Are all Planetary Scan Missions now criminal/illegal?

DukeIronHand · Mar 11, 2018

Try to be an upstanding, law-abiding, Galactic Citizen and all-around good guy.
Scanning mission boards in multiple systems (and in multiple BGS states) and have seen that all Planetary Scan Missions are marked as illegal or “maybe” illegal.

The way of 3.0 or just bad RNG for me?

Ian Doncaster · Mar 11, 2018

They're all "maybe" illegal. Sometimes the data beacon is private (500 Cr trespass bounty), sometimes it's public, and you won't know which until you take the mission. In general all the Elite-ranked ones seem to be private beacons, and the lower ranked ones are often public (presumably there's a rank threshold below which they're always public, but if you have a high exploration rank you won't be seeing those)

DukeIronHand · Mar 11, 2018

Thanks.
Not knowing if illegal or not till you take the mission is kinda weird - it shouldn’t be a guessing game.
Well, plenty of other stuff to do I suppose.

Vasious · Mar 11, 2018

They do all seem to tell you they "may be illegal" and do tell you the target faction so you can check ahead to see if it is a faction worth worrying about a bounty for, as they may not have a jurisdiction beyond a few ground sites or none at all

Ian Doncaster · Mar 11, 2018

Vasious said:
and do tell you the target faction

...though this may not be the faction with jurisdiction over the surface site which actually hands out the bounty, as the temporary search zone sites don't generate a jurisdiction of their own.

Faded Glory · Mar 11, 2018

Personally I don't think it's changed from 2.4... It's always been RNG, but for higher ranked missions most, if not all involve a private data point and an exclusion zone, and in my experience that has been the case for a while.

I also play a (typically) clean living CMDR, however a bounty for trespass (stealing the data counts as trespass) is acceptable. In 2.4, that bounty would expire in 8 minutes, so it had no impact on my game, and periodically I'd pop over to my local IF and cash in any random bounties and pay off the legacy fines left behind from those bounties.

I wasn't sure when 3.0 dropped if I'd continue with these missions due to the bounties not expiring, and I'm certainly not going to add on a time sink of going to IF after every mission, but I thought I'd give it a try, with a few adaptations. These missions pay stupidly well (the high ranking ones from my home station are around 3 million credits) for how simple they are, and they are a bit more interesting than delivery missions.

Here's what I did. I had a Viper MkIII that I haven't really used in a long while. Fitted an SRV, engineered a bit for speed (just for fun really), and that became my 'naughty' ship. It has a rebuy of around 170,000 credits. Since 3.0 dropped I have done

14 Planetary Scans (in 12 jurisdictions)
Approximate value of all bounties is 8,000 credits
Approximate income is 40 million credits

I haven't visited IF once. I had no issues doing the two missions that took me back to a system where I was wanted. For fun, and to see what happens, I am going to see how long I can continue to use that ship before I am taken out for my bounties. Obviously for all other gameplay I use other ships, so I'm clean.

I was skeptical about how the new C&P might affect legitimate criminal gameplay, and to an extent I still am, but in the case of these missions I really don't see it as an issue, and as I said, I'm happy to carry my wanted status until it catches up with me. The only concession that I will make to the new system is I will not take a mission that would have me scan a base in my home system (although if I did, I'd simply fly to IF as soon as I'd completed it).

All of that said, it's a shame that the mission system cannot specify whether activities will be legal or illegal...

SentineI · Mar 11, 2018

Vasious said:
They ... do tell you the target faction

Thanks! I'd never noticed that. Should save me some time, as previously I was checking the target system (but will have to guess if you don't know the target location).

GG7 · Mar 11, 2018

There is a rather long thread on here that goes into this in great detail. Have a look for it.

As for your question... YES! They got flipped back in a 2.4 update and have remained that way ever since.

The ratio is about 9 to 1 based on my experience with doing these in 3.0. I have been doing between 20-30 of them per day for the last week.

For every 20-30 Scan missions I pick up, only 1 or 2 send you to a public beacon.

Dommarraa · Mar 11, 2018

I have only done 5 since 3.0, but they have all been public.

Guess it may depend on how many systems your faction owns within mission range. We pretty much dominate a large region of space, there are only the odd unlandable basis belonging to anyone else

GG7 · Mar 11, 2018

Dommarraa said:
I have only done 5 since 3.0, but they have all been public.

Guess it may depend on how many systems your faction owns within mission range. We pretty much dominate a large region of space, there are only the odd unlandable basis belonging to anyone else

The faction issuing the mission has a lot to do with it. But the predominant direction of the mission type since that 180 degree flip is PRIVATE beacons in a Trespass Zone that will get you a bounty on completion.

Before the flip, the majority were all public beacons and it was rare to find an illegal one. Far less common than the current version with regards to Public beacons.

smiths121 · Mar 11, 2018

Faded Glory said:
I was skeptical about how the new C&P might affect legitimate criminal gameplay, and to an extent I still am, but in the case of these missions I really don't see it as an issue, and as I said, I'm happy to carry my wanted status until it catches up with me. The only concession that I will make to the new system is I will not take a mission that would have me scan a base in my home system (although if I did, I'd simply fly to IF as soon as I'd completed it).

+1 rep for making me laugh with the term "legitimate criminal gameplay".

Simon

Faded Glory · Mar 16, 2018

Finally got my first public / legal scan mission!

It's all RNG I tell ya!

Of course you never know, so I took my naughty ship along for the job...

Daniel Cloudsifter · Mar 16, 2018

DukeIronHand said:
Try to be an upstanding, law-abiding, Galactic Citizen and all-around good guy.
Scanning mission boards in multiple systems (and in multiple BGS states) and have seen that all Planetary Scan Missions are marked as illegal or “maybe” illegal.

The way of 3.0 or just bad RNG for me?

I did about 20 last weekend. Only two had a public terminal, and thus incurred no bounty.

Don't sweat it. Just go do a bunch of them, then visit Interstellar Factors to clear your ship of all the accumulated bounties, and then turn in all missions. Profit![money]

SentineI · Mar 16, 2018

No they are not all illegal. Seen quite a few that have Public datapoints (some not even in a Restricted Area, not that matters too much if you are quick).

By the way, rather than blaming everything on RNG, you *might* find it's related to the faction you're taking missions from (and the State that they are in e.g. maybe War or Civil Unrest?). Or maybe the security level of the systems you are being sent to?

the100thmonkey · Mar 16, 2018

DukeIronHand said:
Thanks.
Not knowing if illegal or not till you take the mission is kinda weird - it shouldn’t be a guessing game.
Well, plenty of other stuff to do I suppose.

Don't think of it as illegal - by whose authority is it illegal? Do you care? The bounties incurred from the kind of scan missions spawned by non-anarchy factions are small and easily cleaned. You haven't killed anyone and the fact that the factions will issue a bounty only signifies that they didn't like you doing it.

GG7 · Mar 16, 2018

ChrisH said:
No they are not all illegal. Seen quite a few that have Public datapoints (some not even in a Restricted Area, not that matters too much if you are quick).

By the way, rather than blaming everything on RNG, you *might* find it's related to the faction you're taking missions from (and the State that they are in e.g. maybe War or Civil Unrest?). Or maybe the security level of the systems you are being sent to?

Ironically, the same factions that once issued missions to PUBLIC beacons without Trespass Zones are now sending you to Private Beacons locked behind Trespass zones. The faction/state and mission description has not changed. Only the beacon type and the fact most now get you wanted.

You're not going to get away with claims like this as long as folks like me with thousands of these missions under their belts both before and after the "Flip" are around to call you out!

verminstar · Mar 16, 2018

I take quite a few of these missions...all but the odd one now and then are illegal. In fact, so many of them are illegal that I just assumed the legal versions were a bug...thats how rare the legal ones are. I didnt report it as a bug cos it was a stroke of luck and frontier would have nerfed it into oblivion ^

sovapid · Mar 16, 2018

A while back, after 3.0 dropped, I took about 10 scan missions for Mats and most/all were illegal.

After I had done a few and well into being wanted, went off to do another base scan. The terrain was a bit rough so I had to land ship a bit further away then I normally would.

As I'm pulling up to the beacon to scan in my srv I saw an NPC Anaconda fly by pretty close.

Right before I start the scan and I got the "Mothership Under Attack" message. Turns out the it was a Deadly bounty hunter. I complete the scan and start rushing back to my ship where I see the Anaconda unloading on it with Plasma Accelerators and various other treats.

For whatever reason I had taken a PVP engineered FAS. By the time the bounty hunter had the FAS down to 80% hull.

The missions aren't the cake walk they used to be and if I had been in an un-engineered taxi ship, it probably would have popped.

First time in a while I'd gotten a rush from an NPC.

The missions also fail now on ship destruction.

SentineI · Mar 16, 2018

GG7 said:
Ironically, the same factions that once issued missions to PUBLIC beacons without Trespass Zones are now sending you to Private Beacons locked behind Trespass zones. The faction/state and mission description has not changed. Only the beacon type and the fact most now get you wanted.

That *could* be quite easily explained *if* FDev decided that the "public/non-criminal" threshold was too low, and increased it for 3.0 (which could make sense with the new C&P system).

You're not going to get away with claims like this as long as folks like me with thousands of these missions under their belts both before and after the "Flip" are around to call you out!

Why do you assume that how the ED universe works will never change? (And in fact the mission system of ED has changed with almost every release, in some way or other.)

Faded Glory · Mar 16, 2018

sovapid said:
A while back, after 3.0 dropped, I took about 10 scan missions for Mats and most/all were illegal.

After I had done a few and well into being wanted, went off to do another base scan. The terrain was a bit rough so I had to land ship a bit further away then I normally would.

As I'm pulling up to the beacon to scan in my srv I saw an NPC Anaconda fly by pretty close.

Right before I start the scan and I got the "Mothership Under Attack" message. Turns out the it was a Deadly bounty hunter. I complete the scan and start rushing back to my ship where I see the Anaconda unloading on it with Plasma Accelerators and various other treats.

For whatever reason I had taken a PVP engineered FAS. By the time the bounty hunter had the FAS down to 80% hull.

The missions aren't the cake walk they used to be and if I had been in an un-engineered taxi ship, it probably would have popped.

First time in a while I'd gotten a rush from an NPC.

The missions also fail now on ship destruction.

Interesting... What are your bounties for, and do you have any notoriety?

I have done 18 since 3.0 dropped (all but one illegal), never cleared my bounties, and five of those I would have completed with wanted status as they were second or third scans in a particular jurisdiction. I have not had any issues from NPC's, just once interdicted, submitted and boosted away with no issues. I have noticed a few NPC's around on occasion when I land at the installation, but none have shown any interest in me.

Not saying that will last forever, but as stated in a previous post, I have made by now over 50 million credits from those 18 scans, my bounties amount to around 9000 credits and my re-buy, when I am destroyed for them will be 170,000.