News Implementation of a dedicated mission server

[[VR] Mad Mike]

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.

g!

Hi

Thanks for the update. What i dont understand is why dont you guys just multiply the wing mission payouts, for arguments sake by 3 but then divide the pay by the number in your wing, then add a potential 25% mission bonus which decreases every X minutes to encourage quick delivery (aka wingplay).

this solves the issue of having them for lone wolves and still keeps them fun for friends in wings.

 

[Deleted member 110222]

This is a great reply, to be fair. You've managed to get everything wrong in it.

I don't know Bongo'...

Pessimist in me has been tin-foiling his very post ever since Engineering was introduced.

 

[Red Anders]

First of all i will personally state i have never ever board flipped with the intention of trying to manipulate available missions to max revenue or max influence etc.

I have never engaged in any of the gold rushes eg Robigo, skimmer missions etc.

i have 4.3 billion credits in cash not tied to any ships.

i play the BGS and have worked a minor faction to be one of the most powerful in its sector. I have done this by playing by the games rules. I also have an ethical commander who doesnt engage in criminal activity to undermine a faction. So no Security ship massacres or smuggling to enforce lockdowns etc.

I have made this money by playing the game. It is believe it or not possible to make good money without recourse to dubious methods.

How then do i run missions. Well i check the board and fill up whats available for a faction or two i may want to support. If i cant fill my cargo hold with missions i will fill the remainder with cargo, i will use my in built knowledge of local systems to know what they buy from the system im at. I also use the galaxy map to obtain such data. This means my ship is always making money. Perhaps not 100 million an hour but when i play the counter keeps ticking.
I have learned the value of making allies in many surrounding systems to build those trade routes and increase the value and quantity of available missions. As a result i have zones in the Empire, Federation and Alliance where i am allied with numerous systems. I am pretty much allied or friendly with every faction in the Pleiades. This allows me to make lots of money where i please. It also reduces interdictions and shortens the time it takes for security vessels to respond to attacks on my trade ships.

When running my Conda or Python in passenger mode i often carry a cargo hold to allow me to carry out the odd cargo mission if there isnt much on offer at a station passenger wise. I also fill my hold with passengers going to many different destinations, rather than just try to manipulate the passenger board to deliver to a single station. When i drop one set of passengers off. I pick another set up at the destination station. This keeps the money flowing and builds my rep up in the region.

I appreciate this represents a gameplay paradigm shift for some, however i hope you can adapt. Elite is after all a continually evolving game, and from time to time something changes that affects us individually, takes us out of our comfort zones and forces us to re evaluate our current playstyles.

That's lovely.

Here's the thing. Your account there replicates mine almost exactly, although my 4.3 billion assets are tied up almost completely in ships - I have a float of about 120m cash and that's it. I too am allied with almost every faction in the Pleiades. I too have bubbles of systems in which I'm almost universally adored in all faction's space. I even carry a cargo rack on my passenger ships. Sometimes, I've even run cargo missions in my mining ship when there's a good one on the board because it has a hold, which is all that's needed. Nothing that you posted there is going to be any kind of gameplay revelation for people who have played the game for any significant amount of time. I have approaching 3,000 hours in the game and if I'd spent all of that sitting here red in the face trying to do nothing but grind the same missions to the same places over and over again I'd have gone insane sometime in 2016.

However some days I don't just want to potter around doing a bit of this and a bit of that. Some days I need a quick cash hit for something. Some days I'm urgently in need of some engineering materials and want to get my hands on three or four missions that will give me them. Some days I'm in the mood for a particular activity and would like to make some credits from doing it, rather than spend half my play time for that day flying around stations or across the bubble before I can find suitable missions.

The thing is, I can't think of a single way that having more mission variety and quantity on the board would affect your gameplay negatively.

So really, as with most of the arguments which are critical of players who don't always want to play the game in the way that you do and may favour a more directed form of gameplay/moneymaking at times, this does seem to be something of a classic case of people who aren't affected in the slightest by an issue (based on what they say about how they play the game) telling players whose enjoyment would be affected by it that they just need to suck it up.

Which is pretty selfish when you think about it. Sufficiently so that no amount of snarky suggestions regarding adapting to paradigm shifts can really disguise it.

There are some very lazy caricatures of players who want to run missions in an expedient way being thrown around in this thread.

YES YES YES

Easy there fella. Hands above the duvet.

 

[Morbad]

I just want to voice I'm HIGHLY skeptic of the figure "only 2.8% of commanders board-flip".

Well, Frontier sure didn't make any statement to that effect.

Turning "2.8% of daily online players" into "2.8% of players" is like looking at an annual death-rate of 1200 per 100000 and coming to the conclusion that 98.8% of people will live forever.

 

[aRJay]

Board mission design as we all know is the centre focus of the game, so it needs to be right aside from the current state of the mission board as far as cargo missions is not good at all, and needs to be addressed asap, before anything is changed, frontier does have this issue of moving on ahead and not fixing current in game issues and leaving them to fester for weeks, months years in some cases.

The current board state is that partial mission loading and general information is woefully bad, a lesson i felt should have been learnt from other updates.

Issues are:

Partial cargo missions confusion of what's loaded what's not
Partial cargo information i.e mission board markers not showing to off load you have to scout through the mission board :/
Longer grind now evident with partial cargo missions having to go back to collect all remaining items also what will happen if short by one item!!! just increases flight grind
Interdictions have increased as a direct result also an issue in previous updates yet again....
Why was beta not given any consideration before just going live!!

The only half decent thing currently is payouts seem to be holding their own
No change to passenger missions (MEANING ITS NOT BROKE SO DON'T FIX IT)

Frontier are showing very little effort across the board (excuse the pun) lately again as a direct result older issues are re appearing and attention to detail is...well there isn't any, finding these above flaws goes to prove that fact alone.

Again why is beta not being used here you have the community Frontier why not use them!???

I just hope (very little though these days) that you fix the above before switching the server board, because you'll have even more players screaming at you and your bug reports will be overflowing once more.

You missed out the important modifier for some people. Not everyone is uses missions as their primary source of everything, some use them for important things that can't be done in another way such as confirming ranks or unlocking permits. I would say that 97.2% of my mission board activity is related to CGs, and I have to say it makes the game very relaxing as I see almost none of the 'game breaking' problems that produce so much salt on these forums of course it means my assets are less than 3 billion and I am very lowly ranked with the superpowers compared with the missionaries who have been playing for the same number of months that I have years but I enjoy the game.

 

[aRJay]

Which is it?

Both obviously.

 

[fu9ar]

The thing is, I can't think of a single way that having more mission variety and quantity on the board would affect your gameplay negatively.

So really, as with most of the arguments which are critical of players who don't always want to play the game in the way that you do and may favour a more directed form of gameplay/moneymaking at times, this does seem to be something of a classic case of people who aren't affected in the slightest by an issue (based on what they say about how they play the game) telling players whose enjoyment would be affected by it that they just need to suck it up.

Easy there fella. Hands above the duvet.

The inordinate amount of individual reward is one thing (not to mention the grey market credit grinding services available), but it is not the worst effect of board flipping. It is an exploit that allows people to affect the BGS unduly, forcing everyone else who wants to compete with them into using the technique.

Learn. Grow. Change.

 

[The Chairmaker]

That's lovely.

Here's the thing. Your account there replicates mine almost exactly, although my 4.3 billion assets are tied up almost completely in ships - I have a float of about 120m cash and that's it. I too am allied with almost every faction in the Pleiades. I too have bubbles of systems in which I'm almost universally adored in all faction's space. I even carry a cargo rack on my passenger ships. Sometimes, I've even run cargo missions in my mining ship when there's a good one on the board because it has a hold, which is all that's needed. Nothing that you posted there is going to be any kind of gameplay revelation for people who have played the game for any significant amount of time. I have approaching 3,000 hours in the game and if I'd spent all of that sitting here red in the face trying to do nothing but grind the same missions to the same places over and over again I'd have gone insane sometime in 2016.

However some days I don't just want to potter around doing a bit of this and a bit of that. Some days I need a quick cash hit for something. Some days I'm urgently in need of some engineering materials and want to get my hands on three or four missions that will give me them. Some days I'm in the mood for a particular activity and would like to make some credits from doing it, rather than spend half my play time for that day flying around stations or across the bubble before I can find suitable missions.

The thing is, I can't think of a single way that having more mission variety and quantity on the board would affect your gameplay negatively.

So really, as with most of the arguments which are critical of players who don't always want to play the game in the way that you do and may favour a more directed form of gameplay/moneymaking at times, this does seem to be something of a classic case of people who aren't affected in the slightest by an issue (based on what they say about how they play the game) telling players whose enjoyment would be affected by it that they just need to suck it up.

Which is pretty selfish when you think about it. Sufficiently so that no amount of snarky suggestions regarding adapting to paradigm shifts can really disguise it.

There are some very lazy caricatures of players who want to run missions in an expedient way being thrown around in this thread.



Easy there fella. Hands above the duvet.

I agree with you in the desire to have greater variety of missions on a mission board. I think thats a given for everyone.
I would also say that this change to the mission system will affect everyone one way or another. Just as the current board flipping meta impacts those who dont flip as it has repeatedly resulted in frontier nerfing certain missions eg Passenger mission payouts, long range smuggling missions, skimmer missions etc.

My biggest hope for the new dedicated servers is that it allows frontier to properly balance the distribution, variety and payouts of missions, then allows them to introduce new mission types in the future. I dont expect things to be perfect from the off, it will take some tweaking, however the current system im sure everyone agrees on is not ideal.

 

[Riverside]

Don't forget, this ship is in the top 2.8% of liners out there

When 2.1 was released engineering meant my Cobra MkIIIs were no longer uncatchable, and the increased AI challenge meant I could no longer fly unarmed. I still enjoyed my time in those ships running mission templates that are no longer in the game though.

Sometimes the meta changes & you have to adapt. I don't board flip habitually & the largest dedicated passenger ship I have in my permanent fleet is a Dolphin.

 

[Sea0fgreen]

All the people in favor of this, all the people who report gold rushes, I'm curious. How much money do you have in game? Have you done all the rank grinding you intend to do at this point?

I think what you really want is to pull the ladder up behind yourselves.

 

[Arwkin]

"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."

Am I the only person who sees a DDoS opportunity here? I am a software developer in an industry where security is high on our radar. I'm assuming the "previous back-up servers" would allow board flipping.

 

[Riverside]

All the people in favor of this, all the people who report gold rushes, I'm curious. How much money do you have in game? Have you done all the rank grinding you intend to do at this point?

I think what you really want is to pull the ladder up behind yourselves.

Some might do, I can only really speak for myself & say that I don't. It's not the way I play, I'm not bitter about others doing it & getting rich, I have done it & understand the effects it has.

It says in the OP that board flipping "was never the intended use of the mission system". So taking any players' opinion out of the picture, the people that designed the game think this is a loophole that needs to be closed.

 

[Riverside]

"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."

Am I the only person who sees a DDoS opportunity here? I am a software developer in an industry where security is high on our radar. I'm assuming the "previous back-up servers" would allow board flipping.

There's no money in it, so little incentive when more profitable hosts can be blackmailed for cash. Nothing about FDev's AWS camp is mission critical to anything more than people's savegames.

 

[Red Anders]

The inordinate amount of individual reward is one thing (not to mention the grey market credit grinding services available), but it is not the worst effect of board flipping. It is an exploit that allows people to affect the BGS unduly, forcing everyone else who wants to compete with them into using the technique.

Learn. Grow. Change.

Well my own career in BGS manipulation is currently about five days old so I'm not really part of the problem there. I did spend some effort trying to keep four factions in one system locked into wars/civil wars for as long as possible back before passenger missions got the chop because they were spawning lots of delicious refugee/aid worker missions but other than that, although I know plenty of theory around the BGS and how to affect it, I haven't been an active participant in working it until literally last weekend.

As for learning, growing and changing, you seem to be responding as if I'm some veteran board flipper. I can't be bothered logging back in and screengrabing my stats but over the three years (next month) that I've been playing my income is spread pretty evenly between all activities with the exception of A > B trading because it bores me rigid.

Learning, growing and changing are great ways to live your life, in fact I'd go so far as to say someone who reaches adulthood without having developed the ability to do those is probably in for a fairly hard time as the years pass.

This is not my life. It is a recreational activity and as with any other recreational activity, if it ceases to be enjoyable I will simply stop it and do something else. My preference would be for it to remain enjoyable though.

If you haven't noticed yet by the way I'm not particularly defending board flipping. I'm totally relaxed about the fact FDev want to end it, not because of the specific issues you've raised but because I tend to believe that they don't implement significant back-end changes just for the fun of doing it, so presumably they have identified a benefit in terms of stability.

I merely want the game to provide adequate opportunities for me to derive entertainment from it.

When 2.1 was released engineering meant my Cobra MkIIIs were no longer uncatchable, and the increased AI challenge meant I could no longer fly unarmed. I still enjoyed my time in those ships running mission templates that are no longer in the game though.

Sometimes the meta changes & you have to adapt. I don't board flip habitually & the largest dedicated passenger ship I have in my permanent fleet is a Dolphin.

That's fine but what is the purpose of the larger ship then? I haven't undocked my Beluga for maybe six months because there is literally no point in using it unless I want to make docking more difficult than it needs to be and not be able to land at outposts. It not only provides no benefit over my passenger Python, it is considerably less useful for what is supposed to be the entire reason it was created to begin with.

I've never particularly chased the meta to begin with, I just find the concept of ships being rendered redundant by a lack of available missions to be somewhat at odds with good game development.

I agree with you in the desire to have greater variety of missions on a mission board. I think thats a given for everyone.
I would also say that this change to the mission system will affect everyone one way or another. Just as the current board flipping meta impacts those who dont flip as it has repeatedly resulted in frontier nerfing certain missions eg Passenger mission payouts, long range smuggling missions, skimmer missions etc.

My biggest hope for the new dedicated servers is that it allows frontier to properly balance the distribution, variety and payouts of missions, then allows them to introduce new mission types in the future. I dont expect things to be perfect from the off, it will take some tweaking, however the current system im sure everyone agrees on is not ideal.

On the highlighted line you'd certainly hope so but I have to say I've seen some posts in this thread which would seem to fly in the face of that assertion.

With regard to the nerfs, I suppose I'd have to do the devil's advocate thing first and say that if only 2.8% of players board flip, I'm not sure that's a sound basis on which to nerf anything really

However of the things you listed, passenger mission payouts were nerfed because the formula they used to calculate the reward was borked in being too heavily biased in favour of distance from the star. Long range smuggling was nerfed because the payouts were again an unanticipated consequence of the reward calculation - there was no need to flip at all to make a fortune from them, I filled a Python on many occasions just from what was on the board when I landed. Skimmer missions were nerfed because they screwed up royally by allowing one target to count for multiple missions - stacking obviously contributed to that but it hardly required board flipping - there were stations with pretty much nothing but skimmer missions on the board. I hardly ever did them myself but I definitely saw places where I could have picked up 20 missions immediately on landing as long as I didn't care which factions I did them for. Same with massacres, it was the multiple counting of targets which was the real problem. Even now I see 8-10 massacres on mission boards all the time - that's exactly why I'm concerned about the variety of missions that will be available after this change.

In short, I can accept that flipping may have exacerbated those problems to a degree but in each case there was a fundamental design flaw that created the initial problem. I'm as sure as I can be that all of them would have been hit with the nerf hammer regardless of any board flipping issues. Especially if 97.2% of players weren't doing it anyway. *giggles*

I agree that it's going to take some time to shake out when they change it. I just hope that their focus is going to be on providing an entertaining experience for all play styles and as you say, that there is sufficient quantity and variety of missions to allow those of us who mix up our play style to be able to choose what we want to do on a given day rather than being led by the game to a point where it feels like a second job.

 

[Termite Altair]

Well, Frontier sure didn't make any statement to that effect.

Turning "2.8% of daily online players" into "2.8% of players" is like looking at an annual death-rate of 1200 per 100000 and coming to the conclusion that 98.8% of people will live forever.

Exactly! Two totally different stats. I myself have probably done more board flipping than 99% of the player base, but all in all I've probably spent only around 2.8% of my daily play time doing it... maybe even less than that. It would be nice to know what percentage of players have ever board flipped since launch. Maybe with that stat people would be less confused, though I expect even that number would be surprisingly low.

 

[Termite Altair]

I watched the Mission Q & A livestream yesterday when I was home sick...

There was a Q & A livestream yesterday?

 

[Riverside]

That's fine but what is the purpose of the larger ship then?

Beats me, I've never seen the point of them. I said earlier (probably in this thread) that as a player that doesn't board flip I don't think the Orca or Beluga are viable as passenger ships.

OTOH fairly easily solved with a few new mission templates.

 

[Nimitz68]

Beats me, I've never seen the point of them. I said earlier (probably in this thread) that as a player that doesn't board flip I don't think the Orca or Beluga are viable as passenger ships.

OTOH fairly easily solved with a few new mission templates.

If you want to fly luxury-level missions they are, but that's about it. Otherwise you're right, there are other/better alternatives.

 

[Red Anders]

Beats me, I've never seen the point of them. I said earlier (probably in this thread) that as a player that doesn't board flip I don't think the Orca or Beluga are viable as passenger ships.

OTOH fairly easily solved with a few new mission templates.

The Orca has a niche definitely; I used it for the mid-range (4-5K LY) sightseeing missions and at a tourism station in boom you could often find two or three of those to the same location. Haven't been in the mood for longish trips recently so I don't know if that's till the case though. Plus it's unashamedly the only ship I fly just for its looks - I know people mock it for looking like something out of an Ann Summers store but I think it's one of the best looking ships in the game. Especially in black.

 

[Han Zulu]

If you want to fly luxury-level missions they are, but that's about it. Otherwise you're right, there are other/better alternatives.

You only get one or two luxury passenger missions, if even that.

I parked my beluga after the last nerf. Can't fill it up, and there's not enough time to fly to 10 destinations. Easier and faster to take a dolphin, and it gives more opportunities for small-medium landing pads, and you can fill it up.

Perhaps the idea is to load the Orca or Beluga with weapons, SLFs, and such, rather than passenger cabins. I might give that a try when I come back to ED.