The Mission Board - Single Server or not, its a flop.

[Vash627]

Just to throw in my two cents... personally, I think this is all better answered with a full searchable mission board. I.e. Gi'me all missions that pay > 10,000 or show me all missions for pirates. Let's see all missions delivering palladium to X. Etc, etc, etc... that way, it can stay the way it is and Danicus & others can selectively pick the missions they want. Sounds like a win-win to me.

I doubt it will ever happen, but... it's what should be.

I'd be okay with a searchable mission board. One that resets once every 24 hours, and lets you find all missions of a particular type anywhere in the galaxy rather than just ones being issued at the station you find yourself at. I would go so far as to place the mission search feature into the ship menu near the Galnet options. Open the menu, find the mission type you are looking for, select it and accept it. If the mission is a delivery you plot a route to where the cargo is to be picked up then take it to where it's supposed to go. If it's a combat mission you plot a route to where the ships are that you've agreed to destroy then travel to the issuing station to collect the reward. You'd never need to flip a board, there'd always be missions of every type available somewhere, you just don't have to be in that somewhere to accept the mission. You could buy cargo and then search for stations that want it and how much they're paying within the game, not using some outside resource by searching across a singular massive mission board for any mission type that wants that cargo.

Seeing all missions across the galaxy from one searchable, filterable, in-game menu would be the best way in my opinion.

You've made my point entirely. The Elite Dangerous advertisement should be "Go to space and play the background simulation!"

I'm not sure if maybe you missed the part where this is a "space sim" ? It's not all pew pew, there's an economy and some other things too.

 

[Winterwalker]

Just to throw in my two cents... personally, I think this is all better answered with a full searchable mission board. I.e. Gi'me all missions that pay > 10,000 or show me all missions for pirates. Let's see all missions delivering palladium to X. Etc, etc, etc... that way, it can stay the way it is and Danicus & others can selectively pick the missions they want. Sounds like a win-win to me.

I doubt it will ever happen, but... it's what should be.

+1 to that search option .. (should be an option though, as opposed to an alternative, definitely).

That's fair enough, same missions searched differently. And fair comment because - am I right about this - can you still search the galaxy map accoding to population? (I think that might have gone?)

Anyway, on the upside galaxy map got a whole filter revamp twelve months ago and some sections of engineering are filtered, navigation and hold space too.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

FDev has already stated that the number of missions will not change

...at the time. They obviously will increase them when servers will be ok-ied for future steps. One of reasons why they had to take number of missions down after 2.4 launch was...board flipping.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Can we stop using advertisment slogan as carte blanche argument how game restricts your imagined gameplay?

Also no for searchable board. Go and seek those opportunities and stop being lazy.

 

[Vorxian]

Can't wait until d-day, when the new board goes live.

Will be here with my

to watch the

regardless of what side of the fence you are, it'll be an interesting and fun day on the forums!

 

[Vash627]

Can we stop using advertisment slogan as carte blanche argument how game restricts your imagined gameplay?

Also no for searchable board. Go and seek those opportunities and stop being lazy.

There's nothing lazy about having a searchable mission board. It makes all the sense in the world to have something like that. Especially 1000 years in the future. That's a thing we can do now in the real world when looking for work. Why would the concept slip from the collective human conscience a millennia later and demand that people fumble about aimlessly in their space truck looking for space truck work instead of pulling out their space smart phones and opening space Craig's list to find places near or far that require the use of a space truck to move a space couch?

 

[Vin58]

Disagree on just about every word.

You are a lone pilot seeking work from those able to provide it. Take your pick, or not. Someone else will be along soon who will take the mission.

I disagree, I may be a lone pilot. But I am an Elite pilot, I have changed the course of civil wars. I have charted the very stars in your galaxy map. But most of all I have hauled umpteen tons of biowaste, fired upon the very people charged with defending all of us and most importantly the person who has blocked many a toast rack whilst reading the forum.

Give me the respect I deserve.

 

[CMDR Dizzy]

I have always thought of the mission board as the fake sand in the sandbox to keep those of us, like me, who cannot make there own fun in the sandbox.
RNG on top of RNG makes it not work very well but I am sure it sounded like a good idea at the time, it's just the implementation that lets it down.

 

[fu9ar]

lol look who is afraid to undock and fly to another system.

 

[Vin58]

You doing it wrong. These days any ape can become president, even in real life. No need to haul umpteen tons of biowaste, really. [noob]

Any ape can throw biowaste, I delivered biowaste with style. Think not just biowaste, this is M&S™ Biowaste.

 

[EDanaII]

Seeing all missions across the galaxy from one searchable, filterable, in-game menu would be the best way in my opinion.

At the risk of going slightly off topic, my real hope for the Single Server mission board is that they'll enforce some rules of Scarcity on missions. In other words, Missions are there until someone takes them, and then they're gone. Missions that are taken more frequently? Go down in payment. Missions that are taken less frequently? Go up in payment. That's a simplification of what I'm suggesting, but I think that a game, whose very foundation is based on Scarcity should also reflect it in the payment. Enough of these 2 million credit to deliver biowaste missions. Let the market pay what players are willing to take from it.

I doubt it will happen too, but... it's what should be.

4 cents now...

 

[Chaparral]

Can we stop using advertisment slogan as carte blanche argument how game restricts your imagined gameplay?

Also no for searchable board. Go and seek those opportunities and stop being lazy.

No. Advertise one thing, sell another. It might offend your sensibilities that a player might not like that. Here's an opportunity to expand your horizons beyond where they stand.

There's nothing lazy about having a searchable mission board. It makes all the sense in the world to have something like that. Especially 1000 years in the future. That's a thing we can do now in the real world when looking for work. Why would the concept slip from the collective human conscience a millennia later and demand that people fumble about aimlessly in their space truck looking for space truck work instead of pulling out their space smart phones and opening space Craig's list to find places near or far that require the use of a space truck to move a space couch?

Agree completely.

 

[Tifu]

What a load of [redacted], so the system is in a state of war? So where are the missions to go on a stealth flight to photograph enemy installations, to ferry prisoners of war elsewhere, to take secret documents to an ally, to move necessary supplies like food and medicines to where it's needed, to protect / attack convoys, to mine for needed basics to make even more ammunition / weapons?

Good point. These aren't the type of missions though that a faction gives to any random commander. Which is where the pledging to a minor faction comes in. Special mission stuff.

 

[Tifu]

Hmm. If the mission board always had every single mission type available no matter which faction was in control or what the system state was, then there may as well only be one system with two stations in the whole game. You could just run deliveries between those two points and do every other mission type in the single system you found yourself in at the start of the game. The BGS is there to simulate the structure of a galactic economy. If we never had to leave our home system to find missions of different types then there's no galactic economy. We'd just be picking random systems to repeat any mission type we wanted at any time we wanted, maybe we'd base the location we did the missions on arbitrary factors like our preferences on star or planet colors.

We have a simulation of a living galaxy where the players can influence what factions are in control, and what states the systems are in. The downside is that we can't just get any particular kind of mission we want at any random location we happen to be. But it's at least somewhat realistic, it's what one might expect to happen if resources have to be shipped around from systems light years apart into regions controlled by different factions that each have different motivations and needs from time to time. Sorry that you'll have to deal with the economic simulation as is, unless FD decides to convert ED into a fully arcade style space shoot'm up.

This ^^^.

What ED lacks is the concept of a cluster of systems where say , minor faction X is dominant. Once you hit the edge of that cluster there should be local news on events, trade and economic trends etc that should give the commander an idea if this sector of space is to his/her taste or not.

This would require though a sophistication to the BGS that isn't there yet.

 

[Stealthie]

I disagree, I may be a lone pilot. But I am an Elite pilot...

Give me the respect I deserve.

You can have as much respect as you want (and you get it from ATC) but if you show up in a poor agricultural system with 3000 inhabitants, being Elite shouldn't entitle you to fill up a VIP passenger ship with people who want to spend millions of credits on sightseeing trips.

 

[Franc Kaos]

...
This would require though a sophistication to the BGS that isn't there yet.

This is the real issue tho' isn't it (apart from the lack of new mission types ever being added to the game), no matter what certain commanders play (system flipping), the BGS was supposed to give the galaxy a semblance of a living thing which would create new gameplay thru varying system changes, but all it turned out to be was a broken clock that ticks back and forth between a few different system states with limited player interaction: War, peace, outbreak, famine etc - with a small amount of missions per state.

But each state should also have fairly similiar mission types, flavour text if you like, a millionaire wants to escape a famine, a general needs to move further away from the front line, doctors need to get where the sickness is; data needs to be moved at all times, asking for help, getting intel where it's needed; exploratory forays into enemy space, to go looking for a cure out there (only one CMDR can find it, bringing fame to him / her for that particular find), to search for hidden enemy installations...

I don't think the mission generator needs to have the same missions per system state, it just needs to up the number of different types (like by a huge number), so combat isn't the only metric in war states.

Also, make the BGS better - seriously, like if a system falls to war then play the war out to it's conclusion and create lasting changes to that system, taking into account player actions. If a system falls to famine it's because there's no Earth like in the system or a recent war destroyed all the local crops, can be fixed temporarily with a CG boost of players bringing aid, but maybe needs to terraform a planet to fix or create farming stations in low orbit.

 

[V'larr]

A well-stated OP, I feel, and an example of the misdirected management that we have to thank for the current state of affairs - what's in the OP ought to be what we should be seeing coming from the management chair to begin with.

 

[John Kozak]

At the risk of going slightly off topic, my real hope for the Single Server mission board is that they'll enforce some rules of Scarcity on missions. In other words, Missions are there until someone takes them, and then they're gone. Missions that are taken more frequently? Go down in payment. Missions that are taken less frequently? Go up in payment. That's a simplification of what I'm suggesting, but I think that a game, whose very foundation is based on Scarcity should also reflect it in the payment. Enough of these 2 million credit to deliver biowaste missions. Let the market pay what players are willing to take from it.

I doubt it will happen too, but... it's what should be.

4 cents now...

I would concur - this is awesome idea. Any issues of balance will resolve itself very quickly - if the model is done correctly.

 

[Whitehair]

A well-stated OP, I feel, and an example of the misdirected management that we have to thank for the current state of affairs - what's in the OP ought to be what we should be seeing coming from the management chair to begin with.

I am not getting your point!

Care to translate into plain english, please?

 

[babelfisch]

So you don't point out why? Why bother post? Weird.

As I said, I don't know where to begin.

I'll try:
"The game was advertised as blaze your own trail and yet I am pretty much limited by the way flight mechanics work. I have limited jump range, limited SC speed and limited normal space speed. I can't instantly teleport everywhere. I have to see the game through the lens of flying to get somewhere and that's why I can't blaze my own trail."

That's what your argument sounds like. Look, the game was not only advertised as blaze your own trail but also as trying to simulate a galaxy. Just like you can basically fly anywhere, you just can't chose how you do it. That's pretty much what computer games are about.