I did not see anyone else post this, so I'm going ahead. This is a complicated piece of technology that a number of people have been working on for as long as the DOFF missions have been in the game. The main bit is a Google Docs Spreadsheet that tracks all in-game DOFF missions through user submissions. I know that this might sound a bit dubious, but it is highly effective.
http://bit.ly/DOFFS
This is a brief listing of what the spreadsheet does:
- Tracks all of your personal DOFF missions including your reset timers for all of your characters. (each character gets their own sheet) Some missions can only be run every few days, or once a week, and this will help you keep up with when you can run the missions again.
- Tracks all current sector DOFF missions. These missions are updated by players after the resets as players find the missions. There are hundreds of players who participate in this, and the system works quite well.
- Tracks your progress in multi-step DOFF missions. (IE, the support missions, consular missions, and commodities missions)
- Tracks the Rare/Very Rare DOFFS that you have obtained.
There are two in-game chat channels to facilitate this.
- doffjobs - this is the parent channel, but it is pretty much used for general chat/answering questions these days.
- doffcalls - this is where people communicate the doff missions that they find. The game resets these every four hours. Missions that people report will show up as available in the spreadsheet. (yes, this is fricking magic!!!)
One other bonus... Sometimes people will get rare/unique missions on their starships, such as ultra rare duty officer missions that only trigger once per character. They post these to the channel and send out bridge invites to people that need them.
Also, let me clear some things up. When DOFF missions were first introduced, each instance of each zone had its own set of DOFF missions. The DOFFJOBS people exploited the heck out of that, so STO changed it so that all of a sector's instances have the same missions.
You can be standing next to someone else in the same zone and have different missions. Usually, this is because you have a mission on cool down. You wouldn't have any way to know if your doff missions were on cool down unless you track them. The spreadsheet helps with that.
Your Department Head missions can be shared with other people through bridge invites. When you invite them to your bridge, that instance of your bridge will remain for as long as someone is in your bridge. You can fly to the other side of the galaxy, but if someone is still on your ship, your bridge will remain in the sector you were in when you gave the invite. Some people will exploit this by leaving an alt on their ship when they find a unique mission like a borg doff mission, or NADORC. That way, they can continue to fly around and just pop into their bridge to send out invites if someone needs one.
I have been using this since it came out. It is a fantastic tool if you are into the DOFF missions. It does require a lot of user input/maintenance, and I would not try using it unless you read the directions. That said, I consider it an invaluable tool.