Newcomer / Intro Missions Issues? (Bugged, or am I just not getting it)

[cneuhauser]

I've seen several "Pick up the black box" missions, and taken them. However, when I go to the system where it tells me to go, I don't see black boxes show up on my "contacts" list. Do I need to scan for them? If so, do I need to purchase a scanner? Then how do I use it?

Found a second mission regarding "Slaves" that I have to take home, yet no home is listed, and when I'm at the base that it says that I got the slaves it says... "THank you for returning the slaves to their home"... guessing this is bugged.

Lastly, does anyone have any links to starting guides to get a little cash and purchase scanners and do some mining? Or for getting started in the trading business?

Thanks,

 

[Undecided]

What you need to do is fly around the system in supercruise, then look around for "unidentified signal sources" that pop up in your navigation menu. It's best to just slowly fly around at zero throttle until one spawns. Once you see one in the nav menu, lock onto it like a station and drop out of supercruise once you get the "safe to disengage" message. These are sort of random encounters that have a variety of ships, or objects in them. Eventually you will find your black boxes.

I'm a little confused as to what is happening with the second mission. Can you explain what the missions description is and what you are doing?

 

[Anarky]

With the second mission it sounds like you've accepted a mission to deliver slaves to the station you got the mission from. This means you need to go and find the slaves, buy them, and take them back to the station. Even though you haven't completed the mission, you get the mission completion text. It's like that for all fetch and return quests.

I wouldn't do slave runs for reputation though. They're worth it when the reward is 45kcr+.

 

[cneuhauser]

1) for the black box mission... I looked around for awhile and another faction asked that I stop looking. However there was no real decision to stop or continue, just an updated mission log. I decided to go back to the original space port and abandon the mission, then got an update to go to the second faction for a reward... Mission really wasn't laid out very well. The stop looking part came from an encounter around a sun where I was supposed to be looking for the box, never did find the box itself...would have been a better laid out mission if I would have found the box, and the interdicting faction ship at the same instance, then it would have made much more sense.

2) slave freedom mission... The original mission was to take free slaves back home. The station never gave me the slaves, nor did it state where to pick the, up... Also checked the market and black market and no commodity of 'slaves' listed. Purchasing them would have been contrary and ridiculous anyways since all the mission said was I was returning the 'free slaves' home... Not rescuing them or purchasing them from servitude. Funny I decided to stop at another unknown signal, and someone just asked me to not deliver the slaves that I never found in the first place lmao... It updated my log, and I was frustrated enough to abandon the quest...then I got a reward... Lmao.

*overall opinion of mission play, though only a quarter or smaller part of the game... They need a LOT of work, especially the script writing, which ironically... Is very simple to fix, with more clear and precise directions.

lastly... I now have a progressive mission for the navy to deliver to them some weapons... After looking around for awhile, trying to figure out what weapons they're talking about, I finally realized that they're talking about the commodity, but the language used is different than utilized in the commodity network... It's little things like that which throw curve balls at newbs and make me scratch my head (actually again it's poor script writing and just careless/lazy) basically they're using "insider lingo" without developing the education and "lingo" of the end user who happens to be new to the game...

analogy... Is if I told any of these commanders "hey go grab your axe lets shed a little", as a musician this makes perfect sense to me...translation "go grab your instrument/saxophone, let's practice some" ... But without correct context or subject knowledge no one would ever know...

 

[Feldspar]

Underneath the blurb it does state what you need to pick up/destroy and where you need to take it, this removes the ambiguity.

 

[Some Useless Geek]

The really nasty bug in missions is when you have completed 98% of the work required to earn the reward (and the reputation that goes along with completion) and you randomly encounter some agent who changes your mission without asking you and without recourse. THIS. IS. A. BUG.

Really, this fits the classic definition of a bug; it is undesired and unexpected behavior in the application -- in this case, a game. What would you think of a word processor that would randomly print your underlined text as bold italics? Or would replace Tahoma with Helvetica during the print process? This is exactly what ED is doing when it changes missions without the user's previous knowledge nor consent. Please, Frontier, fix this buggy behavior. Otherwise all "kill pirate" and "fetch abandoned cargo" missions are useless kaka.