Crime and punishment for planet scan jobs

bratan

B
I just watched both casts of upcoming "Beyond" expansion and have question about law and punishment.
It seems to be somewhat broken right now for the "planetary scan" missions where you have to download data from beacon. I haven't been doing anything illegal, many of these missions are "retrieve data so we can repair our malfunctioning equipment on the planet" yet I'm being punished for doing them by getting Wanted status and small Bounty on my head. As of now there's an "exploit" of using sidewinder and blowing myself up or getting shot down to remove this bounty, however from what I understand this will no longer be possible.
I absolutely love that it will be more strict for players that kill other commanders, but smaller things like that?
Planetary beacons are generated at random, sometimes they are public, most of the times are private (this one will get you bounty).
Can this be fixed somehow? Either make beacons for legal missions always public or don't give us Wanted status for scanning private ones. It's ok if local drones or turrets (sometimes even ships) shoot at me...
Or is there something I don't understand about these missions? :)
 

Kaocraft

Kaocraft
The whole thing is weird and hasn't made sense for a long time. I do hope that the inherent problems with the way this flaw (?) in the mission design interacts with C&P will prompt Frontier to finally take a look at it. It seems like the public/private status of beacons is totally random and has nothing to do with the type of scan mission you take, or which faction you're taking it from. It's also super weird and kind of lame that every scan location is basically the same: 1 scan beacon, one ground turret, 1 anti-air turret, and 4 "stinger" skimmers, all of them with "wanted" status. Why are they always "wanted"? I have no idea. Why is it legal to blow up every piece of destructible equipment at the site, but it's illegal to enter the perimeter, and illegal to scan the beacon? I don't know.

Planetary surface content in general needs a ground up rework, and the scan missions are the poster child for this.
 

piercehead

piercehead
These missions are data theft. Why shouldn't that be illegal? At least as far as the private beacons go. I agree there should be some guaranteed legal ones too, as I never do them otherwise.
 

Kaocraft

Kaocraft
piercehead said:
These missions are data theft. Why shouldn't that be illegal? At least as far as the private beacons go. I agree there should be some guaranteed legal ones too, as I never do them otherwise.
Click to expand...

Thats fine and all, but the legal/illegal status of the beacons doesn't seem to correspond to anything. It's random. I think. You can take a scan job where you are scanning a beacon owned *by the faction that gave you the mission*, with a mission description along the lines of "something seems to be wrong with our transmitter in such and such location, we need you to scan it and check it out." And you still can get a private beacon.

But also also also ALSO: even in the "data theft" scenario you describe; it's illegal to scan the beacon but for some reason it's perfectly legal (and you get paid for it!) to blow up all the skimmers and turrets at the site. What? Why?

Do you understand why none of this makes sense?
 

Kaocraft

Kaocraft
Spacecat said:
I'm guessing this will just be fines. I hope so. I once racked up a 6 day bounty for trespassing, lol.
Click to expand...

I'd prefer if they kept the bounties, but that the legal scan jobs and illegal scan jobs were clearly demarcated (and actually functioned as advertised), and that the payouts for legal vs illegal activities were adjusted to reflect the relative risks and burdens of each.
 

Falcon_D

Falcon_D
Yes.
I’m somewhat concerned about this problem with planetary scan missions and the new C&P system.
So far I’ve been assuming that the new C&P stuff does not pertain to getting a bounty from planetary scan missions. So I was waiting for the beta to test this theory out.
The problem is, you never know if you are going to get a public beacon or private beacon. And recently, all I’ve been getting are private beacons. Right now if I have 2 or more scan missions, I wait for the bounty to run out, do a H-jump and then do the second one. Else the bounties mount up and it takes more time to get rid of them.
 

Faded Glory

Faded Glory
Kaocraft said:
I'd prefer if they kept the bounties, but that the legal scan jobs and illegal scan jobs were clearly demarcated (and actually functioned as advertised), and that the payouts for legal vs illegal activities were adjusted to reflect the relative risks and burdens of each.
Click to expand...

Well, there's no real 'risk' doing the privates versus the public ones, they really aren't more challenging. The burden though will be bounties that don't expire, simply making them less attractive to do as it'll likely be a drag having to visit an Interstellar Factors after a session of doing these missions.

Sadly I've seen no logic behind whether a data point will be private or public, I'm almost certain it's just RNG (saw a patch note not too long ago saying that the numbers were being tweaked to make more of them private), and then a few people complained that the risk / reward was silly, so I'm guessing they tweaked the numbers again, and now we have mostly private ones.

Falcon_D said:
Yes.
I’m somewhat concerned about this problem with planetary scan missions and the new C&P system.
So far I’ve been assuming that the new C&P stuff does not pertain to getting a bounty from planetary scan missions. So I was waiting for the beta to test this theory out.
The problem is, you never know if you are going to get a public beacon or private beacon. And recently, all I’ve been getting are private beacons. Right now if I have 2 or more scan missions, I wait for the bounty to run out, do a H-jump and then do the second one. Else the bounties mount up and it takes more time to get rid of them.
Click to expand...

The bounties mounting up (in terms of their duration) won't be relevant, because as far as we know, bounties will have no timer. However they will be able to be paid off, so you'll just have to find an Interstellar Factors when you either want to go back to a system where you are wanted, or if bounty hunters start coming after you for your tasty bounties in other systems (at which point they become wanted and you can just destroy them).

Although I understand the idea that NPC bounties be treated the same way as PC ones makes sense, I believe that FD trying to curtail something they would rather not see (unwarranted PK'ing) using the same mechanics used to 'punish' players for legitimate naughty gameplay will lead to issues. A couple of different threads already on how this will impact 'fun' criminal gameplay, we'll have to see how it pans out in the beta I guess.
 

Codger

Codger
I don't think we can really speculate about how it's all going to work out...the changes are just too big. Having bounties attached to ships, instead of Commanders...that alone has ramifications we can't really foresee.

It'll be a big mess at first while everyone tries to figure out how it really works, and how it applies to their particular playstyle. After a while, any large pain points will become more obvious, as more and more players are affected and start to complain.

I'm assuming that it will take some months to get it all sorted.


That's my take on it :)
 

Faybs

Faybs
Faded Glory said:
Well, there's no real 'risk' doing the privates versus the public ones, they really aren't more challenging. The burden though will be bounties that don't expire, simply making them less attractive to do as it'll likely be a drag having to visit an Interstellar Factors after a session of doing these missions.
Click to expand...

Ugh, i hadn't thought of that. Time to rename the SRV to "matmobile". Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-crack-train! :p
 
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