Long range hauling missions... ?

Jmanis

Jmanis
DMC831 said:
EDIT: Plus, last I looked, we have both Robigo broken AND no long range missions... since at least 2.4, when I came back to the game. I'm not sure when it started being like this, but others may remember. The factions there don't spawn regular missions, just passenger missions.
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This is what I mentioned in my post. The only way to fix it would be with a, lets say "medium range" (100-250LY) mission template, which causes it's own problems.
Without that, medium range missions must generated from "normal" (i.e <30LY) cargo delivery mission template, and "because Robigo" any implementation would either:
  • Pay pitiful amounts for <50LY missions, as mentioned, this was in the order of =~ 1,000cr in the worst cases; or
  • Pay brokenly high amounts for the 100-250LY range
That's the crux of the problem... so FD's fix was to make the normal missions pay a reasonable amount, and kill off anything =~ 50LY or further, to prevent the brokenly-high payouts.

Reason you don't see any missions in Robigo anymore (just passenger missions) is that the nearest system (Ceos) is 52LY away. Because of that, it breaks the ability to generate almost any mission template, as most have a pre-requisite for a system within 30LY. So this rules out:
  • Assassinations
  • Massacres
  • Delivery/Courier
  • Source (they ask for in-demand cargo sourcable from within that range)
  • All surface missions
  • Hijacking
  • Salvage
  • Might be more I've forgotten

The only ones that might generate (and this largely depends on faction type, it seems) are Donation and Mining, though there may be conditions around them too.
 
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DMC831

DMC831
Jmanis said:
This is what I mentioned in my post. The only way to fix it would be with a, lets say "medium range" (100-250LY) mission template, which causes it's own problems.
Without that, medium range missions must generated from "normal" (i.e <30LY) cargo delivery mission template, and "because Robigo" any implementation would either:
  • Pay pitiful amounts for <50LY missions, as mentioned, this was in the order of =~ 1,000cr in the worst cases; or
  • Pay brokenly high amounts for the 100-250LY range
That's the crux of the problem... so FD's fix was to make the normal missions pay a reasonable amount, and kill off anything =~ 50LY or further, to prevent the brokenly-high payouts.
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That's great to know about the 50ly thing! Thank you for explaining it, I get why they don't spawn missions now (along with the other far flung former smuggling hotspots).

But, about the pay, here's some screencaps from when the missions would spawn after the Weekly Tick-- I don't think the pay is crazy (2.4 era).

134142

134144


One example from Robigo, one example from my home system of Nastrond in the bubble. The pay is less than modern big money in Elite, and wasn't close to the best pay overall at the time I took the screen cap-- which is fine, just to be clear, I just liked doing the missions and this level of pay doesn't seem broken. I'd mainly wanna change the cargo requirements so I could use a smaller ship, but the pay and ranges are what I'd be fine with.

I could of course be missing some issue, but these distances between systems seem great, the pay seems fair, and I don't think it'd break the game to have the long range missions back even with the Robigo situation since it doesn't pay as much as other missions or mining.
 

Thrender Grone

Thrender Grone
Right around the time passenger missions were first introduced, I was taking VIPs from Wu-HIP to systems around 100-150ly away for (at the time) crazy good payouts. Sometimes would stack several at once and collect around 75 million per run. Then after one update, they disappeared. :cry:
 

Seizewell Warrior

Seizewell Warrior
As a follow up to my aside, I swapped out one of my freight racks for a passenger cabin as these seem to be generating more missions with material rewards. Still short distance stuff though other than the sightseeing ones. And actually, I even copped a freight mission with materials so perhaps RNG does still smile occasionally... :)
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
DMC831 said:
That's great to know about the 50ly thing! Thank you for explaining it, I get why they don't spawn missions now (along with the other far flung former smuggling hotspots).

But, about the pay, here's some screencaps from when the missions would spawn after the Weekly Tick-- I don't think the pay is crazy (2.4 era).

View attachment 134142
View attachment 134144

One example from Robigo, one example from my home system of Nastrond in the bubble. The pay is less than modern big money in Elite, and wasn't close to the best pay overall at the time I took the screen cap-- which is fine, just to be clear, I just liked doing the missions and this level of pay doesn't seem broken. I'd mainly wanna change the cargo requirements so I could use a smaller ship, but the pay and ranges are what I'd be fine with.

I could of course be missing some issue, but these distances between systems seem great, the pay seems fair, and I don't think it'd break the game to have the long range missions back even with the Robigo situation since it doesn't pay as much as other missions or mining.
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I was going to respond, but then I looked at the date in those screenshots... tl;dr I agree, and I think this is a case of FD "fixing" something which was already fixed and breaking it further.

There was a point in time where, in your first screenshot, that 84t Cobalt delivery in the bubble would have paid out something like 5-10k credits. This was compared to assassinations and the like, which happily paid out millions like you've shot. For anyone operating in the bubble, this was unacceptable, particularly when you had things like Skimmer/Massacre Stacking etc. going on. But as I said, that predates your screenshots.

I think FD made a good fix by changing the primary influencer of delivery payouts to be the in-system distance to the station, not the LY distance (which still affects, but much less so), and it appears that was done before they broke it again, based on your screenshots. I think the "change" was to change the template from something like:

  • Get a list of the closest 10-20 systems
  • Generate missions to them

into
  • Get a list of systems within X-LY range
  • Generate missions to them

So yeah... if there was a state when missions were like that... FD should've kept that... but I think this was another "left hand-right hand" situation.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
deckroid said:
I'll go one further... I keep seeing tourist missions to take folks to Colonia... but never transport missions. That would be cool.
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They exist... again, only from tourism economies. The problem is the payout is a joke... cue everyone saying "you're not meant to make money off them!" when two- way tourism pays close to 30m, but one way transportation pays less than a million.

Is this a joke?

So, I get colonia missions aren't meant to be total cash cows... but this seems pretty damn ridiculous. Bugreported it here, for reference. All these screenshots are from the same faction, to which I'm allied. Firstly, courier missions to Colonia: This is fine. 1.4m credits, I stack twenty...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk
 

CapitanAceRimmer

CapitanAceRimmer
If they added another board for long range missions or a switch to the current mission board, that would isolate these missions and allow the developers to balance them without affecting the current missions.

This would also allow them to increase the number of missions available.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
CapitanAceRimmer said:
If they added another board for long range missions or a switch to the current mission board, that would isolate these missions and allow the developers to balance them without affecting the current missions.

This would also allow them to increase the number of missions available.
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I don't mention it explicitly, but that would fit very neatly into this suggestion I made a while back, as a separate "Long Range/Exploratory" category. Unfortunately some in the community seem diametrically opposed to the idea of requesting "broad mission categories" on demand, even though any state/faction/government/economy variation offers all mission category types, at any time. And even though this is a common design template for other MMOs...

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/overhaul-of-mission-board-ui-and-mission-lists.456902/
 

DMC831

DMC831
CapitanAceRimmer said:
If they added another board for long range missions or a switch to the current mission board, that would isolate these missions and allow the developers to balance them without affecting the current missions.

This would also allow them to increase the number of missions available.
Click to expand...

That sounds like a great solution to me; adds variety, players can do what they feel like, etc etc-- going by what Jmanis says about how some feel about that idea, what is the argument against it? Obviously I could be overlooking something, but that sounds like what we'd want.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
DMC831 said:
That sounds like a great solution to me; adds variety, players can do what they feel like, etc etc-- going by what Jmanis says about how some feel about that idea, what is the argument against it? Obviously I could be overlooking something, but that sounds like what we'd want.
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The general counter-argument is "Players shouldn't be able to dictate what missions get offered to them"... which is usually made in absence of knowledge that all mission types are available in all combinations of conditions... the only things which vary are target cargoes and flavour text. Any anomalies (like Robigo now offering nothing) are not things coded in special for those systems in the BGS, rather just anomalous edge-cases which weren't thought about. This has always been the case.

Some seem scared and think this means "... players will stack a whole bunch of hauling missions to a single destination."... besides the fact that already happens, being offered a broad category of missions means if you select "trade" missions, you may still get stuck with a board full of mining missions.

The primary concern is "Why should a player be able to ask for (e.g) combat missions from a Corporate faction in an Investment state?"... and the answer is "They already can". People seem to over-estimate the capabilities of mission generation as some complex beast taking into account many, many factors, but as I've pointed out in my previous posts (e.g how Robigo used to be problematic for the rest of the galaxy), it's not complex at all; the rules are quite simple, but they can lead to very strange and sometimes problematic edge-cases. Taking Robigo again... some claimed "Clearly this is by design!"... no... things like Robigo were purely accidental, and always have been.
 

DMC831

DMC831
CapitanAceRimmer said:
I was also thinking that this would not just be haulage missions, it could also be data delivery missions and other mission types.
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Yeah, for me it's not just longer range missions I miss, but "Fail on Scan" smuggling and courier missions. While smuggling gets easy once you know what you're doing, it still can trip up players, and the penalty for getting caught now is very light ever since they removed Fail on Scan. You can still get very poor paying smuggling missions currently, but I've not seen an illegal courier mission since I came back in late 2017.

I'm not sure when they did remove it; it happened some time while I was gone (between early 2016 and Fall 2017) and it wasn't in the game when I came back in 2.4... at least as far as I've seen. So it was at some point during Horizons.

Part of the fun was taking several missions and how one scan could ruin allllll of them, so a fine just ain't the same even if it's a really hefty one. While I hope for a smuggling and piracy overhaul one day like exploration and mining received, I'd settle for for simply having things that were in the game before (and in my opinion, they worked as a mission type, aside from whatever pay balance issues they had in certain situations) and I'd be thrilled with slight tweaks that aren't huge changes but improve the risk and reward.

Plus taking secret data is just more fun than regular courier missions, and it's a nice way to intro smuggling to players who don't really have cargo space. Like ya say though, longer ranges could apply to more than just these missions!
 
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