As the thread title says, I have seen many times recently where I have to kill 30 pirates of faction X, I see a winged duo... scan one and though the faction is correct and it's a pirate that's wanted, it doesn't display "mission target" although the wingmate does. I get two or three of these per mission. Anyone know what the deal is with these?
Bulk Pirate Faction Kill Missions -"Mission Target" Not Always Shown
- Thread starter Schmack
- Start date
I get these from time to time when I do the hunting in res sites instead of the mission signal source too.
The mission information even says to look for them in these places. I could understand it if it was a loophole or exploit to find them like shooting fish in a barrel (like the pirate leader missions where you can stack them, pop into a CNB and watch as they all show up and kill each other).
Correct Faction + wanted != pirate, short version.
As far as i can tell, every NPC has an underlying "type". Such types for lawful npcs are
Civilian
Trader
Police
Military
Bounty hunter
Unlawful types are:
Pirate
Pirate leader
Terrorist
Pirate escort*
Smuggler
Plague ship
Probably more
I'm on phone, so I'll explain pirate escort later... but likely the wing was a pirate (target) plus escort (not target, or possibly other way around)
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Are pirate lords covered under "pirate" then? 'cause I double up "massacre pirates" missions with "assassinate pirate lord" all the time and the kill counts for both.
Nope, or at least not last time I checked (within the last few months)
Way back when you got wings of up to 10 "pirate" sidewinders spawning in Supercruise when you accepted a "Massacre Pirates" mission, there were some major bugs.
In that particular case, the wing "leader" was a named, wanted pirate, and counted towards the massacre mission, but their escorts wouldn't count... they had no name other than "Pirate". Have also done "Urgent Kill Mission for Terrorist leader", and their "Terrorist" escorts haven't counted.
I'll go verify the whole "pirate lord/massacre pirate thing" now, but yeah, Pirate Lords haven't counted to "Pirate Massacres" recently in my experience (because I used to stack the same thing a much longer time ago)
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Huh. Well, I can say for certain that pirate lord assassination targets count towards any massacres (as do their escorts in the case of wing assassinations). Maybe they've adjusted it so "pirate leader" and "pirate" count but not "pirate escort", but that wouldn't explain why the wing assassination escorts count as targets.
Gimme 10 mins and I'll verify now
EDIT: Yep, you're right now... pirate lord assasination targets count towards massacre mission count (again)
Nonetheless... wanted + belonging to the right faction won't necessitate they're a mission target; it could be a smuggler or some other type.
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Not have that happen yet but I do get offered missions sometimes that look like code that just make to the screen right- no idea- or she is talking a weird language I've never seen
This was a bulk "kill x number of faction Y pirates" mission. In one instance the non "mission target" identified ship had the right faction "Gang of Byel Tan" and "wanted" yet did not have the mission target indication and didn't count toward the total, but his wing mate (not escort) did. It's always the ship I scan first. They were the same ship types. In another instance the ship was not in a wing but had the right faction and was wanted, and it scanned me, and I killed it, and of course it did not count toward the total number of pirates needed. This seems to happen early on in the instance, perhaps something hasn't fully loaded yet as far as mission requirements.
I'll try to capture the video.
You seem to be saying that ships from that faction can be wanted and not be pirates? I have not seen a single non-wanted ship from that faction. So though that is obviously a pirate faction, some ship are simply just wanted? Even though it scanned me for goods?
I don't keep exact counts during the fighting but it seems to be. I do the same thing. I'll stack as many pirate lord missions as I can, and add the bulk kill missions as long as they aren't from the same faction (so the numbers don't add).
There's a lot more to it than what I posted above, but the short-end of it is "Yes", ships can be from that faction and not wanted. Anarchy factions are kinda special in that most randomly-generated ships will be wanted, e.g those that spawn in RES sites.
However, for missions/mission USS, certain states and other conditions, the rules surrounding what types of ships spawn are determined by the template for that scenario. If that template is bugged, then there's sometimes (what I believe are) hardcorded mismatches between ship behaviour and type. An example of this is Wing-Massacre missions; there always seems to be incorrect/mismatched ships in the USS for those missions, but non-wing massacre missions seem fine.
PS... this is massively cut back (like 20% of the size) from what I was originally going to post... tl;dr it's a complex thing.
IMO, this is another of those "Is it a bug or is it a feature?" things.
Used to be that if you took a "pirate massacre" mission you could just fly around the target system, checking out the nav-buoy and RES's, or just stay in SC, and every Wanted ship from the correct faction would show up as a mission-target.
Not any more.
Granted, from a "realism" POV, it's possible that not every criminal belonging to the correct faction is a pirate and therefore doesn't qualify as a mission-target.
Thing is, from a gameplay POV, I'm not sure that's a good idea.
Also, I can't help noticing that, when you do get one of these missions where Wanted ships don't show up as mission-targets, you often get no mission-targets at all.
Also, also, we now have special USS's which are supposed to contain mission-targets but they sometimes don't show up until you relog.
Altogether, I get the feeling that something isn't working as it should be.
There was a similar thing with assassination missions a while back.
You'd arrive in the target system, honk and get a mission-update telling you to head for a specific planet in the system.
When you get near it, there'd be no target POI.
I've heard people suggest this is just "realism" too - sometimes your target just isn't around.
Again, that seems a bit iffy, from a gameplay POV, to me.
Pretty sure that was a bug too, given that I don't think it happens any more.
Indeed.
Another one was taking a wing-assassination, you'd jump in system and see the pirate wing, but they were all clean. Some people tried to explain that away as "well, maybe they're at the start of their pirate career, or they aren't wanted in that jurisdiction!"... which'd be fine except:
- Dump instance, whether that's leave the game or just jump out of supercruise, re-enter and they might be "Wanted" this time; and
- A key to making a good game is creating a consistent gameplay experience. For example, I criticize the old (pre-FSS) way of finding barnacles or other surface POI because they don't show up as blue-POI circles, which the game teaches you are the indication "there's something to find here". Having pirates "occasionaly not be pirates" is frustratingly inconsistent and detracts from otherwise functional gameplay.
This exactly.
We can always create narratives to explain away bugs and such. This one is just a quirk, but the game recently has a lot of quirks I haven't seen prior to the most recent update.