A majority of missions are broken and cannot be completed when multiple missions are taken out

I am so fed up trying to just enjoy playing what little content this game has and having the few missions that do exist, as simple as they are, mostly break and fail to complete. It's a constant slap in the face, over and over again as I try to participate in some of the most basic activity of the game.

I have an entire thread dedicated to a critical breaking problem in the "Infiltrate the data link" mission. The mission board had TONS of these missions available but they all were only in reference to the same two megaship targets. I took out a good bunch of these missions to complete, but it turns out you can only complete one mission per megaship and the rest can't be completed as described in the transaction page. I exploited an additional bug in these missions to complete them but the workaround literally sent me across the bubble visiting most of the megaships in the game. (Further details of this bug are here)

I just got invited to do a "Liberate damaged escape pod" mission via a message. Got the damaged escape pods, 4/4, get a message they've all been collected, I brought them to the destination port (a planetside settlement) that is exactly the port in the mission transaction page, colored as the mission target, all properly docked up, on time. Mission board button has a colored triangle in the corner indicating a mission is available to be completed. But when I open the mission board there is no square available on the interface to turn in completed missions, I can only take missions out. As I'm docked at the destination port, it said the distance to destination port was 5,864LS distance away - the distance to the nav beacon in the system (actually it might just be using the distance to the star not the nav beacon).

At the same time, I had several "Liberate the hostages" missions out. I've hatchbroken the transports, scooped up the hostages, I have 8/8 even 9/8 hostages in cargo hold, then I blow up the transport because this game is FORCING me to get mechanical materials and the game is designed so I can't get mechanical materials from doing anything BUT destroying transports (Dav's Hope didn't get me for mechanical after 10+ runs). One liberate the hostages mission always remains all fine and dandy - I've got them in my cargo hold, nothing is wrong. Every other additional Liberate the hostages mission I complete gives me that mission updated prompt that the mission requirement is satisfied (x hostages are in the cargohold), but then the game randomly sends me a mission failed message after some time (every mission except the one good one). I have 8/8, 5/5, whatever it is of the hostages in my hold. Everything is GOOD. But then when it randomly announces the mission is failed the 8 hostages associated with that mission go from mission items to illegal salvage and I have to dump them or get the fined out of me for having them in my hold (sorry hostages, would have loved to save you but the game is making me kill you - this absolutely slays immersion). I lifted off from the damaged escape pod mission destination to investigate the nav beacon the destination port distance was referencing (maybe I needed to scan it first as a workaround?) and as soon as I frameshift I get a message that another liberate the hostage mission failed. Only one single mission is holding steady awaiting to be turned in. None of these are expiring because of the time. The messages I get just say "Failure is intolerable" with no other details, all happening as I've got multiple missions worth of hostages in my hold. (Additional bugs picking up jettisoned escape pod canisters are detailed down in this post and the quoted message in it)

I've had it!! I can't take it anymore!! I try to find a workaround to one broken mission only to have yet another break as I do it. I am just trying to play this game that I clearly am in love with (it's core gameplay and visuals anyway), please just stop beating me up at every turn. Where is your QA department!?

At this point the majority of missions I've taken out in the last roughly week of heavy gameplay have bugged out and couldn't be completed according to the mission listing. A trend seems to be breaking glitches that wreck most of my missions when I have multiple missions of the same taken out at the same time (inflitrate the data link and liberate hostages in particular seem to be prone to breaking when multiple are taken out). That said, kill X target(s) missions (incl massacre, kill pirate faction, wetwork, kill known terrorist/deserter/whatever) all seem fine. I'm sorry for all the exclamation points and the overall venting that's happening here, this has just got me to like my wits end here. I can't file this many issue tracker items. It's not all unique to my computer either, the infiltrate the data link turned out to be a common knowledge problem thats been around for a long time when it got discussed on here. I just want to play the game, not be an alpha QA tester. Please, let me complete and turn in my missions so I can at least sort of enjoy repeating the same 7 pieces of content this game has for me. If the game really can't support taking out multiple missions of these types at the same time, either fix it or don't let players take out multiple missions of these types. When somethings under construction IRL, workers put up cones and barriers to keep folks from falling into a pit or walking into wet concrete or whatever. If nothing else, at least put up some barriers for players in the game around the issues so they don't keep falling off cliffs...
 
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I thought it was funny!

Ok so I am starting to recover slightly from my breakdown from everything glitching out and I at least have this useful information to share with other users:

If you get a notification that the hostage mission gets failed and the transaction menu shows the mission as expired, the mission can actually still be completed if you return to the mission hub with the illegal hostage cargo. There were a few hostages I hadn't spaced yet and I was somehow able to still turn their mission in despite them having changed from mission items to illegal cargo, the mission failed message getting sent to me, and the expired mission page on the transaction menu. Now that I figured this out I swear I read this somewhere before but I didn't get any good search results when I looked into it this evening.

That said my goal was to play ED and not submit free work as a QA tester and build workarounds, but here I am... maybe I'll build a mastersheet of mission glitches and workarounds for the community at some point. I really don't want other people to go through this without having info on the problems and what to do about them.
 
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Here was the issue report I wrote up for the liberate escape pods mission bug just before I had more glitches with the liberate hostages mission and blew a gasket. If anyone's had a similar issue with this mission, a replication report may be helpful in getting it addressed. Unfortunately its the hostage glitch that seems more common and easier to run into and I've seen talked about before (as a validation that this is a widespread glitch).
 

Deleted member 182079

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Where is your QA department!?
/slowly raises hand

I've come across those megaship scan missions, and while I managed to complete them (at least pre "update" 7) - and always thought they're way too easy given the rewards - the last one I tried on Saturday iirc didn't complete... went to the specified megaship, scanned the main beacon (but not the illegal ones - I wonder if they changed this?) and nothing. This was in Odyssey.

Yesterday I switched to Horizons because I can't stand looking at Odyssey anymore, and wanted a smooth and (mostly) bug free experience for a couple of hours (unlocked Qwent - it was as fun as pulling teeth fwiw... and the only place to find Modular Terminals was a player FC... via the help of Inara. Good luck completing that in-game without help.... but I digress). Mission was gone. Just as well then.

There's a new meta in town in Elite - and it's called bugged-mission-parkour. Quite difficult to complete I tell you.
 
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Deleted member 182079

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Last time I checked (admittedly a few weeks ago) they were definitely too trivial for their reward. Just don't stack them: Then you will see how broken they are. And if you pick up 2 missions pointing to exactly the same target, I can even guarantee you that the second one wouldn't work. Even re-booting wouldn't help in this case and you have to abandon it. It's a long known issue and I bet it's somewhere reported in the issue tracker, most likely expired again. So do what a proper white knight would do: Call them "obscure" and never ever touch them again. Problem solved. /s
Yeah that happened to me before i.e. I picked up 2-3 of them, I scanned target A, and the mission for target B showed as completed. Really confused the heck out of me and I actually still managed to complete the rest but can't remember how; may have scanned target B to complete mission for target A or something like that.

The problem with the "obscure" missions is that there's too many of them now, to the point where I feel I have to ignore half the mission board because of one bug or another. At this stage the most sensible course of action would probably be to park the game for a few months, in the hope that at least some of the issues will be fixed by the time one comes back to it. In the current state of it I just feel I'm wasting my time since I can never be sure if a mission I take will complete or not. And since I'm going through the engineer grind, some mission running is required for some of the reputation requirements so I can't really avoid the mission board completely.
 
Nah, the OP chose a couple of obscure mission types - failed to understand some others, then decided a hyperbolic post was in order ... same old same old

Please, explain to me exactly how I chose an "obscure" mission or "failed to understand" others. It sounds exactly like you've learned to avoid missions that aren't known to be completable, and through some convoluted mating of distorted thinking and ill temperament, you now look down your nose at anyone who expresses frustration or the bare assumption that missions presented to players should be able to be completed when you complete the mission steps. I am very new to the game so wouldn't know what is "old", but if this kind of frustration and basic assumption is indeed somehow the "same old", that isn't any indictment of me, but entirely an indictment on Elite Dangerous and Frontier Development's management of its dev time.

When folks say they avoid half the mission board, or are learning how to play bugged-mission parkour, this is the state that Frontier has allowed to exist: This game is highly reliant on esoteric and often unintuitive knowledge the game doesn't tell you and doesn't make naturally clear, that you have to struggle figure out largely from community content. By releasing what can at best be considered incomplete missions into the production code they then sell to customers, they've introduced further esoteric and especially unintuitive required knowledge into the game: which missions are safe to take, which missions aren't, and small but critical mission-running habits like taking one at a time and avoiding any missions you don't know to be 'safe'. It becomes simply another set of esoteric knowledge players collect as they figure out the game, next to any number of other quirks, mechanics, 'common knowledge', etc.

Between the state of the game's missions and the obscene amount of grind that's involved (content seems to have been replaced by pedometers, and long ones too - yet another disrespect to players), I am fairly sure Frontier's management doesn't actually play their own game. It's honestly the closest I can come to reconciling this state of things in a reasonable way. In fact, I would absolutely love to see an uncensored, unprepared and candid recorded livestream of a top Elite Dangerous manager playing a new character from scratch and fully participating in all of the game's 'content', all the way through guardian unlocks and needing to talk their way through their choices of avoiding anything other players might not avoid and every community content resource they use along the way. The thought of it reminds me of an anecdote from my own experience driving a cruiser that had a perpetually beeping locked dashcam. It was maddening. Management ignored regular complaints the problem for weeks if not months, until one day the patrol manager had to take the vehicle out for a shift. The beeping was resolved before the end of his shift. I honestly think this is one the best things that could happen for the game and would be a nice good-will gesture, at a time when I think a lot of folks feel a disconnect between frontier and what players are experiencing in the game.

But at this point I'm mostly hoping to get past my infatuation with the core gameplay and put the whole game behind me as soon and as permanently as I can. I go through phases with games and it can be a little hard to control when my obsession with a game ends (especially something so closely aligned to my core interests: space, flight, combat and gritty realism, and the fact that I'm amid a really tough spot IRL), but I'm hoping it will be soon. I've had issues with other games and particularly player-made mods for games before, but nothing that comes anywhere close the combination of every frustration with ED today.
 
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Did you check out the 'Depot' button on the mission board? Missions that need you to hand things in often need you to go there (but it doesn't seem to highlight blue - almost caught me out yesterday).

And the Data Link Data Link missions - I believe others have pointed out that you can scan any megaship - so even if you are a player with poor impulse control who keeps taken them even knowing you can't rescan the same megaship you can still complete them with a bit of effort.
 
Did you check out the 'Depot' button on the mission board? Missions that need you to hand things in often need you to go there (but it doesn't seem to highlight blue - almost caught me out yesterday).

And the Data Link Data Link missions - I believe others have pointed out that you can scan any megaship - so even if you are a player with poor impulse control who keeps taken them even knowing you can't rescan the same megaship you can still complete them with a bit of effort.

Re. depot button:

So this is my understanding of the depot button. If you have either mission to turn in or goods to turn in, the mission board interface shows two large colored square panels on the right side of the various mission type squares. On the top is mission completion, on the bottom is the depot button you're talking about. If you have neither a completed mission nor is the location a place where you need to deposit things for a mission, then those right two squares won't appear and you'll only see the squares for the mission types (combat, trade, support, thargoid, or whatever they are). My situation and the bug I'm describing is that those right colored two squares (mission complete and mission depot) aren't appearing at the mission destination, and I'm without a depot button to open up to then turn in the 4x damaged escape pods. If the depot button is different than what I've described, it would indeed be something I don't understand. But I'm fairly sure I understand this right and that there's a bug that's keeping the mission board from being populated with mission complete + depot buttons.

Re. Data Link mission:

I was the one who started and confirmed that workaround in this recent thread on infiltrate the data link missions. I feel like there's a chance you're sharing the workaround I shared in my other thread with me here in this thread without realizing I'm the same person, or maybe this has been discussed by others in the past discussions you've thinking of. Either way I'm actually really happy you're sharing this workaround with others because players need to know about this. I just wasn't satisfied that this kind of workaround was required. It took quite lot of work including communication with others here on the forum and looking through frontier issue report replication reports to figure out that the workaround exists, it took a lot of work to figure out where on third party tools I could find bulk megaship locations (FYI for anyone reading, the fandom page for megaships is the best solution, not Inara's "nearest megaship" tool), it took a long time to visit so many different megaships across the bubble (this was the only part that was kind of fun but it was still fairly painful that I had to go down the list plugging in every megaship location into the galaxy map until I'd hit one only a few jumps away in my DBX), and there were various details along the way like learning about bulk carrier megaships vs flight operations carriers that took some time and work to learn the difference between (another piece of esoteric knowledge the game doesn't inform you about).
 
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I thought it was funny!

Ok so I am starting to recover slightly from my breakdown from everything glitching out and I at least have this useful information to share with other users:

If you get a notification that the hostage mission gets failed and the transaction menu shows the mission as expired, the mission can actually still be completed if you return to the mission hub with the illegal hostage cargo. There were a few hostages I hadn't spaced yet and I was somehow able to still turn their mission in despite them having changed from mission items to illegal cargo, the mission failed message getting sent to me, and the expired mission page on the transaction menu. Now that I figured this out I swear I read this somewhere before but I didn't get any good search results when I looked into it this evening.

That said my goal was to play ED and not submit free work as a QA tester and build workarounds, but here I am... maybe I'll build a mastersheet of mission glitches and workarounds for the community at some point. I really don't want other people to go through this without having info on the problems and what to do about them.
Laat time I tried a hostage mission in EDO, I could target the hostage canisters but they would not scoop. If I launched a limpet they ignored the hostage canisters. If I launched a limpet when targetting a hostage, the limpet would launch and circlethe canister without actually ever picking it up.

This was update 7, I sort of game them up at that point as I was trying to get influence for an election.

I do not recall, a fix in Update 8, but did not read the patch notes - except for Sally's excellent narrative.

Simon
 
OP has genuine criticism, and has come across in a non-angry, intelligent, fashion - and yet some want to still deride him. There's a reason I stopped playing this game, and that's when I realised the design team don't know what they're doing, and the QA at Frontier is laughable.

Why am I posting here when I no longer play?

Because of the issues the OP is having. Plus, I have an account - and that's my right :p
 
Laat time I tried a hostage mission in EDO, I could target the hostage canisters but they would not scoop. If I launched a limpet they ignored the hostage canisters. If I launched a limpet when targetting a hostage, the limpet would launch and circlethe canister without actually ever picking it up.

This was update 7, I sort of game them up at that point as I was trying to get influence for an election.

I do not recall, a fix in Update 8, but did not read the patch notes - except for Sally's excellent narrative.

Simon

I can help you with this one! The issue you might be having trying to scoop the canisters is that they inherited a velocity from the ship they were ejected from (whether this is indeed their actual velocity in space or just the value of an object variable or some other bug I'm not completely sure). Your velocity needs to 0 to 40m/s more than the velocity of the canister, or in other words the relative velocity between you and the canister needs to be 0 to 40m/s - or at least this gets you closer to the mindset needed to pick them up. So instead of trying to peg your ship speedometer to 0-40, slowly accelerate your ship beyond 40m/s and you may find that the cargo scoop reticle animation switches from "cannot pick up" mode into a "speed nominal, able to be picked up" state. That's what did it for me and I found I could properly scoop them at a higher peed.

That said I'm not 100% sure the physics I described is actually whats going on spatially in the game. The canisters may have inherited a velocity upon first ejection that decayed over time but due to a bug the scoop mechanic thinks they're going at the speed they were first ejected at - didn't test this further myself because Frontier hasn't hired me for that role yet. There are so many bugs I've kind of come expect them just as much as a properly rendered natural mechanic.

What really frustrated me was the part about the limpit orbiting around the canister. It happened to me, too, and it would happen quite a lot! ~angry noises that limpits have been a part of the game for years and years and I'm somehow finding them to be bugged~ (or maybe they're suffering from the same canister bug as the cargo scoop?)

So far I managed to switch my gaming addiction over to the ol' Starcraft II. A game where they actually stay on top of any gameplay bugs that come up.
 
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OP has genuine criticism, and has come across in a non-angry, intelligent, fashion - and yet some want to still deride him. There's a reason I stopped playing this game, and that's when I realised the design team don't know what they're doing, and the QA at Frontier is laughable.

Why am I posting here when I no longer play?

Because of the issues the OP is having. Plus, I have an account - and that's my right :p

Hold on! There is a more important issue here!

Why isn't your avatar animated any more?!!!
 
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