Newcomer / Intro No Pirates to be found?

[Nerces]

Hello everyone,

I tried to find the answer to my (stupid?) question but can't think of any thread that's really helpfull.

I played Elite Dangerous a lot.. but before 2.3 release. Now that I'm going back to this great game, I feel like a noob. I wanted to try those massacre missions and at the same time some basic killing missions.

The objectives were the same for the different missions I took together: pirates, pirates and more pirates. I've noticed that one pirate down only count for one mission and not all of them. That's perfectly fine with me.

What is not fine, is that I can't find any pirates in the system (LHS 1212) I'm supposed find many (more 180 if I wanted all my missions to be successfull). To be honest, I did find pirates: only 3 after about 20 hours of gameplay in the LHS 1212 system?!

I tried:
- navigation beacon
- mining site (poor and rich)
- signal sources

Nothing worked. Did I miss something??
Please help. Thanks!

 

[Deleted member 38366]

Yes, you missed an >1 year old bug with "Kill x Pirates" Missions.

The bug : the spawn rate of the Mission targets you need to complete the Missions is abysmal. Vastly insufficient to complete such Missions in any reasonable time.
If you currently sit on a larger Stack of Missions.... You have my sympathy. Chances are, you might not be physically able to complete all of them.

There are a few Threads about it with workarounds, though.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...n-pirates-are-these-missions-broken?p=6637961
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/351180-Coming-up-dry-with-Wetwork-missions?p=5496802
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/423750-Working-around-the-Massacre-Pirates-bug

PS.
I personally don't do any of these Missions anymore.

My own old Bug Report from 21 Mar 2017 (!) :
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ates-for-required-Mission-Targets-Abysmal-(-)

 

[Nero Tacitus]

To elaborate, there's currently (and has been since 3.0 I believe) 2 major bugs impacting pirate hunting missions. A) The spawn rates have dropped to unplayably low levels and B) Even when targets do spawn, they don't always count toward the mission total.

There's a mega-thread of bug reports here. We're still waiting on a fix, and FDev have been uncharacteristically slow/absent in remedying the problem.

 

[metatheurgist]

Spawn rates are fine. The only bug is not all valid mission targets count as mission targets. It's been complicated recently by introducing pirates from far-away systems which dilutes the target pool but even then it's a doable mission.

Here's the trick: New pirates don't spawn until the olds ones go, either because they leave due to a script event or they get killed. So if you want the RNG to throw up mission targets you have to churn the pirates as quickly as possible; this means killing any and all of them you see. If you're just sitting there waiting for your mission targets to turn up while 5 wings of non-target pirates are hogging the instance, you'll never make any progress.

 

[Nerces]

Outch... I didn't think the bug was still there

Thanks guys for the quick and precise answers. I'm going to cancel those missions then.
I already lost quite an amount of credits with with my Fer-de-Lance being destroyed outside a station because I was 'wanted' and couldn't manage to pay the fine inside a station.
It's expensive to get back in the game!

 

[aRJay]

Outch... I didn't think the bug was still there

Thanks guys for the quick and precise answers. I'm going to cancel those missions then.
I already lost quite an amount of credits with with my Fer-de-Lance being destroyed outside a station because I was 'wanted' and couldn't manage to pay the fine inside a station.
It's expensive to get back in the game!

It is expensive so it is worth getting back into a cheap ship while you get back into the swing of things as well as coming to grips with the new stuff, of which there is a lot.