News Implementation of a dedicated mission server

[Watcher]

Sounds like a positive development to me, then again I've not used board flipping so it should only have a positive impact on me... I can see this would mightily miff a lot of other people.

I'd certainly like to see some way of having commanders influence the mission generation both in terms of type and destinations, that doesn't have to be an overwhelming effect and there could be a time component but it'd be nice..

If I'm hauling passengers or freight from A to B it would be nice to effectively post "I'm going to B who wants a lift?" and see what sort of offers you get...
I'd also like to see a destination filter option in the mission boards, assuming there isn't one there I've overlooked.

 

[ferus]

No. We're discussing how you are playing the game wrong, but if you just want to come up with excuses instead of solutions that can help you right now... that's your loss.

If you are trying to influence the BGS why do you expect that you should ALSO make a lot of money at the same time? FDev recently set up a mechanic where we can choose between credits or influence for our mission rewards, suggesting that those are supposed to be mutually exclusive options.

Maybe FDev is giving you wing missions because they are suggesting that you try to make some friends to do wing missions with them instead of grinding harder by yourself?

Maybe they are doing that on purpose to reward the people who are taking the risk of making friends?

It's only your playstyle that is "suffering".

Who said anything about money while doing BGS?
All I said was that if you are trying to influence your faction with the 1,5 missions they offer (without board flipping) then it is nearly impossible.
Also, please read my last edit in my previous post - that is my biggest concern with missions at this time - and yes, board flipping has made it a little more possible to play for me.

All I am asking for is to have enough missions with enough variety so I can play this game and not feel like I am wasting my time.

 

[fu9ar]

ferus, your comparison between terrestrial job offerings in your region and high dollar jobs requiring an FTL spaceship to complete is so ridiculous that it is insulting. Good day, Commander,

 

[ferus]

ferus, your comparison between terrestrial job offerings in your region and high dollar jobs requiring an FTL spaceship to complete is so ridiculous that it is insulting. Good day, Commander,

OK, do you think it's normal for a system with population of billions to have 5-6 missions on offer? (Out of which 3 would be wing missions...)

But hey, no.. the game is perfect, it doesn't need to be improved, everything is the player's fault...
THAT'S whats insulting.

 

[wstephenson]

If the limited selection of missions (motivating flipping) was due to bandwidth limitations and to prevent the monolithic gameserver disconnecting from its clients, perhaps the standalone mission server could generate a much larger number of missions, and then serve them to clients via a streaming or paginated API, independent of the gameserver connection. Might need client side filtering UI to be manageable, but it's less disruptive than my earlier suggestion.

 

[Six6VI]

ferus, your comparison between terrestrial job offerings in your region and high dollar jobs requiring an FTL spaceship to complete is so ridiculous that it is insulting. Good day, Commander,

I disagree.

The closer a simulator can get to the user's personal experience of how the real world works is what makes it a good simulator, and the world generates a massive amount of opportunities to move stuff n' data n' things from point A to point B. Please refer to my above post here for Amazon's estimated at peak, 636 items per second order demand, in 2016!

I'm guessing that's being generated by a relatively small, first world fraction of Earth's 7+ billion population. Even a basic extrapolation of that figure should be driving more missions than all 3 million owners of Elite could possibly handle, and that was in just one star system, 1300 years ago! Utilising real world, present day examples to illustrate a degree of disappointment with something you already enjoy, but would like to see refined for even greater personal satisfaction is not wrong.

Attacking, mocking and shaming others because they've failed to capitulate to your demands about what is "right-play" is the only thing I'm seeing in this thread that's insulting and, as ferus has correctly pointed out:

And there is no wrong way how to play a game where you can "blaze your own trail"...

The developer is endorsing their perspective, and mine.

 

[NeilF]

It's just to stop board flipping IMO.
And it's worth the effort because being able to make 100mil an hour breaks the game. The skimmer mission thing was a joke tbf.

I hope so too, I think it's a positive change - and not just because board-flipping is going. I hope it'll allow them to do more with the missions - I reckon the treasure hunts they ran in the game some time back might have been - in part - infrastructure tests to see how well the P2P architecture can handle a shared mission across many Cmdrs and instances. Being on a single server with one state across modes should definitely make it easier.

I can't see FD going to the hassle (time and physical expense?) of moving the missions server generation/coding off to a dedicated server just to stop board flipping. Surely they don't really care abott board flipping as it's just been part of gameplay for 4+ years now...

I really do suspect it's as part of something else, where it necessitates a single (dedicated) server. And hopefully this is some improvement in missions etc.

Heck, maybe it's all as part of other stuff coming along as well. eg: If we get our mining Hot Spots (see my sig) which are stateful (which are depleted as mined). Where better to store that state/data than on a dedicated server, such as the (single) new mission server

 

[Six6VI]

If the limited selection of missions (motivating flipping) was due to bandwidth limitations and to prevent the monolithic gameserver disconnecting from its clients, perhaps the standalone mission server could generate a much larger number of missions, and then serve them to clients via a streaming or paginated API, independent of the gameserver connection. Might need client side filtering UI to be manageable, but it's less disruptive than my earlier suggestion.

I think your client side generation idea, with a small checksum data burst on acceptance to make sure no (cheating) boundary limits are exceeded was a good one. Or, perhaps the server could be tasked with generating a purely arithmetic data transfer with the flavour text filled in by a dialogue pool on the client side. The window dressing, while nicer to look at is probably being mostly ignored by the seasoned player anyway, as someone pointed out earlier. Wait, wasn't that you?

 

[Red Anders]

Running a marathon is just putting one foot in front of the other, right?

Nah, running a marathon is an intense sporting endeavour for which people train for months and which for many non-professional athletes represents one of the most significant personal challenges that they will ever undertake.

 

[Adam Bourke-Waite]

Hi everyone, thank you so much for the feedback you have provided thus far. I wanted to jump in and answer a few questions and discussion points raised:


Will we be increasing the amount of mission options so that players have more choice?

We won’t be increasing the amount of missions spawned initially. We will however be reducing the time it takes for a mission board to spawn new missions from 15 to 10 minutes. This means that players should overall see more variety and it won’t take as long for new missions to appear on the board.


Is there a possibility of adding a ‘refresh’ button if all available missions aren’t suitable?

We won’t be adding a refresh button at this time. It’s important to note that missions are shared between players so it could be frustrating if another player refreshed the mission board just as another player spotted one they wanted.


Will this see the return of the large cargo transport missions with high payouts?

Could you clarify which missions you mean? But this change does not impact the functionality of the missions themselves.


Can we get filters to find the type of missions we want to do?

You can filter the list currently. If you mean will it be possible to have a mission board spawn a specific type of mission based on player input (for example, choosing to spawn only cargo delivery missions), this is not currently planned.


How will this effect missions based around state changes (i.e. massacre missions) where the state may have changed in one instance (War) but not another?

This is an avenue we’re exploring but have no confirmed changes at this current time. It’s our goal to make the missions that spawn in each state make sense, but not overwhelm the entire board. As with a lot of mission development, it’s an ongoing iterative process.


Is it possible to separate wing and solo missions into different categories?

We are not separating Wing Missions into a different category at this time, but in the next update (3.3), you should see fewer Wing Missions spawning per board. We are trying to balance the right amount for all player types, and as said before, it’s an ongoing process.


Worried we’re focusing on the symptom of board flipping, not the cause (Not a great enough of interesting mission options rather than payouts)

We are trying to address all of the reasons players felt they need to use “board flipping”. As we said in the original post however, this is a small percentage of the player-base. We are listening to your feedback and trying our best to provide players with missions that suit their playstyle wherever possible.


Thanks once again for the feedback and keep it coming!

 

[Allan251]

Everybody's goin' to be grindin the grindy grind! (There's a song in there somewhere!) Thank the Goids I've already got the Big Three.

 

[wstephenson]

The window dressing, while nicer to look at is probably being mostly ignored by the seasoned player anyway, as someone pointed out earlier. Wait, wasn't that you?

Guilty, yeah. I don't know how mission traffic looks exactly on the wire, but judging by the verbose netlog contents, the moment to moment protocol is already fairly tight, so missions may be as well. Might well be a ton of XML, like the friends protocol. The benefit of keeping the strings on the server is they are easy to update, and you can cache them client side. You can always compress data, or go binary, but I prefer to get the big picture layout of things right, first. In playing this little other-peoples-architectures game, I'm enjoying trying to figure out the hidden requirements, not just the obvious ones people are bringing up in this thread.

The nice thing about a central server-generated missions list is the similarity to the thing it's supposed to be simulating. A way to keep this, present lots of missions, but reduce the bandwidth would be to only generate a list of currently appropriate seeds on the server and have the clients PG a whole set of missions out of each seed on the client.

 

[Six6VI]

I can't see FD going to the hassle (time and physical expense?) of moving the missions server generation/coding off to a dedicated server just to stop board flipping. Surely they don't really care abott board flipping as it's just been part of gameplay for 4+ years now...

I really do suspect it's as part of something else, where it necessitates a single (dedicated) server. And hopefully this is some improvement in missions etc.

Heck, maybe it's all as part of other stuff coming along as well. eg: If we get our mining Hot Spots (see my sig) which are stateful (which are depleted as mined). Where better to store that state/data than on a dedicated server, such as the (single) new mission server

I'm inclined to agree there is a grander plan 'afoot'.

A distributed mission service across all the game servers might be making it difficult to isolate actionable data on who that 2.8% actually is. A single, more robust point of traffic congestion might provide them with more solid grounds to issue bans or other, penalties?

On a much lighter note though, there may be a considerably higher load generated by the new Torc and Duradrive computers providing us all with a portable interface so we can get up and walk around...

ELITE FEET CONFIRMED - Q1 2019 - YAY!

Mark your calendars, Commaders! 22 more sleeps

Rackham Ultratech Expo - Wednesday October 3rd

*checks Galnet*

[Edit: Wait, nooooo! This is bad <sadface>]

 

[Komemiute]

Hi everyone, thank you so much for the feedback you have provided thus far. I wanted to jump in and answer a few questions and discussion points raised:


Will we be increasing the amount of mission options so that players have more choice?

We won’t be increasing the amount of missions spawned initially. We will however be reducing the time it takes for a mission board to spawn new missions from 15 to 10 minutes. This means that players should overall see more variety and it won’t take as long for new missions to appear on the board.


Is there a possibility of adding a ‘refresh’ button if all available missions aren’t suitable?

We won’t be adding a refresh button at this time. It’s important to note that missions are shared between players so it could be frustrating if another player refreshed the mission board just as another player spotted one they wanted.


Will this see the return of the large cargo transport missions with high payouts?

Could you clarify which missions you mean? But this change does not impact the functionality of the missions themselves.


Can we get filters to find the type of missions we want to do?

You can filter the list currently. If you mean will it be possible to have a mission board spawn a specific type of mission based on player input (for example, choosing to spawn only cargo delivery missions), this is not currently planned.


How will this effect missions based around state changes (i.e. massacre missions) where the state may have changed in one instance (War) but not another?

This is an avenue we’re exploring but have no confirmed changes at this current time. It’s our goal to make the missions that spawn in each state make sense, but not overwhelm the entire board. As with a lot of mission development, it’s an ongoing iterative process.


Is it possible to separate wing and solo missions into different categories?

We are not separating Wing Missions into a different category at this time, but in the next update (3.3), you should see fewer Wing Missions spawning per board. We are trying to balance the right amount for all player types, and as said before, it’s an ongoing process.


Worried we’re focusing on the symptom of board flipping, not the cause (Not a great enough of interesting mission options rather than payouts)

We are trying to address all of the reasons players felt they need to use “board flipping”. As we said in the original post however, this is a small percentage of the player-base. We are listening to your feedback and trying our best to provide players with missions that suit their playstyle wherever possible.


Thanks once again for the feedback and keep it coming!

Many thanks for the clear explanation.

 

[zimms]

Responses were pretty much as expected. Thanks for taking the time to clarify that for us!

 

[WorldsGreatestForumDad]

Im wondering how this is going to affect the BGS.

Influence missions and such. How will those be generated evenly? And since people usually stack a set of missions up only having 1 board will inherently slow down the time it takes for player factions to flip systems.

Are there going to be any values changed here? From looking at it. It seems like some of the phases in the BGS are going to be really stretched out.

Is this a good or bad thing?

 

[rootsrat]

Thanks for the additional information Adam!

Will we be increasing the amount of mission options so that players have more choice?

We won’t be increasing the amount of missions spawned initially. We will however be reducing the time it takes for a mission board to spawn new missions from 15 to 10 minutes. This means that players should overall see more variety and it won’t take as long for new missions to appear on the board.

Great decision! This will make things better.

Is there a possibility of adding a ‘refresh’ button if all available missions aren’t suitable?

We won’t be adding a refresh button at this time. It’s important to note that missions are shared between players so it could be frustrating if another player refreshed the mission board just as another player spotted one they wanted.

If you're reducing the board refresh timer from 15 to 10 minutes, a refresh button should not be needed.

Can we get filters to find the type of missions we want to do?

You can filter the list currently. If you mean will it be possible to have a mission board spawn a specific type of mission based on player input (for example, choosing to spawn only cargo delivery missions), this is not currently planned.

Again, good decision IMHO. Good for immersion and I value that

 

[Athan]

Will we be increasing the amount of mission options so that players have more choice?

We won’t be increasing the amount of missions spawned initially. We will however be reducing the time it takes for a mission board to spawn new missions from 15 to 10 minutes. This means that players should overall see more variety and it won’t take as long for new missions to appear on the board.

Is this with the same four 'slots' as currently, or increasing that to 6 so that the oldest slot's missions still stay available for up to an hour ?

 

[Allan251]

Worried we’re focusing on the symptom of board flipping, not the cause (Not a great enough of interesting mission options rather than payouts)

We are trying to address all of the reasons players felt they need to use “board flipping”. As we said in the original post however, this is a small percentage of the player-base. We are listening to your feedback and trying our best to provide players with missions that suit their playstyle wherever possible.

The needs to use board flipping.
1.Not enough passenger missions spawning to fill a cutter
2.Not enough Data Delivery missions spawning when ranking up for rank or locked ships.
3.Frontiers incessant use of grindy mechanics to unlock engineers, materials or ships.
4.The sheer boredom of the grind for rank, credits or materials necessitating ANY method by which this can be reduced.
#Grindisnotgameplay

There's a few wee hints for you.

Sorry if that comes across as salty. I love the game. I really do! (over 2000 hours ingame), and I really appreciate how far it has come in the last few years, but at the moment the phrase "could do better" would be issued on your report card!

 

[Six6VI]

generate a list of currently appropriate seeds on the server and have the clients PG a whole set of missions out of each seed

Seems legit, in a "Braben-esque" kinda way