Smuggle Thargoid link missions seem impossible and may bankrupt you.

[IndigoWyrd]

I've been moving corrosive cargo for quite some time, long, long before these missions.
It's an interesting thing to do. Yes, your ship will melt and melt fast.
I've had to reboot right near the toast rack more than once just to get my sensors online long enough to request docking.
I've jumped 4, 5 even 6 times with no canopy, and had to drift through the mail slot due to thruster failures a few times.
I've had to FA-Off through mail slots many times due to my ship melting around me, and it's always been fun.

Now that this cat is out of the bag, I'm sure the fun of this will perish soon as well.

Perhaps by the time I return from my trip into the black, these will be either nerfed to hades and back, dead and gone, or Palin will start building larger Corrosion-Resistant racks and the challenge of hauling tons of corrosive cargo will be gone.

 

[andrak]

...and once again Frontier pander to the lowest common denominator.

For one brief moment we had a mission that was exciting, risky and high pay. A mission that required knowledge of the game, a pre-planned build to focus on A or B rated internals with lots of utility mounts, hard points and module reinforcement to lower the chances of corrosion attacking key modules. Using head look to spot the destination through a broken canopy as you fight corrosion with AFM in the right panel. True excitement...

But no, we can't have that because casuals who can't read, aren't willing to think about their build or don't question the fact that 24 million for one jump might be a bit more difficult than it sounds end up filling their empty D rated exploration ship, wondering why they are exploding 1 minute later and then whining to the support team to reinstate the lost money or remove fines for the fact that they can't fly.

No need for skill, no need for consequence, just contact support and all your worries go away.

Pathetic is definitely the word.

Removing the lock on ranked missions above your current rank was a bad move and we need some kind of hardcore missions locked off from noobs, or a complete area of the galaxy dedicated to long term hardcore players.

 

[Taranis Dekker]

...and once again Frontier pander to the lowest common denominator.

For one brief moment we had a mission that was exciting, risky and high pay. A mission that required knowledge of the game, a pre-planned build to focus on A or B rated internals with lots of utility mounts, hard points and module reinforcement to lower the chances of corrosion attacking key modules. Using head look to spot the destination through a broken canopy as you fight corrosion with AFM in the right panel. True excitement...

But no, we can't have that because casuals who can't read, aren't willing to think about their build or don't question the fact that 24 million for one jump might be a bit more difficult than it sounds end up filling their empty D rated exploration ship, wondering why they are exploding 1 minute later and then whining to the support team to reinstate the lost money or remove fines for the fact that they can't fly.

No need for skill, no need for consequence, just contact support and all your worries go away.

Pathetic is definitely the word.

Removing the lock on ranked missions above your current rank was a bad move and we need some kind of hardcore missions locked off from noobs, or a complete area of the galaxy dedicated to long term hardcore players.

I'm guessing you didn't read the response from FD that said the missions were a mistake, then?

 

[shadragon]

So missions destroy your ship faster, the more you stack them.

Damn Frontier, I like the way you think.

 

[Tetched]

Well congratulations. You've successfully had the mission type removed entirely from the game.

Pathetic.

First I did not get the mission removed, I reported a flaw, my first first attempt I died before even leaving the issuing station.

Frankly, I would like the missions to stay, however with lower payouts, lower fines and most importantly full details of the hazards in the mission description. If The description would have said the fine for failure will be larger than the payout for successful completion and if the description had said cargo is corrosive and cause vast amounts of damage to your ship players would at least know these were not to be treated like regular smuggling missions.

 

[andrak]

I'm guessing you didn't read the response from FD that said the missions were a mistake, then?

It's a real challenge and the best thing since long range smuggling. Of course it is a mistake...

 

[BigBANGtheory [VR]]

So missions destroy your ship faster, the more you stack them.

Damn Frontier, I like the way you think.

Exactly, you got it.

Greed = almost certain destruction BUT you balance things out and start to play smart those missions were very do-able.

I reckon I clocked up 250M cr losses and 500M cr gains so a net income of 250M cr from the experience but omg what an experience and I was made to work for it none of that skimmer nonsense or Biowaste hauling crap. The fact you could gain so much at the risk of losing so much was I think a first in Space Sims tbh, it was the potential to lose upwards of 50M cr in a matter of minutes that made it dangerous seriously dangerous. I've a mind to write a letter to Sandro about this because I personally believe it was unintentional but at the sametime so good for ED gameplay it really needs to be looked at more seriously.

 

[Devari]

Exactly, you got it.

Greed = almost certain destruction BUT you balance things out and start to play smart those missions were very do-able.

I reckon I clocked up 250M cr losses and 500M cr gains so a net income of 250M cr from the experience but omg what an experience and I was made to work for it none of that skimmer nonsense or Biowaste hauling crap. The fact you could gain so much at the risk of losing so much was I think a first in Space Sims tbh, it was the potential to lose upwards of 50M cr in a matter of minutes that made it dangerous seriously dangerous. I've a mind to write a letter to Sandro about this because I personally believe it was unintentional but at the sametime so good for ED gameplay it really needs to be looked at more seriously.

I think that unfortunately this is a case of mistakenly attributing something to an intentional design decision when it was just a coincidence involving an unintended bug that happened to result in challenging gameplay. The OP noticed a game bug and some players are trying to tell him it's just a "challenge". That's the problem with players who frequen the forums, they would have already known what such a mission would involve as soon as they realized what was in their hold, while everyone else would just notice a blown canopy and a disintegrating ship, followed by a massive 20-30 million credit fine.

We had the same arguments when the Skynet NPCs appeared with 2.1 and everyone thought they were fixed. Players would go on about how they liked how challenging the NPCs were while others (myself included) were noticing behavior that was still outside the normal ranges for what the ships should be capable of doing. Issues such as an NPC Anaconda outmaneuvering a CMDR flying an engineered Python or Asp. It turns out that there were still remaining bugs regarding NPC turn rate that make them impossibly agile and FD gave out a second set of reimbursements to compensate CMDRs for their losses to those impossibly agile NPC ships. All the players who noticed this and reported it as a bug were told to "git gud" the entire time when it really was a legitimate game balance problem.

The issue here is that Elite needs a very fine gameplay balance in terms of appropriately scaled risk/reward to properly cover the range of Elite players. What might be trivial for a PvP-modded combat ship could be instant death in a Type 7 or Type 9 and what might be very lucrative in a Cutter might only be average incomes in a Type 6. Both FD as well as many experienced players need to occasionally play the game using ships on the lower end of the power curve to properly appreciate this, which is why I have two dozen fully Engineered ships that includes a combat Sidewinder, Imperial Eagle, Type 6 and so on rather than just flying my Python and Corvette all the time.

 

[her3sy]

What's the payout?

 

[wenkman]

I'm guessing you didn't read the response from FD that said the missions were a mistake, then?

where was that mentioned? i'm searching for these missions since the update and don't see any. if they were removed i can stop searching, can't i....

 

[BigBANGtheory [VR]]

I think that unfortunately this is a case of mistakenly attributing something to an intentional design decision when it was just a coincidence involving an unintended bug that happened to result in challenging gameplay. The OP noticed a game bug and some players are trying to tell him it's just a "challenge". That's the problem with players who frequen the forums, they would have already known what such a mission would involve as soon as they realized what was in their hold, while everyone else would just notice a blown canopy and a disintegrating ship, followed by a massive 20-30 million credit fine.

I think both cases are true, it was imho unintended (rather than a bug per se) but at the same time very rewarding in gameplay terms if you engaged with it. What I would say though (trying to be balanced here) is anyone who took on a mission paying out upwards of 20M cr from a criminal faction is on pretty slim grounds to think it was going to be casual haulage. Personally I thought I was being baited and expecting Thargoids to jump in and wipe me out at any point. They should have been rank locked to Elite trader thus ensuring the player taking them had exceeded 1B cr in wealth and could handle the losses without bankruptcy because yes that is a serious outcome of which the player should be warned of.

 

[Yukk]

Except at least now with the Thargoid material CGs it showed that each tier unlocked a higher grade rack. Before hand no one really knew what the CG was for and the payout wasn't worth the effort so no one did it and we got stuck with garbage level cargo racks that are unrealistic for doing Thargoid content and instead of FDEV saying "oh we set the bar too high on that one like a typical CG that unless the entire playerbase contributed, didn't have a chance in hell of giving you bigger cargo racks due to low amount of Meta Alloys" they just let it happen and now we are dealing with this garbage nonsense where the Corrosion racks are too small and it's ridiculous on the bigger ships to put size 1 and 2 stuff in sizes 4-5-6 and even 7 slots, it's utterly ridiculous.

Maybe we can get a CG for an engineer to invent the "double adapter" which allows you to put two smaller items into one larger class slot. Obviously, due to the complexity of such a complex technology, any ship could probably only use one or something ...

 

[Devari]

I also lost all my wealth by receiving a 69m fine yesterday. Based on the mission description I had no idea about that. I dont want to complain but how is that fair?

Your ship dies in 1 minute and your bankrupt and marked as criminal.

Submit a support ticket and there is a good chance they can help you out. According to the devs those missions were never supposed to exist to begin with and are therefore considered a game bug, and support usually has no problem reimbursing losses incurred as a result of a confirmed game bug.

 

[Devari]

I think both cases are true, it was imho unintended (rather than a bug per se) but at the same time very rewarding in gameplay terms if you engaged with it. What I would say though (trying to be balanced here) is anyone who took on a mission paying out upwards of 20M cr from a criminal faction is on pretty slim grounds to think it was going to be casual haulage. Personally I thought I was being baited and expecting Thargoids to jump in and wipe me out at any point. They should have been rank locked to Elite trader thus ensuring the player taking them had exceeded 1B cr in wealth and could handle the losses without bankruptcy because yes that is a serious outcome of which the player should be warned of.

I would almost agree here, except that when passengers missions first appeared they were noticeably more lucrative than all other missions and this was not considered a bug. The main issue here is that the risk/reward balance in terms of fines and even the corrosive nature of the cargo were not apparent to a casual player at all, or even an experienced player who doesn't visit the forums. For most players who aren't familiar with how the mission works it would be a massive risk to even attempt the mission.

 

[Goose4291]

They made these actual missions? Awesome!

Also, rookie

No, seriously, not a troll. This one reason why one of the recent CGs should've been *only* for the corrosive thargoid materials, get people used to hauling this stuff. I've seen lots of people RE: the research probes go "Oh, make sure you have the corrosive cargo racks!,,, for 1t???

My PB is about 50t shipped about 300LY. Also, fines? Meh, just don't get scanned, and if you do, just make sure to not die and spawn at a station owned by that faction. The upper limit on that v50t is the loading time. You can only do these 2t at a time and it can take a while, so your ship gets corroded increasingly in that time.

Just so this doesn't feel like a troll... here's some tips for smuggling large quantities without CRCRs.

1. Class A life support.
2. Fuel Tanks, not Fuel Scoops. You can get big range with these, and you must jump instantly to your next system to avoid a pulse, if your route is multihop.
3. Watch for cargo hatch failure. If that happens, emergency drop out of supercruise to avoid a cargo spill.
4. When you get to the station, fly fast. You dont want these spilling inside the station
5. Fit out every availabe slot. This gives the corrosion something else to target.
6. Any more than 16 instapop your canopy, more than 20 to 100% your cargo hold, though less may still cause failure.



Yup. This is why I've wanted a CG just for this stuff, and have also craved missions to haul corrosive stuff. It's difficult, it's challenging, it's fun, and it's much, much more interesting than the usual "pickup at A, drop off at B point and click adventure". People claimed hauling the vanilla goods was for RP or non-horizons participation, but the two activities are barely comparable, even if you take out the salvaging component.

There's a reason we're still on AEDC's most wanted list, though I will admit my personal best was 4t in an Adder, due to me being a tad more cautious than you