I ran across a thread yesterday (I think on Reddit) where someone claimed that stacking missions (for instance a bunch of data missions going to the same place) is an exploit. I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding? I've been doing scan jobs over and over again in the same area. One station will send me to the same moon in a neighboring system to scan it for... sometimes 250k up to 1.8m credits. If I'm lucky, I'll get six missions to the same place and pull in (on my luckiest one so far) upwards of five million credits.
I'm not sure why that would be wrong. If multiple people are willing to send me to get info on the same location... that fits the story for me. They all have concerns. I'm answering their questions. They didn't ask for an NDA.
So am I misunderstanding this? I'm relatively new, so forgive me for asking what may be a very obtuse question.
It's not that obtuse really.
You used to be able to stack up to the total mission limit (20) of the planetary scan missions, also massacre missions where you're sent to kill a particular faction's ships. For both of those, a single 'target' (scan or kill) counts towards all missions as you know.
In a previous update FDev changed the game so that you could only accept up to three of each mission type per faction and the reason for this was given as the way the game is coded didn't allow them to make the scans or kills only count towards a single mission, so they had to limit them another way. The point being that they did in fact want to limit them and didn't strictly intend for the kills or scans to count for multiple missions.
There has been endless debate on here about the topic with some players arguing that it makes perfect sense to get missions from six different factions all to scan the same base which is somehow being used by all six of them to send transmissions to various combinations of the others, whilst others suggest that's prety stupid and the missions should each give a separate place to scan.
Similarly some players thought it was perfectly reasonable to collect 20 separate missions from a faction, each of which required them to kill between 48 and 82 ships, then just kill 82 ships and cash them all in because every kill counts for every mission, whilst others argue that this is clearly ridiculous and the game should require you to kill the required number of ships for each mission separately.
As far as I'm concerned the debate ended the moment FDev put a hard cap on the number of missions you can accept because at that time they are saying
'We understand what is happening here and this is where we've set the limit'. If you're playing to that limit, you're not exploiting anything, you
can't be.
That's all something of a moot point now since the beta includes an update where scans and kills
will only count for a single mission, so I guess that answers what FDev actually want to happen.
Delivery missions (goods and data) are completely different. Even if you do consider the above to be exploits you're not exploiting anything by stacking goods delivries and data because if you have 20 separate messages to be delivered to the same place nothing is being double counted. Same with trade missions, you're not deliving the same 10 tons of palladium to twenty different recipients, you're hauling 200 tons of it.
Fun fact though. The chained planetary scan missions (which aren't actually chained at all and are just planetary scan missions)
don't have the three mission cap.
