So, just a quick summary from Beta, where Conven is guaranteed clean of other players (not even a traffic report on local news!)
--- Conven Factions, Board 1 ---
Patronage 1: 4 x Donate Credits, 3 x Courier
Corporate 1: 8 x courier, 3 x donate goods
Cooperative: 1 x source, 1 x courier, 7 x delivery (flavoured), 2 x planetary scan
Confederacy: 3 x Delivery (flavoured)
Corporate 2: 7 x Source, 4 x Planetary Scan
Patronage 2: 6 x donate credits, 3 x donate cargo
Anarchy: 6 x Illegal Assassination, 3 x Disable Generator
--- Same Factions, Board 2, 30-60m Later ---
Patronage 1: 9 x Delivery, 2 x Donate Goods
Corporate 1: 2 x Source, 1 x Courier, 7 x Delivery, 1 x Planetary Scan
Cooperative: 5 x Donate credits, 2 x Covert Installation Scan, 2 x Delivery (flavoured)
Confederacy: 4 x Donate credits, 1 x Source, 5 x delivery (Flavoured)
Corporate 2: 1 x Donate credits, 3 x Donate Cargo, 7 x Delivery
Patronage 2: 2 x Donate Credits, 5 x Source, 1 x Courier, 2 x Delivery, 1 x Donate Cargo
Anarchy: 5 x Illegal Assassination, 2 x Installation Scan
This isn't an antithesis of the "priming" theory... but with such large discrepancy between the different boards in a system with almost certainly no player activity, it's hard for me to ascribe player activity on mission boards to what gets generated.
What I
have observed in my time observing the boards is that many missions survive between 10m-board-refreshes. I very deliberately waited 30-60m (I don't know exactly how long, was getting toddler to bed) because I knew it'd give me what I call a "Full" refresh... I actually think each mission generated on the board has a random Time to Live (TTL) which designates when it disappears and gets replaced. In addition, any mission that despawns needs to generate a mission that
wasn't the type that aged off (in order to continue generating a diverse range of missions).
More speculative, I think there's several factors which influence what missions get generated:
- How many of that template has been generated across the whole board. (Fairly confident, 80% trust)... overriding this is whether there's any valid mission types remaining when the cap is hit (Reasonably Speculative, 50% trust)
- Factions like Confederacy and Cooperative have their own, special flavoured template, so these don't count against the common, shared templates. (Fairly confident, 80% trust)
- Stateful mission generation gets priority (Fairly confident, 80% trust)
- Government-level preferences for particular mission types do apply (Reasonably speculative, 50% trust)
- Your active missions which would populate the mission board normally, are applicable in that system for generation purposes (Very speculative, like, 20% trust)
For me, this can give the effect of "priming" a system; you take a stack of delivery missions, and suddenly, you'd start seeing less of them generating, and if you come back just 10-20m later, a lot of the ones you left on the board would still be there.