, because that depends on what is lucrative. I don't generally get to grab a full stack of missions all going to the exact same place, but it is nice when it happens for a few of them. If that 2% of the population is hammering the server, generating missions, often faster than once every 10-20 seconds, A conservative estimate is a mission flipper would generate 30+ times more requests for mission generation than me for hours on end, until they stack the "perfect" stack of 20 missions, they are massively overloading a pipeline that was not ever designed for that much throughput, not to mention hammering the login server, and who knows what other BGS server architecture... 2% times 30 is 60%, which is a low-end estimate for how much they were impacting the mission generation pipeline. But that is only a comparison of relative peak rates, not absolute counts.
Furthermore, this was their primary activity for hours on end, when I would maybe generate missions 5-10 times in a session to stack up 15-20 missions for a session (a generous high-end estimate of my mission generation activity) meaning that the actual numbers of requests from that 2% compared to everyone else who was undocking and traveling to another station to get more missions was much, much higher and clogging the pipeline so the rest of us were unable to generate missions in a timely manner when we docked.
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No, not to me either, or a combination of smart mission system that tries to fill your hold / mission stack based on the ship you're in and current galmap parameters, PLUS a filterable list allowing you to select the rewards you want, or any other mission parameter for that matter.
It all adds up to giving agency back to the player so they can create their own narrative and not waste "PLAY" time.
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I had another thought about mission wrinkles too:
Say I'm in a passenger vessel and I have two seats left but I've given up on trying to fill them because, frustration and I've just closed the passenger board. I hit LAUNCH and I get:
***LAUNCH ABORTED - INCOMING MISSION CRITICAL MESSAGE***
"CMDR, we've just had a last minute booking for two to your current destination, would you be so kind as to consider taking them as well?"
This could even incorporate, as Red pointed out earlier, the ability for factions to communicate with other people in stations they control in a local, or remote system...
"Unfortunately they're not in this station. We're offering a bonus if you can postpone departure for a few minutes for them to get here from the planet we're orbiting, or you're welcome to go pick them up on your way instead? To sweeten the deal our operatives on the surface have advised they also have several urgent data missions going the same way to make the extra stop even more worth your while."
You can still say no if you're in a hurry to finish up for the day and go to bed.
Looks good so far, FD. I'll hold my final judgement until I see the results.
"Trust, but verify." - Ronald Regan (translation from old Russian proverb)
"Trust, but verify." - Ronald Regan (translation from old Russian proverb)
I've been asking for a Mission Filter Button for 6 months now.....maybe this server move will make such a feature more likely going forward. Also makes me wonder about the possibilities of dedicated Power Play-Missions in the future too. Also yeah, anything that makes missions feel more organic would be welcome to me.
I do wing missions solo tho!
