It's Official (I think)....2.4.03 has "broken" Surface Scan Missions

[Ian Skippy]

What??? Surely chasing the POI circle on the HUD a half-dozen times before the base magically appears every single mission is engaging, thrilling, challenging, and entertaining gameplay that just cannot be overlooked! Take back your comment immediately, sir!

Thats also a weird one. Clearly the base is just teleported into existence after scanning the last 'search beacon'. Why not have it be there from the start and have the search lead you there. That way it makes sense, and you could even skip ahead if you scout it yourself before reaching the end of the breadcrumb trail. Now pretty much always the last one is right behind you, and when you turn around there is a base where 20seconds before there was not.

The planets are cool, and am I looking forward to further enhancements. The perma-settlements look great, skimmer AI has been better now, dogfighting over planets is ace (espescially high-g ones!). But planetary missions are terrible. Why not have us interdict a specific NPC, and have him give us the location if we can get his hull below 30%? Why not infiltrate a large base so we get the location of the tiny secret base? The game already has so many mechanics in place to make cool missions, and we get this. Weird.

 

[Marc_Hicks]

Yeah, there is pretty much no gameplay whatsoever to this missions, they are the most cynical version of a Fedex quest you can imagine. The majority of mission templates simply have nothing to them. Go to X, press either button A or B, return. No challenge, no risk, no planning needed. Normally mission design uses this as a plot to get you to the fun. Not as the fun itself.

*Somewhere at Warner Bros*
"Hey, I've got a great idea for a movie!"
"Alright, pitch it..."
"Well, you have this guy and he has to go to this place..."
"Okay, then what happens?"
"Nothing, he just takes a train and reads a book for two hours."
"..."
"Okay okay, I've got another one!"
"Let's hear it..."
"So this guy falls in love with this girl."
"Okay, good start, what happens?"
"Nothing. He is really shy and just reads a book for two hours."
"Riiiight."
"Wait, wait, I've got another one!"
"Sigh, last one..."
"So this guy finds a treasure map and goes on adventure!"
"Okay, sounds cool, what happens?"
"Well, its right there on the map, so he just grabs it, sells it..."
"Hold on, please don't tell me he buys books and reads for the rest of the movie..."
"No?"
"Get out of here man, really."


Anyway, what you want is the 'urgent assassination' missions, they almost always require base infiltration first.

I could almost live with the cake walk if it at least regularly spawned an engaging follow on mission-like a liberation, assassination or massacre mission.....heck, even a passenger transport mission.

The other point is that I don't see why they place artificial limits on the size and/or complexity of Procedural Generated settlements. They could make these missions challenging even without the need to shoot anything......just by having the data point being hard to find and/or to reach, or by requiring the player to activate multiple lesser data points before they can scan the mission specific ones.

 

[Bomba Luigi]

Yeah, there is pretty much no gameplay whatsoever to this missions, they are the most cynical version of a Fedex quest you can imagine. The majority of mission templates simply have nothing to them. Go to X, press either button A or B, return. No challenge, no risk, no planning needed. Normally mission design uses this as a plot to get you to the fun. Not as the fun itself.

*Somewhere at Warner Bros*
"Hey, I've got a great idea for a movie!"
"Alright, pitch it..."
"Well, you have this guy and he has to go to this place..."
"Okay, then what happens?"
"Nothing, he just takes a train and reads a book for two hours."
"..."
"Okay okay, I've got another one!"
"Let's hear it..."
"So this guy falls in love with this girl."
"Okay, good start, what happens?"
"Nothing. He is really shy and just reads a book for two hours."
"Riiiight."
"Wait, wait, I've got another one!"
"Sigh, last one..."
"So this guy finds a treasure map and goes on adventure!"
"Okay, sounds cool, what happens?"
"Well, its right there on the map, so he just grabs it, sells it..."
"Hold on, please don't tell me he buys books and reads for the rest of the movie..."
"No?"
"Get out of here man, really."


Anyway, what you want is the 'urgent assassination' missions, they almost always require base infiltration first.

This post is missing something...

Spoiler

[video=youtube_share;HRvN86gNmds]https://youtu.be/HRvN86gNmds[/video]

 

[Drelthar]

99.99% of the surface scan missions I've ever done, had zero resistance.

This is probably intentional however, as, they were things like "Can you go check out -our- equipment? something seems to be malfunctioning and we need to get a scan of it"

Scanning their own equipment for them shouldn't really have any resistance (well! unless the mission was actually kind of cool ,and the thing that was wrong with it, was that their enemies were down there sabotaging it! and you had to take those guys out!)


Even so, that last .1% of surface scan missions that DID have some form of resistance (which were "Go get info on our enemies!") had... very little resistance. Maybe a couple of skimmers, POSSIBLY a turret.

Even then, the skimmers barely reacted, and the turrets almost never reacted.

Surface bases have always seemed really cool to me, but have almost never functioned how I expected them to, which is a shame really.

 

[Tadeus72]

As far as I remember there are legal an illegal surface scan missions, the illegal ones have a higher chance of trouble. Or maybe I'm making this up? Nowadays I'm enabling the filter that shows me only the legal ones.

 

[Marc_Hicks]

99.99% of the surface scan missions I've ever done, had zero resistance.

This is probably intentional however, as, they were things like "Can you go check out -our- equipment? something seems to be malfunctioning and we need to get a scan of it"

Scanning their own equipment for them shouldn't really have any resistance (well! unless the mission was actually kind of cool ,and the thing that was wrong with it, was that their enemies were down there sabotaging it! and you had to take those guys out!)


Even so, that last .1% of surface scan missions that DID have some form of resistance (which were "Go get info on our enemies!") had... very little resistance. Maybe a couple of skimmers, POSSIBLY a turret.

Even then, the skimmers barely reacted, and the turrets almost never reacted.

Surface bases have always seemed really cool to me, but have almost never functioned how I expected them to, which is a shame really.

Prior to the....."nerf"?!?! I had a high paying surface scan mission that *claimed* it was just to fix their equipment, only to find it was a private beacon, with skimmers & defense turrets . I just assumed they were being a bit loose with the truth, like whdn thry pay you vast sums of cash for you to smuggle.....ahem....."biowaste" .

Like I said though, resistance doesn't just have to be via combat. It could be because the settlement is hard to reach, or the data point is in a hard to reach part of the settlement.....or is well concealed, or the data point can't be scanned without "unlocking" or "activating" it first.....or any combination of the above.

While we are at it, though, why can't these Procedural Generated Settlements have sabotage missions attached to them too-like we currently have for Persistent Settlements?

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

https://twitter.com/Frontier_Help/status/921837153948241921

Marc, you might want to do bug report for this.

 

[Jmanis]

Prior to the....."nerf"?!?! I had a high paying surface scan mission that *claimed* it was just to fix their equipment, only to find it was a private beacon, with skimmers & defense turrets . I just assumed they were being a bit loose with the truth, like whdn thry pay you vast sums of cash for you to smuggle.....ahem....."biowaste" .

Like I said though, resistance doesn't just have to be via combat. It could be because the settlement is hard to reach, or the data point is in a hard to reach part of the settlement.....or is well concealed, or the data point can't be scanned without "unlocking" or "activating" it first.....or any combination of the above.

While we are at it, though, why can't these Procedural Generated Settlements have sabotage missions attached to them too-like we currently have for Persistent Settlements?

I gotta agree with Novo... almost all planetary scan missions I've ever done have been simple, no trespass zone endeavours. Land, scan, leave, and that's been the case since these missions existed. One or two have had a trespass zone with maybe two turrets or two skimmers (never both), but the overwhelming majority have never triggered a security response.

Maybe there's a particular subtype (say, Scan missions that occur in civil war) which are always like you describe. To explain, I noticed a while back that "source goods" mission offered by a particular faction in a "Bust" state would get the redirection wrinkle 100% of the time, and there was a subtle difference in the mission title text (Ones that only redirected some of the time were "Source X units of Y commodity", but these ones were always "Find us X units of Y commodity".

So, it's possible that may be the case, and you happened to be in a glut of those types of missions for a time?

 

[Marc_Hicks]

I gotta agree with Novo... almost all planetary scan missions I've ever done have been simple, no trespass zone endeavours. Land, scan, leave, and that's been the case since these missions existed. One or two have had a trespass zone with maybe two turrets or two skimmers (never both), but the overwhelming majority have never triggered a security response.

Maybe there's a particular subtype (say, Scan missions that occur in civil war) which are always like you describe. To explain, I noticed a while back that "source goods" mission offered by a particular faction in a "Bust" state would get the redirection wrinkle 100% of the time, and there was a subtle difference in the mission title text (Ones that only redirected some of the time were "Source X units of Y commodity", but these ones were always "Find us X units of Y commodity".

So, it's possible that may be the case, and you happened to be in a glut of those types of missions for a time?

Nope, not even the Civil War ones anymore. During 2.4.02, I noticed a sharp rise in the ones that offered a decent amount of resistance, then they dropped to nothing again with 2.4.03. Very sad .

 

[Arindor]

I've taken surface scan missions and felt a world of hurt trying to get past security in conflict systems. Perhaps you should try looking elsewhere OP.

 

[bubbabenali]

Why would scanning (and stealing) data - preferably undetected - involve any form of combat?
As soon as anyone triggers any forme of defence massure the data should get invalidated and the mission instantly fail.
You can have it "dangerous" but not well time to annihilate the basedefenses"-dangerous.

 

[ChiefRedCloud]

I've hooted my horn about these scan missions (both Civil War & planetary) before. But here goes again. I, like many here, enjoy a challenge. But sometimes I just want to scan and go collect. Several of you have mentioned that there is no lore, or rhyme or reason for these missions.

To me a Civil War scan means there is unrest and there more the likelihood that it will be guarded. Perhaps adding pluses to it would indicate it to be a more challenging target. Obversely a simple planetary should be a quite simple easy scan with less Pay?

Chief

 

[Marc_Hicks]

I've hooted my horn about these scan missions (both Civil War & planetary) before. But here goes again. I, like many here, enjoy a challenge. But sometimes I just want to scan and go collect. Several of you have mentioned that there is no lore, or rhyme or reason for these missions.

To me a Civil War scan means there is unrest and there more the likelihood that it will be guarded. Perhaps adding pluses to it would indicate it to be a more challenging target. Obversely a simple planetary should be a quite simple easy scan with less Pay?

Chief

As I said, I don't mind Planetary Scans being just "drive in & scan", from time to time, as long as the pay-out reflects the fact that it's a milk-run. If they're paying me about 100KCr-200KCr to do a planetary scan, then I don't really expect much in the way of resistance (though I'd like the 200KCr one to involve more than just scanning one easy to find Data-link). If you're offering me 800KCr or above, then I expect something less run of the mill.