News Implementation of a dedicated mission server

[[VR] Mad Mike]

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.

not at all.... i currently have 4 million in the bank, i do have an anaconda however i have had to mothball it as i splurged too much and cant afford the insurance

there are lots of reasons why fixing the missionboard is good and guys you know what... honest to goodness if FD officially announced they have totally fixed the economy and are now totally happy that it is now robust and sensible accross the board, BUT to implement it everyone had to reset their bank balance AND assets I would be ok with that.

dont worry it aint gonna happen... i am just countering your view that the only people happy with a robust mission board are those who are the "haves"!.

i would like to see far more missions on the missions board. this would be much much better than increasing the mission payouts imo. they are already nuts.... the moment a mission to deliver X tons of Y to station Z pays more than actually trading the same X tons of Y to station Z yourself using your own money then the mission board is broken imo.

 

[Jukelo]

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.

Here's my current save:

Spoiler

 

[Deareim]

Just another proof FD is not currently playing its game

 

[andr2010]

I understand that the players were not bored, you decided not to fix the errors of the last update, and add a bunch of new ones?

 

[M_Biscotti]

dont worry it aint gonna happen... i am just countering your view that the only people happy with a robust mission board are those who are the "haves"!.

Not the case for everybody, look at there https://inara.cz/cmdr/36040/

.... the moment a mission to deliver X tons of Y to station Z pays more than actually trading the same X tons of Y to station Z yourself using your own money then the mission board is broken imo.

I thought the same until I thought that if you want a specific amount of something somewhere everybody buy at a given price, if you don't pay more, why would someone sell it to you instead of anybody else ? But I agree on some cases : paying 3 to 10 times the price for something very common on very common circumstances doesn't feel consistent.

That's why I love the idea of a standalone mission generator. It requires no patches on the other parts of the server, and if this part of the server doesn't have to be "clouded", it can be restarted very quickly. It might not even require to restart all other servers. Being standalone also means they can fix, modify, and enhance mission systems far more quickly than now. I do have many hopes on this feature as you can see ^^

 

[Red Anders]

That is what is happening now except the neckbeard impact factor is exponentially higher because they are able to stack specific missions to get a specific outcome.

That's a fair point and I'll defer to your presumably greater experience when it comes to the degree of impact on BGS play. I've also repped you for the phrase 'neckbeard impact factor'.

 

[deanom59]

What S/He said

Will you change the mission generation to one where I can choose the faction I want to support and the type of missions I want to run, for the BGS? Or massively increase the number of missions so I can filter by type (that filter now is a cruel joke)

Board flipping happens/ed so that you could actually find missions for your chosen faction. If this means there is essentially only one mission board, and the mission generation doesn't change otherwise, I fear you're significantly nerfing missions as an option for targeted BGS play.

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

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.

So, after the explo nerf (the last remaining BGS mechanic that actually rewards owning a station) and now this incoming likely mission nerf for influence... are you finally going to do something about the OP murder? Or is BGS really just going to get reduced to who can shoot the other side's system authority the quickest?

Exactly this!

 

[SubitusNex]

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.

Sounds pretty ridiculous then. You're clearly not trying to "address all of the reasons players felt they need to use “board flipping”" because you are not addressing the biggest reasons why people do it which is what led to those first two feedback questions. People have posted time and time again why they have to do it and your apparent solution is simply to remove the option without taking any measures to mitigate the original problems in the first place. Overall your position is that you are going to fix this by making it a single board and changing nothing else other than turning the refresh from 15 to 10 minutes.

Plus your solution to having us be able to choose between wing missions and non wing missions is simply reducing the number of wing missions. What's the actual rational behind that? Pointless.

This is vastly insufficient. Apparently all you know how to do is turn everything into a bigger grind. It seems that every day I get more disappointed in Frontier Developments. Honestly, if you care about your player community you should listen to them. It's about time you do something positive for a change.

Sure having a more sustainable, robust server is good, but at this point a better mission query system wouldn't be too hard to implement, and improving mission spawns shouldn't be hard either.

I do not want to have to sit and look at my screen for 10 minutes because I can't work for the faction I want to because there are no missions that I can do for them. This shouldn't be a problem for players to face. Deal with it.

It's almost as if you just told us "if we remove board flipping, then people don't need to board flip. Right?"

You're flipping your community the finger and want us to enjoy it. I'm sincerely upset. Specially because this is not the first time you do it and it's getting old.
Either improve your reasoning and argumentation to the public or improve the quality of your work. Hopefully both.

 

[Killakiwi]

Board flipping the most engaging content in Elites trade system now removed....


I dont believe the 2.8% number is active players, the amount of people who show up to systems for passenger/skimmer/meta alloy or what ever gold rush is going on that requires a board flip or two to full a hold should more than proof enough for that.

What will happen is check one station receive a mission or two that might fill 25% of the hold wait for few minutes and see if it refreshes ... ah screw it Netflix/other game is more interesting anyways and log.

 

[SubitusNex]

Board flipping the most engaging content in Elites trade system now removed....


I dont believe the 2.8% number is active players, the amount of people who show up to systems for passenger/skimmer/meta alloy or what ever gold rush is going on that requires a board flip or two to full a hold should more than proof enough for that.

What will happen is check one station receive a mission or two that might fill 25% of the hold wait for few minutes and see if it refreshes ... ah screw it Netflix/other game is more interesting anyways and log.

I think you may have a point there. What is considered an active player to them? Also, how much of that active population is actively doing missions? That could give us a good figure of it. Also, how was it measured, on what days, etc? Because that indeed sounds like a lowball number. But I can obviously be wrong. Still I would like to see FDev's numbers.

It's also probably further skewed by PS4 and Xbox numbers.

Still... I don't think the 2.8% is really or should really be the focus of the feedback here. The fact is there are a number of improvements which with largely improve the community's experience and while this server is one of them, there's obvious drawbacks that need to be properly mitigated and additional improvements made.

 

[jonesskill]

These statistics maybe weak and all (no details published for instance) but at least they are based on some numbers while you have nothing. I always find it ridiculous when people oppose their gut feel against facts and numbers. If they provide some numbers you'd better come up with some hard facts to disprove these numbers. Otherwise please stop that nonsense, it's leading to nowhere...

Nothing?

3.300 Votes:

TheYamiks
Elite Dangerous : "Board flipping" what do you think of it?

I use it and want it to stay! 52%
I use it , but want it gone! 15%
Don't use it and want it to stay! 5%
Dont use it and want it gone! 4%
Meh, don't care ether way! 24%

I'ts 3.300 people opinion on this matter, the highest number of people voting on Yamkiks pool ever, that can be checked and are open to anyone see/vote.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheYamiks/community

 

[Konan]

I am happy about fdev getting rid of board flipping. I personally don't see what some of you are worrying about. The systems i work always have a diverse list of missions DEPENDENT on the state of the factions in the system. If a faction is NOT in boom, you will have a poor list from that faction. Me and my friends we work out systems keeping the factions we like in boom as much as possible. We almost always have a plentiful supply of the mission rewards we are looking for. I never board flip the mission board. I do not want fdev screwing up the board to satisfy some cheaters (and that is what you are if you advocate manipulation through means fdev did not intend). The only thing I want the board to do is for the missions to represent the state of the system,the type of system and the wealth of the system.

 

[Susanna]

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. Clarification: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ssion-server?p=7005234&viewfull=1#post7005234

Yet another nerf inbound... You guys are completely off your trolly! So just how long will it take to stack 20 data missions now? Or pick up a full ship load of passengers? Are you going to extend the period given to complete the missions as well to compensate for the extra time it will now take to gather the missions? I doubt it even crossed your tiny little minds.

And as for your crummy 10% increase... Just another insult! [mad]

Do you people even play your own game? Because it sure as fridge magnets looks like you don't...

So let's recap on the current FDev screw overs in the last few weeks...

No carriers in Q4 update
No ice planet update in Q4 update
Mission board flipping removed
The Gnosis farce...

Nice going FDev, you never seem to fail to find new depths of decrapitude to sink too!

Oh and up til now it's been 'working as intended', now you decide it wasn't... Lies!

 

[rootsrat]

Nothing?

3.300 Votes:

TheYamiks
Elite Dangerous : "Board flipping" what do you think of it?

I use it and want it to stay! 52%
I use it , but want it gone! 15%
Don't use it and want it to stay! 5%
Dont use it and want it gone! 4%
Meh, don't care ether way! 24%

I'ts 3.300 people opinion on this matter, the highest number of people voting on Yamkiks pool ever, that can be checked and are open to anyone see/vote.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheYamiks/community

While 3300 people is a significant number on its own (which really is 1700 people supporting the "no change" notion), it actually really does means nothing in the context of the whole Elite Dangerous community. Sorry.

 

[jonesskill]

Sure, I know these numbers. No need to repeat them over and over again. Except that Yamics and his fans are building a filter bubble in its own. They might form a greater number of players but certainly aren't the majority of all players. They certainly feel they are, that's for sure.

You might as well just see the remaining 2.8% in action!

You can make the same pool in any place, the results will be the same. (Some people already do it again on Facebook)
You can even filter the feedback in this thread, and the results will be the same.

 

[Mangal Oemie]

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.

Here is what will happen upon release:

1. BGS players find the board empty, and re-adjust to the new reality, and return to exploration data, bounty hunting, possibly even trade. BGS play without board flipping in most systems is impossible. If I have the time to do 20-30 missions, I am not going to instead do 2, then return to port, and do another 2 in the same time it took to flip and do 20 before. I'll go make 2 hours of explo jumps instead. If the faction owns no assets, it may become more effective to push a little to get a faction into conflict, then push it up through combat bonds. Point being: don't give missions for my faction? Then no missions will be run for the BGS, and other approaches would be found. Too bad about that influence option in rewards, though...

2. Passenger mission running will practically die out completely, or become Dolphin taxis, as it would take several hours to find enough passengers to fill a Beluga, Orca or Anaconda passenger ship

3. Rank grinders, engineer material grinders, etc. many who may not yet have a forum account will sign up and cause the biggest storm on the forum since... eh.. the Gnosis event.

4. Reduced daily active users, as frustrated CMDRs decide to go play something else.

 

[Killakiwi]

I always find it ridiculous that people believe a corporations statistics and numbers with out them giving the facts and numbers and explaining how they came up with them.

I believe what i see and what i have done in the game as well as the people i have talked too.

 

[jonesskill]

While 3300 people is a significant number on its own (which really is 1700 people supporting the "no change" notion), it actually really does means nothing in the context of the whole Elite Dangerous community. Sorry.

This show how people can read data wrong.

The only number we can extract from there is: 4% want it really gone. <-- You and a few in there.
The rest, don't care want it to stay or want it gone IF a better system take place (Just read the comments)

 

[rootsrat]

This show how people can read data wrong.

The only number we can extract from there is: 4% want it really gone. <-- You and a few in there.
The rest, don't care want it to stay or want it gone IF a better system take place (Just read the comments)

The only number that would actually matter is from the poll made by FDEV within their Launcher, so that every player can vote once (and even that wouldn't be 100% accurate, as some own multiple copies).

Sorry mate, any other poll means literally nothing in the context of "what the community wants".

 

[jonesskill]

The only number that would actually matter is from the poll made by FDEV within their Launcher, so that every player can vote once (and even that wouldn't be 100% accurate, as some own multiple copies).

Sorry mate, any other poll means literally nothing in the context of "what the community wants".

You're not a newbie on ED, you know that something is very strange about their trowing this numbers away - i'ts like they are looking for support to a CHANGE that is NOT POPULAR.
If you expect their doing a pool about this matter, knowing that people will vote against the changes you are a dreamer.

Their are looking exactly for suport, its like teir are asking for *some* people " Hey dudes, come and fight for this " And don't get me wrong, they are only changing this because i'ts a SIDE effect that they can't prevent.