AFAIK the timers do not stop for space missions (but hey, it wouldn't be the only time I was wrong). When I have like 4-7 days to pick up some black boxes, it doesn't really matter as the mission takes like 2 minutes to complete. I have plenty of time to get back to the station to turn them in and get new missions. With on-foot missions some take a lot of time to complete, most times they take the whole of my gaming time and I struggle to get back to the station...
Need more time for Odyssey missions
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AFAIK the timers do not stop for space missions (but hey, it wouldn't be the only time I was wrong). When I have like 4-7 days to pick up some black boxes, it doesn't really matter as the mission takes like 2 minutes to complete. I have plenty of time to get back to the station to turn them in and get new missions. With on-foot missions some take a lot of time to complete, most times they take the whole of my gaming time and I struggle to get back to the station...
I'm well sick of FD removing interesting things from the game because a minority of players can't be bothered to read the conditions first.
Fully agree though, once the mission is ticked as completed, we should be able to return to the station any time we please to collect the rewards.
Would it be helpful if I created a support ticket for this issue? Not really an actual bug but it bugs me nevertheless... 
Not really the right place for this. Let's just keep bumping this post every day for the next 3 years.
I'm in favor of short, even challenging mission times, but the timers pause when you are not in game. Long mission timers with no pauses are kind of the worst of both worlds: still annoying while not brining any interesting challenge to the table.
Ideally I would like to see modest mission times which pause when you are logged out, combined with more aggressive "par times" which would provide additional rewards for faster completion.
If necessary there can still be a "BGS" timer which ticks down in real time and would negate any BGS effects if you complete the mission after that point.
Ideally I would like to see modest mission times which pause when you are logged out, combined with more aggressive "par times" which would provide additional rewards for faster completion.
If necessary there can still be a "BGS" timer which ticks down in real time and would negate any BGS effects if you complete the mission after that point.
Agree. And the "if you're killed, the mission is over" was always nonsense and unfair. The mission should fail if you couldn't finish it after the time limit is over, not before.Hello!
I'm speaking from a standpoint of someone who usually does not have a lot of time to play in a single sitting, so always trying to squeeze in that hour of play.
In that hour, I can barely get ANYthing done in Elite. I won't get into the time sinks fans have been moaning about for years, like travel time, though those are a big part of the problem. But Odyssey introduced new ones, like the short time to complete missions and turn them in.
With non-Odyssey missions I'm able to stack at least several missions and have enough time to complete them over several days, saving the time to travel to and fro getting the missions and turning them in.
Odyssey missions have short timeframes, and those include turning the missions in, naturally. This means I can only take one mission at a time, hurry to get to the destination, hurry with the mission execution and hurry back to turn it in. This sadly affects the way I do the missions, too. The hurry I'm in prevents me from using the current stealth system effectively and I do much more mistakes.
Just on a side note, I really like some of the Odyssey missions. I also see (in a non-educated way) how much trouble must have gone into making the AI system allowing stealth etc.. I hope we see more content here and well, more time to do the missions.
EDIT: "Odyssey missions" refers to on-foot missions.
Some are very doable in a short time, say comparable to picking up black boxes in space - with collector limpets able to be done in half a minute! Except that the black boxes missions have a 5 days (cca) timer and EDO missions have 5 (cca) hours timer.
But then there are EDO missions that take a far longer time to complete, especially covert missions. With the travel time they can easily take more than an hour - and that is usually longer than I'm able to play.
A longer timer means that you can take several missions and do them in one or three sittings, only travelling from and to the station once for all of them. With shorter timers you're forced to turn them in in the short timeframe so a large portion of the play is the transit time.
The mission timers stop on completion of the mission. So you have plenty of time to log off and hand in another day with the space ones you don't get a completion until you're back at the station itself.
Thats not how it was. Must've been fixed in 6 or 6.1.
But yes wholly agree the timers should be on a par with horizons ones. 24 hrs for the lesser ones and 3 to 6 days for the harder (heist, covert, etc) ones.
I'm pretty sure they want the bgs affected more often hence the short timers.
And hence the bgs in alot of turmoil atm..and me shooting coppers won't help : )
Didn't notice that at all when I was playing last night. Will pay more attention now ...
Might I throw out the idea that it's actually Space Mission timers that need to be reduced (not Odyssey timers increased), and the overall objective of many space missions reworked to function more like Odyssey missions?
Notwithstanding the way Odyssey handles mission stacking[1], and excluding massacres (just like in space... hmmm...) most missions take around 5-10 minutes, excluding travel time[2], are quite involved by comparison, and almost always can't be stacked. Contrast against most space missions which are, excluding travel time, 1-2 minutes tops and, well, incredibly mundane and often stackable.
Instead of making Odd missions more like Space missions, make space missions more like Odd.
In short... how about we make short-timer missions pay better, and make easily stackable, quickly completable missions pay less, or rework them so that effort, not metagaming gets rewarded.
EDIT: Or even better, put 24 hour timers on everything. If you meet that timer, you get a nominal reward for your effort, but no material, influence, cargo or rep rewards/options. But finish it within a tight primary timeframe, and you get substantially more rewards.
[1] It prevents it by active filtering of missions with the same destination and/or objective. If that's the path FD wants to take stacking, then the algorithms generating should just not generate missions to the same target/with the same objective. Stacking would obviously have major issues with Odd depending on the type of mission, but with a board limit of about 100 missions per generation, it absolutely sucks that the 10 missions offered by a faction you want to work for get wiped because you accepted one, causing the rest to disappear, with no recourse.
[2] It's kinda surprising the community didn't seem to realise that intra-system travel was incredibly slow before Odyssey. I guess no grind-guides include that XD... here i was thinking that was just common knowledge...
[3] "Reasonably Expected Effort" in anticipation of the usual "Well, transporting 2000t of widgets in a Cobra MK3 takes way more effort than a T9, so it should pay more!"... If T9's/Other large ships are prohibited for use in the mission, then absolutely, that should pay lots. If not, then use a T9, don't uppercut yourself. In practice, a 2000t shipment to or from an Odd outpost (max size small) should pay a hefty premium compared to a large->large transport target. The fact the mission boards don't take this into account is a major oversight
Notwithstanding the way Odyssey handles mission stacking[1], and excluding massacres (just like in space... hmmm...) most missions take around 5-10 minutes, excluding travel time[2], are quite involved by comparison, and almost always can't be stacked. Contrast against most space missions which are, excluding travel time, 1-2 minutes tops and, well, incredibly mundane and often stackable.
Instead of making Odd missions more like Space missions, make space missions more like Odd.
- Make the objectives more involved; for example, rework massacres so that, instead of just being "free credits" on top of normal kills... make them wave-based fights which need to be undertaken at the mission USS, and will only count for that instance of the mission. Also make them less stackable.
- Introduce variable mission timers; 24 hours for everything in space is dumb, and already leads to timing issues.
- Normalise effort for most missions around 10-15 minutes of the activity. Looking at you in particular, mining missions.
- Rebalance rewards; make rewards scale based on "reasonably expected effort[3]" needed to complete the mission, not intrinsic effects like "cargo value". "Distance to station" is a factor for most space missions, but doesn't seem to factor in for Odyssey. Looking hard at Passenger Missions and Luxury Cabins here too; and obviously
- Rebalance rewards for time on the clock. A courier mission with 15 minutes on the clock should pay out drastically more than a courier mission with 24 hours on the clock.
In short... how about we make short-timer missions pay better, and make easily stackable, quickly completable missions pay less, or rework them so that effort, not metagaming gets rewarded.
EDIT: Or even better, put 24 hour timers on everything. If you meet that timer, you get a nominal reward for your effort, but no material, influence, cargo or rep rewards/options. But finish it within a tight primary timeframe, and you get substantially more rewards.
[1] It prevents it by active filtering of missions with the same destination and/or objective. If that's the path FD wants to take stacking, then the algorithms generating should just not generate missions to the same target/with the same objective. Stacking would obviously have major issues with Odd depending on the type of mission, but with a board limit of about 100 missions per generation, it absolutely sucks that the 10 missions offered by a faction you want to work for get wiped because you accepted one, causing the rest to disappear, with no recourse.
[2] It's kinda surprising the community didn't seem to realise that intra-system travel was incredibly slow before Odyssey. I guess no grind-guides include that XD... here i was thinking that was just common knowledge...
[3] "Reasonably Expected Effort" in anticipation of the usual "Well, transporting 2000t of widgets in a Cobra MK3 takes way more effort than a T9, so it should pay more!"... If T9's/Other large ships are prohibited for use in the mission, then absolutely, that should pay lots. If not, then use a T9, don't uppercut yourself. In practice, a 2000t shipment to or from an Odd outpost (max size small) should pay a hefty premium compared to a large->large transport target. The fact the mission boards don't take this into account is a major oversight
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You might, but I definitely do not agree. Nobody is harmed by the ability to turn the missions in say a day or three later. There is no gameplay advantage a player is given by a long timer so I can see no objective reason to do so.
Also, nobody has ever reported long mission timers to be a problem in any way, so it is kinda weird to do so now, years later, when others want the timers in Odyssey to be the same as they were pre-Odyssey for all these years. But sure, why not...
EDIT: That said, time-sensitive missions with large rewards are a good idea!
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Yes there has been. There's oftentimes (especially in Odyssey, whose missions are more affected by this) posts where a mission is taken before a BGS status update, and the system state changes over that tick, making the mission impossible to complete afterwards. Longer mission timers would just exacerbate this even more. Coincidentally, I've definitely abused long mission timers when conducting BGS activities. Even longer timers would be, well, fantastic, for all the wrong reasons.
Happy to concede the middle ground is to give the good rewards for finishing it in the expected (short) timeframe, and leaving mediocre/credit-only rewards for leaving them longer. Coincidentally, this is exactly how EVE does missions; there's something like a 7-day timer on all missions, but you get double rewards (and other things like LP? It's been a while...) for finishing it within the hour you take it where most missions take up to about 30 minutes.
But that's a critical difference right? All Odyssey missions 15 minutes to complete, whereas stacking and blitzing Space-missions is a totally different mentality, plus the rewards are all askew. I personally don't think the implementation of space missions is right, and that Odyssey's current implementation is much better.... not that anyone who enjoys the current mechanics around space missions would agree there.
This makes it easy.
We already have three different rewards choices. Give them three different timers.
I'll take whatever.This makes it easy.
We already have three different rewards choices. Give them three different timers.
I have to admit not to know enough about BGS.
Several missions are contingent on (and only completable during) particular BGS states, and some are even uncompletable outside of them. States can change every ~24 hours.
Odyssey in particular is affected by this.
- Wars/Conflict Zones essentially shut bases down for 4+ days. Almost any sort of mission targeting these bases cannot be completed while the war proceeds. This includes assassination, retrieval, covert theft, base restoration etc.
- Base Restoration is contingent on the target base being shut down, which occurs when the base is in particular (negative) BGS states such as (but not limited to) lockdown, infrastructure failure or natural disaster). If you take missions just before the base enters such a state, it can suffer the same issue per wars as above. If you take a restoration mission just before the owning faction leaves that state, it is impossible to complete; you can only abandon it.
Both these issues became apparent fairly quickly after Odyssey launched; people complaining about taking a restoration mission and being unable to complete it due to the base being online, or taking other missions and being unable to complete due to a warzone taking over, despite the short timeframe on Odd missions.
In space it's less bad due to most missions being contingent on USS, though there's one glaring (and similar) issue; CZ massacres. You can only find those targets in warzones. If the war finishes, there's no more targets. There's been numerous complaints about that occurring.
Another issue that affects both is the Retreat state; there's numerous cases now where a player hasn't been able to complete a mission where they took a half-billion worth of tourists out to <some destination 20,000Ly away> only to return and find the issuing faction is no longer present, because they were retreated out of the system during the month-long timer they were given to complete the mission. This also occurs with normal missions where the faction is retreated during the 24 hour window.
Equally, if assets change hands as a result of conflict and a mission targets a facility (e.g installation scan) targeting that faction, in control of that asset, these are now impossible.
Beyond all that, there's just all-round issues with synchronicity and "making sense"; taking a mission to "urgently source medical goods" for an outbreak, but if the timer is long/suspended during log-off, you might return days or weeks later with the "urgent goods" well and truly after the outbreak has ceased.
Outside that, long mission timers can be quite exploitable; whether it's for stacking, or "banking" completed missions to hand in at a time when they will be more impactful. States also affect the missions on offer... == different state effects for completing the mission, so banking those to an appropriate time for hand-in later is also viable. Banking works less these days given how the BGS works now, compared to old days, but it still has a place.
Of course, all these have potential fixes, but that's also a lot of potential effort simply to get "longer timers", and some of those fixes could look very clunky. Thus, back to my original post, I think the way missions work needs to be rejigged generally, though not towards longer timers, but rather to focus to rejig them to be committed activities to which you subscribe to one or two for that gaming session kinda like Odyssey does, rather than creating a "shopping list" like the current space game.
Bloody hell, that's a lot to consider... Thank you for the explanation! Being a casual gamer with three children, I definitely wish for the timers in Odyssey to be the same as they are in Horizons - we've obviously survived with them this long, after all. I do hope some solution can be found to not disrupt the BGS, though.
I’m not a coder, so I could be way off, but I don’t see why you couldn’t have longer hand in times.
Yes, you need to do the mission within 6 hours because of the BGS, but why can’t a mission register for the BGS when you’ve completed the task, and then you hand it in at your (relative) leisure?
It's not the bgs influence that matters - that can be applied whenever. What matters is that the bgs puts the bases in the states required for the missions. So you can't have 7 day timer to get to repair a base as the base could go active at any time in those 7 days.
They could extend the hand in time if they wanted to, but given it's only a few who refuse to adapt I don't see much pressure to do it
