Stacking missions with the same goals is wrong?

I thought the 'regular' ones, i.e. the ones that don't show the linked mission logo, were capped to three from each faction at the same time as the massacre missions were capped? As opposed to the other ones which aren't currently capped? (Although probably should be if the 'normal' ones are in fact capped, it's presumably an oversight.)

I must admit, I thought the idea was to just apply a flat-out cap on the number you could take.
Attempting to cap the number available from each individual faction hardly seems worth the effort.
If you've got 5 or 6 factions at a station and you can, theoretically, accept 3 from each then you're "capped" at a total of 18.
Big whup!

TBH, I'm not even sure if they just changed their minds about applying the cap or whether it just isn't working.
Either way, it isn't.
Just after 2.3 (or whenever it was that the cap was supposed to be applied) I was at Niu Hsing and noticed that the big Fed' faction there had half a dozen scan missions available.
I took 3 of them, clicked on the 4th, clicked accept and... it was accepted.
I then took the 5th one as well.
And then I mode-flipped a couple of times and stacked about 12 of them.
Off to the required planet, one scan, job done. Home for tea and medals.
Business as usual.

The only thing I did notice, and I dunno if this was a coincidence or deliberate, was that after I handed them all in, the faction had NO more missions available at all.
I wasn't trying to grind there at the time. I was just passing through so I didn't stick around to see if more missions reappeared later.
I definitely took 5 missions at once, and then another 3 and another 4 in different modes though.
 
This doesn't make any sense.
If you take 3 missions that want you to bring them 8 units of gold each, you need to get 24 units of gold so every mission giver gets his 8 units.
If you take 3 missions that want you to shoot 8 ships, you need to shoot 8 ships. It's not that mission givers go and say "Ohhh no, those 8 kills don't count for me, kill 8 more because the ones you killed already were for the other guy".
Defeats any logic.

Except most of the time it's the SAME mission giver!. Different factions I can see it both ways. IF Fred Flintstone and Barney rubble both want you to kill 8 ships then depending on how lore is written you could double dip..... However IF it is written that you had to hand over 8 bounty vouchers as proof however then double dipping won't work..... But if each time the mission is from Fred Flintstone then it stands to reason the number of ships needed must surely be additive
 
I like this as IMO it should directly affect the 'grey area exploits' of the like of quince etc.

I have no problem whatsoever of being able to stack missions to the same location or the same thing. But with quince where you can stack 20 scan missions, land and scan 1 POI and have all your missions completed is just daft. Which is the same as the massacre missions. If you have 3 missions to kill 10 ships you should have to kill 30 ships, not just 10 and have all 3 missions completed.

This should fix it if I've read the description correctly.

I disagree, if I have 3 massacre missions for the same target from the SAME CONTACT, then maybe sure, but if multiple parties are involved, I see no reason why they shouldn't overlap. Why would I discuss my other massacre business with someone other than the contract giver? I wouldn't that would be stupid, so they have no way of knowing how many people I am working for, just that their task got completed.

Keep in mind, in this universe despite it being the future, hyperspace travel and ship AIs and all that, we still physically deliver messages and hand in missions and bonds/vouchers, so assuming they have some way of knowing what you have in YOUR combat log seems like tech no one else has the power of.
 
I think its in reference to stacking mission to the same place that involves scanning the same data points at a base, planetary scan jobs etc if I recall, rather than stacking data delivery mission which are going to the same place.

hence the fix in the beta:

from
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ownload-now-(changelog)?p=5830555#post5830555

The tears & laughter that would incur if I can't essentially go perform a planetary hack on another base on the same planet without having to return the mission first.
That would be the epiphany of failure in game design.

I'm eagerly waiting to see this is not the case...
 
I ran across a thread yesterday (I think on Reddit) where someone claimed that stacking missions (for instance a bunch of data missions going to the same place) is an exploit. I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding? I've been doing scan jobs over and over again in the same area. One station will send me to the same moon in a neighboring system to scan it for... sometimes 250k up to 1.8m credits. If I'm lucky, I'll get six missions to the same place and pull in (on my luckiest one so far) upwards of five million credits.

I'm not sure why that would be wrong. If multiple people are willing to send me to get info on the same location... that fits the story for me. They all have concerns. I'm answering their questions. They didn't ask for an NDA.

So am I misunderstanding this? I'm relatively new, so forgive me for asking what may be a very obtuse question.

In general: There is only one instance who is able to decide if there´s an exploit in the game or not: Frontier.

Some idiots always think they have to educate other players how to play the game. Don´t read their threads, ignore them - they are just here (or on Reddit) to make other players look like cheaters because they are not able to achieve anything themselves.

And as stated by the devs in the beta: Same missions to the same places given out by different factions is STILL mission stacking, but intended behaviour.
 
what defies logic, is you clearly understand 8 + 8 + 8 = 24 units of gold

but you fail to grasp 8 + 8 + 8 = 24 ships.

Nope. Except all three missions were given out by the same faction. If Faction A gives you 2 missions and faction B 1 mission you have to kill 16 ships. 3 missions by 3 factions: 8 ships. 3 missions from the same faction: 24. (assuming all have the same target-group).
 
3 Different people asking you to kill 8 targets of Group A has for objective to kill 8 targets. Not 24.

You get that it's often the same faction offering these missions, right?

Are we to assume these people suffer with some kind of multiple personality disorder in order to provide a reasonable explanation for this behaviour?
 
Who cares? Does anything need to be MORE tedious/grindy anyway? I made my first 100 mil in Xbox Preview, I don't want to go back to that and I do not begrudge new players having a faster transition through the ships. Credits are the least part of this game, and that's how it should be. Think of your first fortune as the early game, then everything else as the real game, like leveling to max through questing in an MMO and then progressing to pvp/raids etc. Credits are only going to get you ships and modules at the end of the day, and not even all the ships. Simply having ships is the tip of the iceberg. You can then START experimenting with everything.

But you know what? When I can only make a few mil an hour in my 34 mil rebuy ship and 1 mistake can reverse 6-10 hours of work, the scaling is clearly out of whack, or at least, disrespectful of my available free time.

At this point I want to farm creds as little as possible and play mad scientist as much as possible. The game is more engaging that way. If there is no efficient way to make what some people apparently consider unreasonable amounts of money in 2.4 I'll simply stop flying stuff with more than a 10 mil rebuy, as that's probably my max income per hour can cover.
 
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WHAT three mission cap?

There is a three missions cap.. But bizarrely, it's three per faction. So you'll only hit the three limit if one faction is offering more than three planetary scan missions (which doesn't happen very often). I've hit this limit once, I think. Also, follow-on missions don't seem to count towards this limit.
 
Who cares? Does anything need to be MORE tedious/grindy anyway? I made my first 100 mil in Xbox Preview, I don't want to go back to that and I do not begrudge new players having a faster transition through the ships. Credits are the least part of this game, and that's how it should be. Think of your first fortune as the early game, then everything else as the real game, like leveling to max through questing in an MMO and then progressing to pvp/raids etc. Credits are only going to get you ships and modules at the end of the day, and not even all the ships. Simply having ships is the tip of the iceberg. You can then START experimenting with everything.

But you know what? When I can only make a few mil an hour in my 34 mil rebuy ship and 1 mistake can reverse 6-10 hours of work, the scaling is clearly out of whack, or at least, disrespectful of my available free time.

Or: You don´t know enough about the game. Maybe not your fault, but fact.
 
To indulge in a bit of pedantry, the way the game handles "data" in other cases would suggest that's incorrect.

You can't, for example, get one scan of a wake echo or encrypted firmware (or whatever) and then make "copies" of it for endless engineer upgrades.
You get ONE and you have to hand it over to an engineer - and then you have to get another one for another upgrade.

Having said that, I do agree that it's not lore-breakingly flawed. You're just making the scan and then handing it over to a whole bunch of people.
It's probably "shady", at worst, rather than an "exploit".
Ideally, I suppose it might be nice if they introduced some way for factions to find out you'd been playing them and, perhaps something might happen as a result.

At the end of the day, it's not intended to be that way though.
As you approach a planet, you can see that there ARE a heap of "different" surface installations on your scanner.
It's just that they all happen to be in exactly the same place, because the game uses persistent assets as mission objectives.
Which is why you can go to one place and get 1 scan to complete 20 missions, rather than having to actually visit 20 different installations.

It only suggests that Wake scans are inconsistent which in turn justifies the consistent need for them.
Now if one wants you to scan the hidden files and the other just wants to get to know which operating software they use you can still catch these in one go.

The only real bug is the design flaw of having them spawn outside of your viewpoint to make it seamless. This obviously would require rework to *tadaa* - get it right -

I'm really afraid of the situation where I'd have to turn the mission in before another base would spawn. If they want me to scan a different base that's no problem. If the base doesn't exist in the first place then how much further can you fall in the category of 'cancerous patchwork'
 
You get that it's often the same faction offering these missions, right?

Are we to assume these people suffer with some kind of multiple personality disorder in order to provide a reasonable explanation for this behaviour?

There's no exploit in taking advantage of 2 individuals wanting me to interact with the same target group.
If they belong to the same entity it's their problem and fully reflects reality in the sense that the same entity may very well lack this communication and get 'rolled over'. At no point is this the commander's problem, ever.

What's more important is that this dev-line does not exclude the possibility that I may have to return a mission before a new base can spawn. This goes beyond any measure of sense.

Ship kills, and actions to complete planetary hack and disable missions will now only contribute to a single mission, this will be the earliest mission accepted


 
The only real bug is the design flaw of having them spawn outside of your viewpoint to make it seamless. This obviously would require rework to *tadaa* - get it right -

I'm really afraid of the situation where I'd have to turn the mission in before another base would spawn. If they want me to scan a different base that's no problem. If the base doesn't exist in the first place then how much further can you fall in the category of 'cancerous patchwork'

TBH, I think it'd probably even dodgier if the bases were spawned specifically for the missions.
As an individual, you'd go somewhere, see a base, go back later and 2 or 3 other bases might sprung into existence, and the previous one vanished.
And that's before we consider what other players might see (or not) as a result of different people taking different missions in the same area.

Like I said, I'm really not that bothered about it because the idea of obtaining data and flogging it to a bunch of different people is fairly plausible.
Except the times when you're flogging the same data to the same person a bunch of times but, meh.

It's a bit more of an issue with the skimmer missions, especially when they're from the same faction, but it's still meh.

There's no exploit in taking advantage of 2 individuals wanting me to interact with the same target group.
If they belong to the same entity it's their problem and fully reflects reality in the sense that the same entity may very well lack this communication and get 'rolled over'. At no point is this the commander's problem, ever.

You know it's the same person from a given faction who gives you ALL your missions, right? :p
 
There is a three missions cap.. But bizarrely, it's three per faction. So you'll only hit the three limit if one faction is offering more than three planetary scan missions (which doesn't happen very often). I've hit this limit once, I think. Also, follow-on missions don't seem to count towards this limit.

That's not how it works... It's described a few posts above...

If you detain 3 missions of the same type any new bulletin board will cease to spawn missions of that type.
If you have 2, bulletin boards will continue to be as rich & random as they are if you had none.
This is partly avoided by taking 2 most valuable missions, and hopping until you get a full board of missions to maximize the profit.

You get 2 + whatever the - refreshed - bulletin board is filled with.
 
Or: You don´t know enough about the game. Maybe not your fault, but fact.

I know plenty, again let me repeat, I DON'T CARE. And again, I don't begrudge anyone else for shortcutting whatever grinds any Dev puts in any game that exists ever. But I also don't have the luxury of unlimited gaming time and or limit my gaming singularly to Elite nowadays, so likely, we're not the same type of player. I wanna get really good at flying my ship. That's it. Bond with it. I should be able to invest in economies with my credits and have my money make me money.
 
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TBH, I think it'd probably even dodgier if the bases were spawned specifically for the missions.
As an individual, you'd go somewhere, see a base, go back later and 2 or 3 other bases might sprung into existence, and the previous one vanished.
And that's before we consider what other players might see (or not) as a result of different people taking different missions in the same area.

Like I said, I'm really not that bothered about it because the idea of obtaining data and flogging it to a bunch of different people is fairly plausible.
Except the times when you're flogging the same data to the same person a bunch of times but, meh.

It's a bit more of an issue with the skimmer missions, especially when they're from the same faction, but it's still meh.



You know it's the same person from a given faction who gives you ALL your missions, right? :p

I beg to differ! Take SC for example (whatever they talk about anyway). The base is a bunch of individuals that set camp and are causing havoc. The base is constructed of fabric maybe some scrap material or a crashed ship.

In Elite, bases have full foundation, appear out of nowhere and I REALLY CHECK EVERYTIME the sensor 'distract you away from spawn location' trick is just too obvious...
Just another design flaw in the first place...

The problem with suggesting back & forth travels or 'instancing' is that at the point in time where you accepted the mission the base MUST exist. It may be generated at point of entry np. But it can't just not be there unless the guy somehow fore-tells you there's going to be a bunch of folks settling in once you satisfy my buddy.

You'd have to be more specific when speaking of flogging the same data because as I mentioned before, a wake-scan may very well prove to diversify. Even if put under the same name.

Lastly, I do! But this doesn't mean they necessarily ask for the same thing. You can ask me to obtain data from the same data-center but this data is still quantifiable. As mentioned, if you want to know about my OS, that's a different question than knowing what I hide in my bookmarks. Yet both are data and include invasion without my consent. In other words; A hack.
 
The tears & laughter that would incur if I can't essentially go perform a planetary hack on another base on the same planet without having to return the mission first.
That would be the epiphany of failure in game design.

I'm eagerly waiting to see this is not the case...

logic would dictate that "scanning the same data points at a base" is NOT the same as scanning intrinsically different "data points" at "another base on the same planet"
 
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