If we are gonna complain about something...
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"A pilot has gone missing! Please bring him/her back!"
"I'm on it! Where should I look?"
"A planet?"
"Care to be a bit more specific? There's quite a lot of them you know."
"No."
"Ehm...ok...I'll try my best then I guess..."
*lifts off from the planetary starport and flies 3 km to the east*
"Hey! There is a POI here...I wonder what that might be!?"
"How about that! The pilot I was looking for!"
"Well...actually not THE pilot, just A pilot, but nevermind...that doesn't seem to matter..."
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Come on FD! If you get a mission to retrieve a specific item...just spawn that location at a specific location when you enter the system in question. Then give us something similar to the SRV wave scanner to track down that POI, doesn't matter if it's in space or down on a planet. When we get close enough it appears as a signal source/POI as usual and the current game mechanics takes over.
The whole point of these salvage/retrieval missions is to find things. At the moment we aren't finding them...instead they are being delivered to us by the game itself by spawning right were we happen to be.
These type of missions are your biggest "sin" right now IMO. Many of the others a in much better shape.
Assassinating someone or killing pirates/bountyhunters/traders still allows you to actively find them (by chosing the right locations to search or interdicting them) and kill them.
Trade missions obviously works in terms of gameplay.
Mining missions also work since you can still make informed choices where to look for the resources wanted and then actively mine these.
Taking out generators or retrieving information from nodes in settlements in Horizons is also fine.
And so on...
Retrieval missions are not fine...
This bares repeating, over and over again, till someone at Frontier gets the message.