DISCLAIMER: I can't photoshop to save myself. I apologise in advance for my rancid efforts 
Removing board flipping from the game is, fundamentally, a good thing. It's a good move by FD, and I stick by it. However, there's still some extant problems with the mission boards that board flipping could work around:
- Inconsistent mission generation with state/economy. That is, you'd get a board full of assassination missions from a Corporate Faction in a Boom state. That's pretty non-sensical. A player should be able to make educated guesses about the state, economy and faction type, and be guaranteed particular mission types given those parameters. This isn't a "I want to do whatever I like", rather "I want to be able to make sensible decisions to enjoy a type of gameplay, rather than wait for the RNG to grace me".
- Blobby mission boards. A problem with mission boards is they tend to generate lots of the same mission type. If you see one massacre mission, you're likely to see 10 on the board, and minimal orther types, rather than a nice distribution. Wing/Long Range mission spam are great examples of this.
- Stateful mission starvation. All factions on a mission board will generate a combined total of =~ 100 missions. An active state tends to generate more missions... but all factions still share the same mission pool. If all factions are in a state, there can be a problem where two factions are in a Boom state, one has 25 missions generated for it, and others only get 5-6 despite being in the same state.
- Mission board waste is exceptionally high, without taking into account any parameters. Sending 100-odd missions at a time, a player can only accept a maximum of 20 missions, causing 80% wastage. Taking into account player preferences such as
. o Supporting a particular faction
. o Capability of the ship/desired activities
. o Reputation levels
... that wastage factor is more like 95%
There are also technical problems.
- Mission boards *cannot* send more than about 100 missions back to the client. Sending more got trialled in a Beta a while back, and it resulted in near-constant timeouts of mission boards and made the game virtually unplayable. So it's basically a hard-cap that we can't send more than 100 missions.
- Mission board response times exponentially increase with the amount of missions sent back. A board sending back 25 missions is *significantly faster* (3 seconds) than a mission board of 100 missions (25 seconds). That's eight times slower for only four times the missions.
The proposal
Pre-empting mission generation with either the faction or type of mission, or both, is a solution that gives players what they want under the right circumstances, and eliminates a lot of waste.
A basic categorisation I've been discussing for a while is:
- Combat
- Trade
- Special ops (surface scans, salvage, legal hijack etc)
- Passenger
- Criminal (any illegal activities, only available through Anonymity Protocols)
The new contact layout in Beta is a great starting point for a UI and functional redesign of missions. Clicking the Contacts tab, you'll get the following screen.
This is a great starting point for a new mission board layout with transparent "categorisation" by the player.
Option 1 - Categorise primarily on Faction
Presume you hit the Mission Board button, and you are greeted by this:
Response time for this should be near-instantaneous, showing the factions you'd like to work with, without actually generating any missions yet.
After selecting a faction, say, Jet Power Exchange in this case, you're then greeted with the following mission board:
Missions are categorised by type through the different agents, who are (presumably) all reps of that faction. In the mock-up above, you can assume the "Trade Coordinator" was selected, thus a variety of trade missions are now on offer. This ensures all factions are fairly represented, and a variety of acitivities are offered to the player, with missions distributed between all (available) categories.
Option 2 - Categorise primarily on Mission Type
Alternately, we can flip it around and put the broad mission type first:
This puts emphasis on the mission category, which most people care about, and leaves the determination between faction types up to the players who really care about that sort of thing, and supports non-partisan players much better. After selecting, say, the trade category, you're then presented with a more familiar UI.
Key difference here is that only missions of the selected category will be delivered to the client.
Option 3 - Hybrid of both
No terrible photoshop for this one... this would just chain the two categorisation screens together. I don't like this one personally, as it introduces some depth that most players won't care about, and it makes it much harder for non-partisan players to browse offerings from multiple factions. The only advantage of this is to be able to cut down mission generation down to something like 25 to make boards much more responsive.
Some notes
-I did mention briefly about one of the considerations being that a player should not expect to find tonnes of assassination missions from a Corporate faction in Boom... but they should be guaranteed such missions from, say, a Dictatorship in Civil Unrest. This brings to light the idea that categories would only be available under certain state/faction combinations, and are unavailable at other times. For the mock-up below, this could be something like "Corporate in Civil Unrest has it's Trade contact locked down" or similar.
Conversely, a Dictatorship is more likely to purge an outbreak by killing the infected and locking down trade, while a corporate entity would more likely open the trade doors wide to purchase medicines. The UI would look something like this in these cases:
- The categories I use are just suggestions. You could also "fix" wing missions and long-range missions with similar categorisation effects.
Anyways, that's just my 40c.
Removing board flipping from the game is, fundamentally, a good thing. It's a good move by FD, and I stick by it. However, there's still some extant problems with the mission boards that board flipping could work around:
- Inconsistent mission generation with state/economy. That is, you'd get a board full of assassination missions from a Corporate Faction in a Boom state. That's pretty non-sensical. A player should be able to make educated guesses about the state, economy and faction type, and be guaranteed particular mission types given those parameters. This isn't a "I want to do whatever I like", rather "I want to be able to make sensible decisions to enjoy a type of gameplay, rather than wait for the RNG to grace me".
- Blobby mission boards. A problem with mission boards is they tend to generate lots of the same mission type. If you see one massacre mission, you're likely to see 10 on the board, and minimal orther types, rather than a nice distribution. Wing/Long Range mission spam are great examples of this.
- Stateful mission starvation. All factions on a mission board will generate a combined total of =~ 100 missions. An active state tends to generate more missions... but all factions still share the same mission pool. If all factions are in a state, there can be a problem where two factions are in a Boom state, one has 25 missions generated for it, and others only get 5-6 despite being in the same state.
- Mission board waste is exceptionally high, without taking into account any parameters. Sending 100-odd missions at a time, a player can only accept a maximum of 20 missions, causing 80% wastage. Taking into account player preferences such as
. o Supporting a particular faction
. o Capability of the ship/desired activities
. o Reputation levels
... that wastage factor is more like 95%
There are also technical problems.
- Mission boards *cannot* send more than about 100 missions back to the client. Sending more got trialled in a Beta a while back, and it resulted in near-constant timeouts of mission boards and made the game virtually unplayable. So it's basically a hard-cap that we can't send more than 100 missions.
- Mission board response times exponentially increase with the amount of missions sent back. A board sending back 25 missions is *significantly faster* (3 seconds) than a mission board of 100 missions (25 seconds). That's eight times slower for only four times the missions.
The proposal
Pre-empting mission generation with either the faction or type of mission, or both, is a solution that gives players what they want under the right circumstances, and eliminates a lot of waste.
A basic categorisation I've been discussing for a while is:
- Combat
- Trade
- Special ops (surface scans, salvage, legal hijack etc)
- Passenger
- Criminal (any illegal activities, only available through Anonymity Protocols)
The new contact layout in Beta is a great starting point for a UI and functional redesign of missions. Clicking the Contacts tab, you'll get the following screen.
This is a great starting point for a new mission board layout with transparent "categorisation" by the player.
Option 1 - Categorise primarily on Faction
Presume you hit the Mission Board button, and you are greeted by this:
After selecting a faction, say, Jet Power Exchange in this case, you're then greeted with the following mission board:
Missions are categorised by type through the different agents, who are (presumably) all reps of that faction. In the mock-up above, you can assume the "Trade Coordinator" was selected, thus a variety of trade missions are now on offer. This ensures all factions are fairly represented, and a variety of acitivities are offered to the player, with missions distributed between all (available) categories.
Option 2 - Categorise primarily on Mission Type
Alternately, we can flip it around and put the broad mission type first:
This puts emphasis on the mission category, which most people care about, and leaves the determination between faction types up to the players who really care about that sort of thing, and supports non-partisan players much better. After selecting, say, the trade category, you're then presented with a more familiar UI.
Key difference here is that only missions of the selected category will be delivered to the client.
Option 3 - Hybrid of both
No terrible photoshop for this one... this would just chain the two categorisation screens together. I don't like this one personally, as it introduces some depth that most players won't care about, and it makes it much harder for non-partisan players to browse offerings from multiple factions. The only advantage of this is to be able to cut down mission generation down to something like 25 to make boards much more responsive.
Some notes
-I did mention briefly about one of the considerations being that a player should not expect to find tonnes of assassination missions from a Corporate faction in Boom... but they should be guaranteed such missions from, say, a Dictatorship in Civil Unrest. This brings to light the idea that categories would only be available under certain state/faction combinations, and are unavailable at other times. For the mock-up below, this could be something like "Corporate in Civil Unrest has it's Trade contact locked down" or similar.
Conversely, a Dictatorship is more likely to purge an outbreak by killing the infected and locking down trade, while a corporate entity would more likely open the trade doors wide to purchase medicines. The UI would look something like this in these cases:
- The categories I use are just suggestions. You could also "fix" wing missions and long-range missions with similar categorisation effects.
Anyways, that's just my 40c.
