Have noticed a load of different pirate factions appearing in Mapotepa Haz Rez sites whilst trying to do massacre missions of Mapotepa Purple Pirates, some from systems that I've never heard of, since 3.0.3 landed. This makes the missions take far longer to complete. Seeing more Kolapa pirate ships in Mapotepa now then the local ones. Wonder why this change happened?
I am having the same issue since the 3.0.3 update.
Anti-criminal Massacre missions were a pretty solid way for white-hat buttkickers to do guilt-free combat against black-hats for pay. You'd pick up a mission to kill 30 or 70 or 135 bad guys of some "ring", "cartel", "raiders", whatever. In the system's resource sites the local bad guys would spawn with some regularity and you could find enough mission targets to kill the 70 bad guys and get your mission done.
Now when you go to a resource site, the vast majority of the pirates are not locals, they are from all over the place. If this is a balance change to make it harder to complete massacre missions, that's an odd choice because even before, it was way faster, cheaper and easier to just haul transport jobs for money, without any of the risk or effort of fighting. What really adds insult to injury through is that now, even if you luck into finding that rare pirate who's from the right faction,
most of the time they aren't even counted as mission targets.
You can supercruise around the system and interdict one or two here and there but this takes forever too. Pirate hunting massacres worked solidly before and now you can't find 70 mission targets even if you played continuously for the 36 hours provided to complete it.
edit: I'm playing right now hunting Gang of Aphra in Aphra. It just spawned a wing of 2 Gang of Aphra -- and considered one of them a mission target and the other not. Bizarre.