Strange mission boards....

[ubit]

Hello,

i have read in this forum that there is a limit of 40 missions in total - spread over passenger board and normal missions. In addition you can accept up to 20 missions at the same time.

The second last patch split the 40 missions 20/20 to both boards. The last patch adds a change that only missions are send from the server that are displayed in the game (seems there was a local filtering before leading to less than 20 missions per board). This has been done to avoid empty mission boards that occurred before. And it works - somehow. But far from beeing perfect:

1. Factions without missions
There are still a lot of mission boards that do not show missions for half of the factions. If one faction has 10 missions there are only 10 remaining for the other factions. Often it looks like 8/8/4/0/0 or 10/10/0/0/0 in a system where 5 factions are present. It does not depend on faction state which faction offers 0 missions. Even factions in boom often present 0 missions. This should not happen as missions are THE mechanism to "play BGS" for most of the players.

2. Seems that the server generates much more than 20 missions
If you look at a mission board it now normally presents 20 missions spread over the factions. If you accept 1 mission, leave the board, open it again: Hey! 20 missions there again. Seems that there are more than 20 mission in the "background"/on the server - just artificially limited to 20. And it looks like the missions are retrieved from the server every time you open the board. How is this related to the 40 missions total? Does not fit... As described elsewhere in this forum missions are not generated "on the fly" with each request but in bulk - living for 15-60 minutes. Why is an additional mission available as soon as you accept a mission? Actually this behavior is the "little sister" of the - often requested - reload button in the mission board. Currently i have to leave the board, enter it again after every single mission i accept to see if there is something better available. I think this is not good in terms of server load...

3. Why only 20 missions?
If you look at screenshots with google you easily find mission boards with more than 20 missions available. So there is NO 20 mission limit for the mission board. As it seems that the server offers more than 20 missions and the mission board can display more than 20 missions: Why the restriction? 20 missions for e.g. 7 factions is nonsense. There are so many types of missions that it is nearly impossible to find the mission type you want/need to accept (e.g. in terms of BGS) for the faction you want. 7 factions, 20 missions => average of less than 3 missions per faction. Or (see 1.) no missions for the faction of choice at all.

Ciao, Udo

 

[GeneralIdea1964]

I

I do have trouble to find missions for places I will be going. They are always for places that you can't trade profitably with. This is by design I am sure.
It would be nice if there where at least a few missions to places where you could trade successfully as well even if they where not too well paid.

Why do you need more that 20 missions, it's hard enough to complete half that and not be killed/attacked by every now pirate in the system.

 

[DNA-Decay]

Dav said the missions were based on what is being traded in system and what's available "nearby".

 

[ubit]

Why do you need more that 20 missions, it's hard enough to complete half that and not be killed/attacked by every now pirate in the system.

If you are working for a single faction with the BGS you only should accept missions from this ("your") minor faction. In a system with many factions there are often 0 missions available for this faction even when it is in state boom. Or just 1, 2 or 3 if you are lucky. Sometimes you find 10 and more missions - but this is rare - and random.

Or e.g. "your faction" is in state outbreak. Then you will find mostly donation missions (credits and/or commodities). If you are not a "rich" player you cannot do them and have to look for outbreak data or outbreak delivery missions - that often are not available because of the total 20 limit.

Ciao, Udo

 

[Jmanis]

So, I just lobbed up this bugreport, because it seems mission rewards are calculated pretty incorrectly (tl;dr easier missions = more rewards, harder missions = less reward)

I've got no stake in the 0-mission dealio... I've got my own views that get pretty off-topic fast about that, but to address this:

3. Why only 20 missions?

.. You can blame mode-switching + mission stacking for that. People used to stack "destroy the generator at X" missions (and they still do it with Massacre missions, where 1 kill counts for all missions, and "scan the data point" missions, where 1 scan can count for all the missions to that same location) to get ridiculous amounts of credits/rep/rank in a single run.

It completely broke the advantages of being in a single system with many (8+) stations. It takes two or three stations now to fill my mission log... before that I could load up with plenty more and then that'd be my 2h of gameplay for the night.

 

[ubit]

.. You can blame mode-switching + mission stacking for that. People used to stack "destroy the generator at X" missions (and they still do it with Massacre missions, where 1 kill counts for all missions, and "scan the data point" missions, where 1 scan can count for all the missions to that same location) to get ridiculous amounts of credits/rep/rank in a single run.

I do not mean the 20 mission limit for accepting missions but the 20 mission limit for offered missions...

Your explanation seems wrong as the low amount of mission on the boards LEAD to relogging because this is the only way to fill the ships's 20 mission limit with 20 missions.

The problem with kill and scan missions is just bad game design. It should relly be no problem to fix this and only mark one mission as done for each scan or just decrement the "open kills" for only one CZ-Mission. FD seems to "fix" every problem in the game the wrong way instead of doing it right...

Ciao, Udo

 

[babelfisch]

IIRC the mission server generates way more than 20 missions, but it's the transaction to your machine that is limited to 20.

 

[Jmanis]

I do not mean the 20 mission limit for accepting missions but the 20 mission limit for offered missions...

Your explanation seems wrong as the low amount of mission on the boards LEAD to relogging because this is the only way to fill the ships's 20 mission limit with 20 missions.

Ciao, Udo

Sorry, misread, get what you mean now. From the recent livestream, I think it's just that 20 seemed reasonable.

You misunderstand me on the stacking though. In some locations you get lots of the same mission stacking. Before the 20-mission limit, the "cool thing" was to stack "cut the power" missions that would all target the same powerplant. People would literally stack 100-odd of these missions and go out and destroy the powerplant once to succeed all the missions at once. Shortly after this was done in earnest and "revealed" on the forums we got the 20-mission acception limit.

Also RE: "It should relly be no problem to fix this"... they did a livestream about this, and it's not so simple.

 

[ubit]

YOU misunderstood *g* I am not complaining about that i only can accept up to 20 missions. The problem is that you get offered only 20 missions on a single board. That nearly forces some players to switch modes until they have collected 20 missions.

Fixing the problem with generator kills, planetary scans, cz-kills HAS to be simple. Just select a single mission of the matching kind and decrement the number of remaining kills/scans needed. Or: Just mark all not completed missions of identical type and same target system as "sleeping" and activate only one of them at any time. If this is not possible i don't want to see the code that is responsible for this behaviour....

Ciao, Udo

 

[Jmanis]

YOU misunderstood *g* I am not complaining about that i only can accept up to 20 missions. The problem is that you get offered only 20 missions on a single board. That nearly forces some players to switch modes until they have collected 20 missions.

... sooo,, I acknowledged I misunderstood that....

Sorry, misread, get what you mean now. From the recent livestream, I think it's just that 20 seemed reasonable.

... as in 20 missions total being delivered to the client.

Fixing the problem with generator kills, planetary scans, cz-kills HAS to be simple. Just select a single mission of the matching kind and decrement the number of remaining kills/scans needed. Or: Just mark all not completed missions of identical type and same target system as "sleeping" and activate only one of them at any time. If this is not possible i don't want to see the code that is responsible for this behaviour....

Ciao, Udo

It's not a programmatic issue, but a logical one. Say you destroy a ship... which mission do you select? The one with the most kills remaining on it? The one that gives the biggest reward? The one that has the least time left on the clock? The one with the most time? The first in an alphabetical list according to some hidden ID? Different players are going to have different answers to that question.

Watch this livestream, it talks about the issue here.
[video=youtube;gTXNK9Vuemg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTXNK9Vuemg[/video]

 

[Sentenza]

If you are working for a single faction with the BGS you only should accept missions from this ("your") minor faction. In a system with many factions there are often 0 missions available for this faction even when it is in state boom. Or just 1, 2 or 3 if you are lucky. Sometimes you find 10 and more missions - but this is rare - and random.

Or e.g. "your faction" is in state outbreak. Then you will find mostly donation missions (credits and/or commodities). If you are not a "rich" player you cannot do them and have to look for outbreak data or outbreak delivery missions - that often are not available because of the total 20 limit.

Ciao, Udo

Not necessarily. If you are taking over a system, running missions for other factions can help detract influence from the current ruler faster.

 

[ubit]

It's not a programmatic issue, but a logical one. Say you destroy a ship... which mission do you select? The one with the most kills remaining on it? The one that gives the biggest reward? The one that has the least time left on the clock? The one with the most time? The first in an alphabetical list according to some hidden ID? Different players are going to have different answers to that question.

Simple decision of game development. First guess: Count kills for the first mission first. It is up to the player to accept missions in the "right" order. Adding a timestamp should be really easy. Let players accept multiple missions of this kind and work through them one by one. Disable all missions of the same mission type with the same target - except that one that has been accepted first. Reliable. Simple. Understandable. Easy to implement. I really do not understand the problem in programming. I am a software developer too and it really should be no problem. Everything that is needed is a simple decision about which missions are first and a couple of lines of code.

Ciao, Udo

 

[Iskariot]

YOU misunderstood *g* I am not complaining about that i only can accept up to 20 missions. The problem is that you get offered only 20 missions on a single board. That nearly forces some players to switch modes until they have collected 20 missions.

I would already be happy if I could combine 5 or six hauling/data missions for the same destination system in normal everyday play in the bubble.
It never happens.
I get a 20 ton cargo mission for my 700 ton Imperial Cutter, if I am lucky, and that is all. Most of the time not even that.
I usually can't even fill up my Python that has only room for 64 tons of cargo.

It would be cool if the game was able to recognize the ship the player is in and generate appropriate missions.

And couldn't the total mission board limit easily be increased, without stressing the BGS, by simply duplicating a few hauling missions (for example) and just changing the number of tonnes involved. This should take no more than a few fractions of seconds. FD could easily triple the number of missions on the board that way without too much trouble.

 

[ubit]

I would already be happy if I could combine 5 or six hauling/data missions for the same destination system in normal everyday play in the bubble.
It never happens.
I

This is the problem with this very huge galaxy... Combined with the low limit of missions offered.

Most stations send commodities/data to systems that are close. If there are a lot of close systems: bad luck - as the hauling missions spread over a couple of systems. Having only 20 mission offered in a system that has 20 systems in a range of 20 ly this is an average of 1 mission per target system. Subtract the "non-hauling" missions (lots of data delivery, state-dependend kill missions etc.) and you rarely find a mission for a specific target system. Trying to fill a large cargo is nearly impossible.

If you are in a system like Aditi - where only a few systems are near - it is much better. Most of the hauling missions go directly to the neighbor system in 12 ly distance. Most of the hauling missions there go back to aditi. Easy to fill my corvette cargo with missions if at least 1-2 factions are in boom.

Another problem of this "many systems nearby/few missions" is that it is nearly impossible to find round-trip missions (again: Except systems like Aditi, Kidi, Wu Guinagi). The same problem. For a round trip you need a mission (or mostly more than one) to your source system. Even flying to different stations they are very different to find. You have to fly back empty - or buy commodities on the local market to sell in your source system. Mostly this "free trade" does not give you much profit. Finding a "good" system pair is a pain, takes a lot of time and dries out (changing faction states, supply/demand changes, price changes) after a couple of days. Sometimes the route is "dead" the next day.

Ciao, Udo

 

[Jmanis]

I really do not understand the problem in programming. I am a software developer too and it really should be no problem. Everything that is needed is a simple decision about which missions are first and a couple of lines of code.

Never said it wasn't an easy problem to fix programmatically. I said it was logically difficult.

Yes, what you suggest would fix it. Frankly, I don't like it. I would prefer that it award the activity to the mission in my log with the least amount of time remaining on it.

Oh look, here's my mate Bob. He thinks my idea sucks. He'd prefer the activity register against the mission with the most amount of work left to do on it.

And now comes Jim. We don't really like Jim, but he thinks he should be able to select which mission an activity registers against, through a complex series of widgets.

Suzy has an opinion too! She thinks it should just tag against a random mission.

That's, what, five simple-to-program solutions to the bug, including yours? But guess what that means? Pick one, and you'll satisfy 20% of your customer base, and annoy the other 80%, who think it should be done differently for entirely valid reasons.

That's the problem.

 

[ubit]

There is no problem. FD just have to decide which solution to use. It is their game. They (and you) should know that changes never make everyone happy. FD did a lot of decisions like this in the past. Not always "the best decision" - from my point of view. But they did it. And after a while everyone accepts this (they even have no choice except leaving the game) *g*

Every solution is better than the current situation where this bug is heavily used to gain rank and credits. This is a major design failure in the game. Should never possible to complete 20 scan missions with a single scan.

Whichever solution is choosen: The only players that have a disadvantage are those who currently stack those missions - what can be considered as "using an exploit". For all other players nothing is changing. The can play like they do "the correct way". Accept one mission. Do the kills/scans. Hand in the mission. Do the next.

In this special case you do not annoy 80% because those 80% simply are not affected by fixing the bug. If i were FD i simply would do this as soon as possible.

But: As the problem exists for a really long time i am not sure if FD is interested in fixing this bug. Because a lot of players (mostly PvP) use this "mechanism" to gain enough credits for their combat games. Many PvP-Players should run into serious problems if this kind of income is cut... And it seems that FD has an open heart for PvP-Players.

Ciao, Udo

 

[racer1]

The mission boards really need a dev re-visit.

I have just been trying to gain rep with Sirius and Eurybia Blue Mafia to access engineers with an alt cmdr.

Once I had the Siruis permit I headed over to Sirius to get the Qwent invite. It took ages and the thing I noticed was that Sirius Corp on most board refreshes has no missions at all. Galactic mega corp has nothing that needs doing in its home system - makes zero sense. Now there maybe a BGS reason but it makes for bad gameplay.

All factions should always have some missions.

Same over at Eurybia, controlling faction Eurybia Blue Mafia regularly has no missions on board refresh. Which just leads to more board refreshes.

While we're here on missions.

Relogo/board refreshing needs to be fixed.

You cannot balance missions when some people refuse to relog and while others are happy to do it.

Just add a mission refresh button, have a 30 seconds cool down timer on it to reduce server load.

Then it becomes legit and they can balance missions Keep the 20 limit.

 

[ubit]

It is intended that BGS affects mission boards. If factions are in retreat or lockdown 0 missions are quite normal. The handling of state "None" does not make sense for me as None = "No special state" = "Business as usual". But None often leads to 0 missions too. But this is intended - although most players do not care about BGS. They should - as BGS leads to some nice types of gameplay and trading (state dependend trading, supporting player factions etc.).

The main problem with BGS and mission boards is that factions with states that SHOULD generate a lot of missions (e.g. Boom, Civil War, War) often show 0 missions because all of the available 20 missions are already "consumed" by other factions.

Think of a system with 3 factions. Faction A and B are in Boom. Faction C is in Retreat. You will see 20 missions in total from A and B, 0 missions from C. Sounds good. But: If Missions for Faction A are retrieved first from the database/transmitted to the game - Faction A could show 20 missions, Faction B shows 0. Bad. Very bad... Both factions have the same state - but offer VERY different number of missions.

In this situation it can happen that A presents 20 missions and B show 0 because simply A is first transmitted from the server - blocking the whole mission board.

A few days later B + C went to War. A still in boom. There SHOULD be massacre/CZ-Missions for B + C. Currently most of the time only B OR C have missions. Again: The limited total number of missions on the board lead to a huge advantage for the faction that is read first from the database/server.

The only "correct" solution:

Limit the total number of missions to e.g. 20 PER FACTION. (Or maybe 10 if server load is an issue)
Set the total number of missions for the complete mission board to 20 times "number of factions".
No Faction should be able to "block" missions from other factions just by presenting 10, 15 or 20 missions for themself.

This change could lead to up to 180 (or 90 if only 10 missions per faction) missions on each mission board. All factions are handled the same. No faction is penalized just because of the order of database results.

Again: Bad game design currently. No logic in the current implementation in terms of gameplay.

Ciao, Udo

 

[racer1]

Neither faction I was referring to were in lockdown or retreat. Even so those states should still have missions.

Lockdown should have bounty hunting missions.
Retreat should have something, perhaps bring in defensive weapons, transporting supplies/passengers out of system.

Gameplay should not be limited by poor mission spawn. Even small changes could make the system a lot better.

Hopefully in the next update lol...

 

[ubit]

Hopefully in the next update lol...

Hey! Elite Dangerous is designed for a period of 10 years... There has to be some work for the developers in the future....

Ciao, Udo