News Implementation of a dedicated mission server

[Han Zulu]

Yes you can . With 95 % confidence level and confidence interval 2.5 you need a sample size of 1536.

In other words 1700 is statistically quite relevant.

That being said I also think FD is dropping the ball here. They should FIRST fix the mission system so board hopping isn't necessary anymore. After that fix the "issue" of board hopping.

Unless the only way to fix the issues with the missions is to put it on a dedicated mission server, which, as it stands, also prevents board hopping. I think that's what they were aiming at.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Why though? It'd be much better if they added "Credit my Zaonce Bank account with a billion Credits". That way you're saving the time on having to do the actual mission.

Or better, just give us 10 billion Cr each and all of the ships with all of the modules straight away. Who needs gameplay anyway?

Surely board flipping is just another form of grind. So all they are doing is replacing one grind with another.

 

[rootsrat]

"Gameplay" = Wait the board refresh and pray to the gods of RNG to something usefull pop up?

No, gameplay = go to another station in the system and try to find more missions and if they are not there use your bloody head and try to THINK how to maximise your profit from using other tools and features that this game offers you.

"Wait the board refresh and pray to the gods of RNG to something usefull pop up" sounds like an incredibly lazy way to play this game by a player who doesn't really know how to play.

 

[jonesskill]

I'd really like to have a combined poll about how many of those who actively do board flipping also consider the game already a grind and in general. I bet we'd be in for a surprise.

And "alleviate some of the grind" (SciTrekker) is just another word for "band-aiding". How can any halfway serious gamer support such nonsense?

HAHAHA serious gamer, sorry, this is ridiculus.

Also, for sure, let the wound OPEN and the patient die of hemorragie i'ts better than "band-aiding" it.

 

[Tolans2003]

This is going to kill elite......The Reason most people "Board Hop" as previously mentioned is to fill their ships.....Think about it a truck loaded at a carrier doesnt make 5 other stops to load before he goes to deliver to a single carrier he is loaded and sent on his way.....A plane going from Houston to Dallas doesnt go to The Woodlands then to Conroe to pick up more then Huntsville then Madisonville then finally head on its way it goes FULLY loaded from Houston to Dallas. By taking board hoping your basically cutting profit margines by up to 90% for passenger missions with oh btw we will give u a lowsy 10% bonus R U FRIGGAN KIDDING ME!!!!! Common now guys do u really think that people are going to run your passenger missions or even reg boom data or delivery missions without being able to fill up their ship to make a run worth while......I mean the average payout of a Smeaton Orbital run is right around 2-3 mill.....ITS A 30 min flight in and it takes 2 friggan hours BOARD HOPPING to get your ship filled.....SO when u implement this are u then going to add more missions because if u dont it will simply be then end of passengers.....Now CARGO U CAN do a 3 min flight total and make 6 mil.....But i dont like cargo being interdicted constantly so what are u doing for those of us who like passenger missions......O and one last thing. People are complaining because u shouldnt be able to go to a Anaconda or Cheiftan inside of 2 weeks playing this......THAT .......U still have to A rate it then ENGINEER it.....If u make everything a huge huge grind how do u expect the average joes who cant spend 6-12 hours a day gaming to friggan get ANYWHERE......U make this too grindy your pop dies simple as that..... I honestly wonder with all the stuff u removed and what little your giving back if u dont want this game too die....If so thats a shame because it was good and was a great idea but I'm along with countless of others I know and played this with YES PLAYED because they already left a while ago and 10-15 just left because of this garbage who honestly believe U WANT this game to die.

 

[ferus]

Why though? It'd be much better if they added "Credit my Zaonce Bank account with a billion Credits". That way you're saving the time on having to do the actual mission.

Or better, just give us 10 billion Cr each and all of the ships with all of the modules straight away. Who needs gameplay anyway?

Yes, because that's exactly what SciTrekker said. Why is any attempt to alleviate the grind immediately perceived as a win button?
Can't you just see that some of us want less grind (i.e. better mission system) without taking it to the extreme? Or a game that is more approachable to the player and his free time?

No, gameplay = go to another station in the system and try to find more missions and if they are not there use your bloody head and try to THINK how to maximise your profit from using other tools and features that this game offers you.

"Wait the board refresh and pray to the gods of RNG to something usefull pop up" sounds like an incredibly lazy way to play this game by a player who doesn't really know how to play.

It was already explained several times why flying from station to station is not a viable solution if
1. you have limited time for playing
2. you want to support your local faction
3. you want to actually PLAY the game rather than ATTEMPTING to play

...and still have to rely on RNG to toss you something meaningful your way.

There are already so many things that ED does the annoying way that we really don't need yet another one.
Why does everything have to be so tedious in a videogame?

 

[jonesskill]

Can you imagine how the game would look like if it would be designed for people who only have 5 minutes time for playing each day, something you shouldn't exclude according to your logic?

Well, nobody is asking 10BI credits OR some rewards diferent that we already have.
Just asking to keep the liberty to chose the missions they WANT to do in the time that they are playing the game.

I'ts just you and a few more no-sense that are distorcing another people words to try to prove you puritan way.

 

[ferus]

Can you imagine how the game would look like if it would be designed for people who only have 5 minutes time for playing each day, something you shouldn't exclude according to your logic?

Flying from one system to another and relying on RNG to generate you some suitable mission is not good gameplay no matter how many hours of free time you have.

But if you insist on doing only tedious missions that take way too long to get in the first place, no one is stopping you.
You can do it now and you could do it even with the new system.

 

[dAlexis]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to clarify the mention of 2.8% percent of daily online players "board flipping" in the OP. The vast majority of our daily active players are using the mission board, and of those, it is only a small number who are actually "board flipping" (2.8%). This figure is based on daily active users using the mission board specifically.

To reiterate, the implementation of a dedicated mission server is not to remedy "board flipping", but to bring about much greater server stability and reduce crashes, and the removal "board flipping" is a side effect of these improvements.

As always, we welcome your feedback on the mission system in general and how it can be improved in future.

First of all, thanks 4 the reply!
However, I really do not beleive in 2.8%. How many relogs 4 player were threated as "board flipping"? If 10+ - you just counted men, grinding money, not missions. Or they are just reloading the board w\o leaving to main menu? My opinion, that 20% figure from beer rule ( 20% are drinking 80%...) is lower, than number of players with 2-3 normal relogs.
But if it's really 2.8% with one-two real relogs - please, compare medium common flight time for these 2.8% with others. It seems 2 me, that it'll be ~10 * medium time 4 others. You'll touch men, flying the most.
Due to this - my opinion:

1. Maybe, one server will be more stable, however, it's just a one fault point. Of course, I have in mind you message about backups on old servers, but remember about backup implementation of new mission types from new server, improvements, etc. Degradation of backup fuctions with time may happen indeed.
2. Flipping boards have two causes - looking 4 money and looking 4 missions. The first cause is clear enough, but when I see, that there are no missions 4 faction at all, or all passengers are from Colonia to old bubble - what 2 do? Just board flipping, which will not be available. I'll just wait 10 minutes, speaking various words...
3. Several players, maybe, have crashes from mission boards, but all the crashes, I remember during ~1 year, happened from maps (Galaxy & system). No one from board.
4. If you want to improve missions - once more: please, begin from the log without correct influence during several patches. And generate more various missions! 20 is not enough, maybe 30-50 will be OK.

And, please, remember about principle: "Workable? Do not touch, leave it working!". However, it seems 2 me, that everything with this new server will be, exactly accordig to words of our ex-premier Victor Chernomyrdin: "We were planning to do the best, but the result is as always" or "It happened never, but again... "

 

[ferus]

Of course it's an extreme but often the only way to increase the visibility of more or less abstract issues.

Btw, where would you set the threshold? At 10 minutes? One hour per day? And then you would have to answer the question "who are you to determine how much time is still viable for playing on each day?"

Yet you have no trouble immediately tell off anyone who wants it a little more approachable.

 

[ferus]

Agreed, that's no good game design either since there's missing a lot (some more ingame tools and filters to begin with). But is it really enough justification for the rubbish that board flipping is right now? With board flipping as status quo you can wait for a fundamental fix until kingdom comes, that's for sure.

I would love to and I hope they will fix it... but I am slowly losing faith in FD at this point. Their history of nerfs and "improvements" is not the best in my opinion.
Grind on top of grind...

Nope. That's just black and white thinking as you obviously can't think of any better solution than board flipping to the underlying issues. When I see people defending this nonsense I could come to the conclusion that board flipping must be some sort of highly addictive drug that suppress all creative thinking...

Yes, I had to resort to board flipping here and there*. With a good selection of missions (which FD denied will be adding) I would not have to.
Simply bad game design. So simple.
Some of us are trying to get FDEV's attention and all we get are comments about win buttons and so on...


* For instance, when I had about an hour to play (because of my job, famliy etc.). I wanted to do a quick delivery mission for some credits because I knew I would have time for anything else.
I checked the mission board in a multimillion system and saw nothing. Not one delivery mission.
At that point I had two options:

1. board flip
2. or walk away from the game

I decided to board flip. Am I the bad guy?
I am getting worried that with the newly "improved" mission board I will have to resort to option 2 more often than I would like.
Take away board flipping by all means but please add more missions and more variety of missions.
That's all we are asking. (and no, that is not a win button).

 

[SciTrekker]

Why though? It'd be much better if they added "Credit my Zaonce Bank account with a billion Credits". That way you're saving the time on having to do the actual mission.

Or better, just give us 10 billion Cr each and all of the ships with all of the modules straight away. Who needs gameplay anyway?

Ful disclosure: I have never board flipped.
But I have stopped playing when I don't see the missions I need for working the BGS (yes need, not want because FD have said I need them to achieve a certain outcome). Other MFs have plenty of INF+++++ missions on offer but the MF I want to support is only offering missions with REP+++++ and I'm allied with them.

 

[Zurie]

Single Jump Passenger Missions

I am part of the 2.8% that uses board flipping. I have a Belluga with 7 luxury class cabins. My specialty is going from Pearson Station to Namorodo. I pick up Elite (crown) passengers and take them all from A to B. It takes me about 20 minutes of constant board flipping to get the ship full enough to take to my destination, which is another 15 minutes of flying. I make around 30 million per trip. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But you can only do this with a ship that cost over 150 million in gear and being Elite trader rank AND having exalted ranks with all the station factions. So its a very high point of entry to even accomplish this and I think that it falls in line with a decent reward for a decent amount of money towards the process.

A number of these passengers do not like being scanned so I do the majority of my docking and undocking in silent mode, dodging the small mail slot (compared to a belluga) along with dumb NPC pilots who fly in and out, while dropping heat sinks to manage my heat in silent. Sometimes you have wanted passengers and your ship can be shot by the station at any point of successful scan. Ive also flown shieldless and collided with the wall losing ALL of my passengers, all of my ranking progress for their missions, 14 million rebuy, etc.

I enjoy this gameplay. I don't do it alot, but when I do it, I do it to make some side money and as a means to another avenue to upgrade ships and its a really nice change of pace from CG / Combat / Exploring / PVP.

With the removal of board flipping I am fearful that the ability to get enough passengers to make money and make it worthwile will diminish or end.

What is FDEV's thought process on how multi-cabin passenger missions should work? Yes I could pick up 1 or possibly 2 missions to Namorodo, and then pick up one random mission to some other place, but granted there are short range passenger missions and long range. So am i picking up 1 or 2 cabins now and flying off and thats the way you wanted the belluga to function? What is the reason to allow so many passenger cabins if we are unable to fill them going to our destinations of choice? Surely you don't expect me to pick up someone going to colonia and someone going 16 light years away? Why even build a passenger ship so large if you don't have missions to fill it up in a reasonable way?

We really need a overhaul on how the passenger missions selections work. I should be able to search for a destination and get all the missions I'd normally get flipping the board 20 times in 1 shot. Apparently "all" of those missions are on the server in 3.2 so in 3.3 are those missions going to be spoon fed out slowly in 10 minute increments?

Passenger missions should allow you to pick a destination and either get all the missions from that station available for the destination, or at least a sizable majority of the cabins.

I have over 1000 hours into this game and have done everything from skimmers to passengers to base raiding, combat, thargoids, etc etc and I feel there are going to be alot of missions that will have a negative impact from being limited to a single set of choices every 10 minutes.

 

[Mangal Oemie]

Why though? It'd be much better if they added "Credit my Zaonce Bank account with a billion Credits". That way you're saving the time on having to do the actual mission.

Or better, just give us 10 billion Cr each and all of the ships with all of the modules straight away. Who needs gameplay anyway?

I would have thought the gameplay would be the missions I end up actually doing. Not the flipping of the board to get them.

I actually _like_ delivery missions. Give me 20, and I'll do a little "travelling salesman" figuring out my optimal route from system to system, docking and unloading at various stations nearby. That's the gameplay.

I want to do the missions. Please give me some.

 

[Jukelo]

I would have thought the gameplay would be the missions I end up actually doing. Not the flipping of the board to get them.

I actually _like_ delivery missions. Give me 20, and I'll do a little "travelling salesman" figuring out my optimal route from system to system, docking and unloading at various stations nearby. That's the gameplay.

I want to do the missions. Please give me some.

The thing is, gameplay includes the search for good opportunities. That's why the game doesn't remotely tell you where modules and ships are, where good trade routes are, how the BGS works etc... Flying around to find what you need or want is part of the game, part of the enjoyment, and just sitting at a station board flipping obviously does nothing for that.

 

[ferus]

The thing is, gameplay includes the search for good opportunities. That's why the game doesn't remotely tell you where modules and ships are, where good trade routes are, how the BGS works etc... Flying around to find what you need or want is part of the game, part of the enjoyment, and just sitting at a station board flipping obviously does nothing for that.

See, I have the same opinion but on flying around stations and systems relying on RNG to give me something meaningful.
How hard is it to increase the mission number (so it would at least resemble a station where millions of people live?). The worst part of this is that the game does not tell you where to look and you can spend hours flying around achieving actually nothing...
That's not what I imagine when FD says "we value your time".

I want to play the game and I want to continue playing the game but it's just throwing more and more obstacles in my way.

 

[CMDR _BigJay_]

I would have thought the gameplay would be the missions I end up actually doing. Not the flipping of the board to get them.

I actually _like_ delivery missions. Give me 20, and I'll do a little "travelling salesman" figuring out my optimal route from system to system, docking and unloading at various stations nearby. That's the gameplay.

I want to do the missions. Please give me some.

My first gold rush was Sothis/Ceos long range hauling around 2 years ago. Take my Asp-X with cargo racks, flip the board a few times at Newholm and pick up as many of the smaller (8t, 12t, 16t) long range cargo missions as possible. Also grab some data delivery missions to New Dawn. Once I hit my 20 mission limit, fly over to New Dawn, drop off the data missions and flip the board a few times picking up all of the smaller long range cargo missions there. Once the cargo racks are full, or close to full, I'd fly 300-ish ly back to the bubble and drop off all of my cargo missions. I made a little over 1Bcr doing that and went from a Cobra MkIII to an Anaconda in about a month.

It's been a long time, and I've done many other things in the game. But I do look back to those days and think it really was a pretty good time, doing the space-trucker thing.

Used to be you could flip the board once or twice at both stations and my Asp-X would be full. That wasn't too bad. Once I got to an Anaconda, I had to flip the board a few more times than that. Then they nerfed it into the ground. Those missions are back now, and they pay ok. I went back there to do a few runs with my every-day-driver Anaconda (only has 128t of cargo racks). It took me HOURS of board flipping to get a dozen missions going back to the bubble. Spawn rate was terrible. I did that run and then quit and went and did something else.

That's the context I look at this stuff through... I HAD gameplay that I found fun and rewarding and now it's gone. I've heard the long range smuggling missions from Robigo that were in the game before I started playing were very similar but even more fun because of the smuggling part. They're gone now too.

 

[ferus]

Missions are certainly far from ideal to begin with but they never should be just giveaways. That adds just more boredom to the sauce. You should have to play out what missions are given to you, but nothing that would support grinding missions.

These things could be so easily balanced if only the payouts would be properly adjusted to an environment that either disallows or (at the very least) strongly hamper mission stacking. But obviously no one including the devs are able to imagine such an easy solution.

If it's not clear what I mean, take transport missions for example. Why does a big ship owner have to stack 10 or 20 missions to fill his ship when just a single mission that requires the cargo space of a big ship would be offered with an appropriate payout?

Mission stacking is the core of all these issues IMO and just a result of lazy coding.

Yep, I agree with you on this one. Completely.

I don't need to stack missions (I never did actually). When I board flipped it was because no mission was available for me and my ship at that time.
I was either in a different ship and transferring the appropriate ship would result in (guess what) waiting or the board was full of massacre missions or something similar which I simply don't do.

A good balance in mission variety and reward is all we need. But so far ED only chose to take away board flipping without increasing the number/variety of missions (at least that's what the latest update sounds to me).

 

[spiresofillusion]

Agreed, that's no good game design either since there's missing a lot (some more ingame tools and filters to begin with). But is it really enough justification for the rubbish that board flipping is right now? With board flipping as status quo you can wait for a fundamental fix until kingdom comes, that's for sure.

It's definitively not a solution to the underlying issues and i doubt anyone is happy about changing modes iteratively for this reason. But it is indeed a reasonable strategy to face the problems. The announced changes will, however, take this alternative away leaving us stuck with too few missions of the wrong type damning many Cmdrs to wait an eternity in mission board limbo until RNGesus shows mercy.

Concerning the `fundamental fix', many people here seem to believe that along with the ceation of a separate mission server, FD is going to include a lot of new and fancy changes to the mission board. I don't quite understand where this wishful thinking comes from. The original post of Will states clearly that this is a purely technical change, with the board flipping thingie being a side effect.

Moreover, the net increase of payouts is simply an attempt of appeasement, since

(...) when it comes to missions, we will continually review and balance them where needed.

Which implies that the current mission offers work as intended, being it the payouts, the mission quantity, the time constraints, etc.

That's just black and white thinking as you obviously can't think of any better solution than board flipping to the underlying issues.

I'm pretty sure that not only a lot of people here on the forum but also the FD staff has a lot of good ideas on how to solve the issues. The problem is, as i strongly presume, the date on the roadmap for `Create player tailored engaging missions' is denoted as `when kingdom comes'.

 

[SentineI]

I don't need to stack missions (I never did actually). When I board flipped it was because no mission was available for me and my ship at that time.

Yes, this.

Mission stacking is a fairly minor problem by comparison, but as usual FDev decide to concentrate on nerfing exploits used by 1% of the player base, at the expense of ruining the gameplay for the other 99%.

The whole game balance of ED is horribly distorted by FDev trying to prevent a minority exploiting to earn millions, while ruining the fun for the rest of the players (leading to many people to stop playing IMHO).