Hello everyone,
As most of you know, Board Flipping is the act of saving and exiting the game and then coming back in order to refresh the missions that are being offered to you. This makes for very counterintuitive gameplay in which the most efficient way to play is by quitting the game. It does not feel natural. And it probably puts strain on the servers because you aren't just refreshing missions, you're doing the whole log out and login procedure into the game.
Players are well used to playing like this and the sudden removal of the capability would certainly not be good without a considerable overhaul of the mission system. It wouldn't feel good to have a ship with huge cargo space and not be able to fill your cargo as much as possible for doing trade missions, for example.
However, this has allowed for many abuses, such as the infamous Quince exploit. By having only one available location for mission generation it becomes extremely efficient to flip the board until you fill up your transactions screen with such missions, concentrating players on a location simply because it is by far the best one for earning credits and reputation.
The most simple solution would be to add a mission refresh buttom on the board, with a certain timer before it can be re-used to avoid making the server strain even worse than before. As you earn reputation with the minor faction, this timer could then be substantially reduced. It means that a reward for focusing on that faction would be a much quicker process of finding interesting missions to do.
I don't think this would be enough, though. Systems that have less variation of locations for missions will always end up being much better for running missions. You can't blame players for trying to be as efficient as possible, you just need to adjust the mission system to avoid such situations.
This is why I believe there should be a mechanism called "mission points". An easy mission would cost 1 point, the hardest ones would cost much more, like 10 points along with obviously much higher rewards. Your rank in the game could determine how many available points you have, giving further incentive to advance in a certain rank. This would replace the current mission cap of 20 (and 3 for certain mission types). I believe players would very much prefer to get an extremely hard mission that uses up all available points instead of doing the boring roulette of getting as many small missions as possible to the same destionation as long as the hard missions scale enough in their rewards. It would fix one of the deep flaws in the current mission system, that is a lack of substantial improvement in challenges and rewards the better equipped you are.
EASY TRADE EXAMPLE: 1 point. Move 10 slots of cargo to a station in a system 25 ly away. Reward: 100k CR each, 1m for all of them.
MEDIUM TRADE EXAMPLE: 5 points. Move 60 slots of cargo to the same station as the easy one. Reward: 750k.
HARD TRADE EXAMPLE: 10 points. Move 150 slots, same distance. Reward: 2m.
In this example you have a 10 point cap. I only changed cargo space to simplify the math behind the idea. Obviously it should be much more complex, but I'm working on the fringe case of a remote group of systems that have few available destinations for their missions. As a result you:
- Save a lot of effort flipping the board until you get 10 similar missions.
- Get a much more efficient reward per mission point, which makes you interested to get a higher cap and fish the bigger point missions.
- Don't need to migrate to a system with few possible destinations, as getting the hard mission would make it not matter since you only need one mission in this case.
- Prefer to get the 10 point mission because even if you could take 20 easy ones, you would be needing much more cargo to get the same reward.
As most of you know, Board Flipping is the act of saving and exiting the game and then coming back in order to refresh the missions that are being offered to you. This makes for very counterintuitive gameplay in which the most efficient way to play is by quitting the game. It does not feel natural. And it probably puts strain on the servers because you aren't just refreshing missions, you're doing the whole log out and login procedure into the game.
Players are well used to playing like this and the sudden removal of the capability would certainly not be good without a considerable overhaul of the mission system. It wouldn't feel good to have a ship with huge cargo space and not be able to fill your cargo as much as possible for doing trade missions, for example.
However, this has allowed for many abuses, such as the infamous Quince exploit. By having only one available location for mission generation it becomes extremely efficient to flip the board until you fill up your transactions screen with such missions, concentrating players on a location simply because it is by far the best one for earning credits and reputation.
The most simple solution would be to add a mission refresh buttom on the board, with a certain timer before it can be re-used to avoid making the server strain even worse than before. As you earn reputation with the minor faction, this timer could then be substantially reduced. It means that a reward for focusing on that faction would be a much quicker process of finding interesting missions to do.
I don't think this would be enough, though. Systems that have less variation of locations for missions will always end up being much better for running missions. You can't blame players for trying to be as efficient as possible, you just need to adjust the mission system to avoid such situations.
This is why I believe there should be a mechanism called "mission points". An easy mission would cost 1 point, the hardest ones would cost much more, like 10 points along with obviously much higher rewards. Your rank in the game could determine how many available points you have, giving further incentive to advance in a certain rank. This would replace the current mission cap of 20 (and 3 for certain mission types). I believe players would very much prefer to get an extremely hard mission that uses up all available points instead of doing the boring roulette of getting as many small missions as possible to the same destionation as long as the hard missions scale enough in their rewards. It would fix one of the deep flaws in the current mission system, that is a lack of substantial improvement in challenges and rewards the better equipped you are.
EASY TRADE EXAMPLE: 1 point. Move 10 slots of cargo to a station in a system 25 ly away. Reward: 100k CR each, 1m for all of them.
MEDIUM TRADE EXAMPLE: 5 points. Move 60 slots of cargo to the same station as the easy one. Reward: 750k.
HARD TRADE EXAMPLE: 10 points. Move 150 slots, same distance. Reward: 2m.
In this example you have a 10 point cap. I only changed cargo space to simplify the math behind the idea. Obviously it should be much more complex, but I'm working on the fringe case of a remote group of systems that have few available destinations for their missions. As a result you:
- Save a lot of effort flipping the board until you get 10 similar missions.
- Get a much more efficient reward per mission point, which makes you interested to get a higher cap and fish the bigger point missions.
- Don't need to migrate to a system with few possible destinations, as getting the hard mission would make it not matter since you only need one mission in this case.
- Prefer to get the 10 point mission because even if you could take 20 easy ones, you would be needing much more cargo to get the same reward.
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