General The 6 year old problem with rescues – still not fixed

[Phill P]

The thing is there doesn't seem to be a problem. Why is running out of missions a problem? We all run out of missions, then we take other missions.

No we don't. You can do AX all day to clear a war system. If you are Deliveries you can do Deliveries all day. Rescues keep running out of missions so you can't.

Saying do something else is not an answer, I have addressed this in the OP. Suggest you read it so you're not asking about things that have already been addressed.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

No we don't. You can do AX all day to clear a war system. If you are Deliveries you can do Deliveries all day. Rescues keep running out of missions so you can't.

Saying do something else is not an answer, I have addressed this in the OP. Suggest you read it so you're not asking about things that have already been addressed.

So you want rescue items rather spawn in the world than being tied to missions? I mean if you stick to the thing "I want the mission board work how I want" then I don't see this going anywhere. But having rescue items spawn in the world to find and pickup - why not?

 

[Phill P]

So you want rescue items rather spawn in the world than being tied to missions?

No. This is not remotely what I have said anywhere. Interesting idea but not the one under discussion.

I mean if you stick to the thing "I want the mission board work how I want" then I don't see this going anywhere. But having rescue items spawn in the world to find and pickup - why not?

This is not me saying I want the board to work how I want. This is saying let's have some fairness and parity across all war activities with consistent work for everyone, not just two thirds of it.

Salvage has improved a bit but now you need a Scythe killer to do it as they will attack you all the time.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

No. This is not remotely what I have said anywhere. Interesting idea but not the one under discussion.

This is not me saying I want the board to work how I want. This is saying let's have some fairness and parity across all war activities with consistent work for everyone, not just two thirds of it.

Salvage has improved a bit but now you need a Scythe killer to do it as they will attack you all the time.

AX spawns in the world without being tied to missions. You can't have both. If you want missions you gotta accept limitations just like everyone else. You want continuous rescue then probably having those behave like AX spawns is your best bet.

 

[Phill P]

AX spawns in the world without being tied to missions. You can't have both

If you want missions you gotta accept limitations just like everyone else.

Nonsense. There are always a steady stream of AX and Delivery missions in war systems, at every port.

You want continuous rescue then probably having those behave like AX spawns is your best bet.

Perhaps that might be a way to provide more work but its going off on a tangent to get round a problem instead of dealing with it directly.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Nonsense. There are always a steady stream of AX and Delivery missions in war systems, at every port.

...

If that is true you would indeed have a case.

 

[Phill P]

If that is true you would indeed have a case.

It is, and thank you.

 

[Northpin]

The "infinite fountain of rewards" is another exaggeration. The mats are no different from the mats you would get at any station after allying with every faction there. Again, it is only because you do more rescue missions at once than any other type of mission that it gives this exaggerated impression. And again in practice it's not such the massive thing it seems in theory.

Running out of missions is a thing for all types of mission boards if you stack the said missions and do them faster than the boards can refresh.
I run out of mission when i do Robigo - it's only doable at full pace for about an hour (that means 6 runs, each run with all 8 cabins taken), after that the boards start to dry up and i can no longer fill all my cabins on my python so i have to do the runs with 1 or even 2 cabins empty or do only 3-4 runs per hour instead of 6

I also used to often run out of missions when i was doing planetary ax defense missions, back then when we still had systems in invasion and 6-modshard Conda was still a thing.

 

[Phill P]

Running out of missions is a thing for all types of mission boards if you stack the said missions and do them faster than the boards can refresh.
I run out of mission when i do Robigo - it's only doable at full pace for about an hour (that means 6 runs, each run with all 8 cabins taken), after that the boards start to dry up and i can no longer fill all my cabins on my python so i have to do the runs with 1 or even 2 cabins empty or do only 3-4 runs per hour instead of 6

I do mention that other activities can run out the board to an extent but then this also implies that all boards have the same refresh rate so if that's true increasing it shouldn't be difficult and there's no logical reason not to do it.

Difference is with Robigo you don't do it for any objective but your own. Whereas all war activities have a wider purpose, to move the progress bar and take the system away from Thargoid Control towards Human Control or Unpopulated. A specific purpose relevant to the Thargoid War Machine. It's not, as some people seem to think, just a hobby or a bit of RP or a fast track to superpower rank and materials.

I also used to often run out of missions when i was doing planetary ax defense missions, back then when we still had systems in invasion and 6-modshard Conda was still a thing.

The other point is that you have other options within the same activity, in your AX defence example there are other types of AX mission and always straight AX combat to make progress with if the specific mission you want is not available at the time. Deliveries rarely if ever run out and like AX have wing missions. Rescues have no alternatives within the umbrella of their activity, or any wing missions, so they just run out.

At the end of the day they want us to participate so having the steady work to do that other activities take for granted is not too much to ask. Anything else is nonsense on stilts.

 

[Shadow Draikana]

Apologies on bumping this thread but I'm pointing out the issue linked in OP succeeded in hitting confirmed/voting phase. Now it can be upvoted and (hopefully) escalated to get FDev's attention

 

[Phill P]

Apologies on bumping this thread but I'm pointing out the issue linked in OP succeeded in hitting confirmed/voting phase. Now it can be upvoted and (hopefully) escalated to get FDev's attention

Thanks for the bump, appreciated.

 

[Shadow Draikana]

Thanks for the bump, appreciated.

No problem, just doing my part where I can o7

 

[Dushess74]

You cleared the board? Job well done. You rescued the people in distress. I dont see what the problem is.

There is also another problem. We can easily rescue millions from 97k population system. Each time when it's under attack.

 

[Phill P]

There is also another problem. We can easily rescue millions from 97k population system. Each time it's under attack.

Rescues have never tallied with system population but it's not a gameplay issue, just a bit silly.

 

[BackToTheMud]

While I understand your frustration, especially when it comes to the lack of meaningful co-op here...or in most parts of the game: Have you considered roleplaying your rescues more?

Your wing sweep in and clear the bord, rescuing all the remaining stranden people, and then you fly to the next station in need of aid as your roaning band of rescue specialist once more saves the day.
Or instead of using the biggest ship you have access to you pick something smaller; just be some dude trying to help where he can.
During the last of the NMLA's bombings I took the Keelback I pretty much live in, switched the fsd-bay for a cargo rack, giving me space for a "massive" 48t, a shield boster for a heat sink, and took missions from a rescue ship to rescue the people floating around in escape pods inside the station. Not the most efficient way to earn credits, but fun and good for my own story.

 

[Phill P]

While I understand your frustration, especially when it comes to the lack of meaningful co-op here...or in most parts of the game: Have you considered roleplaying your rescues more?

Again this misses the point and has been addressed already.

This is not just a role play exercise. It's for a specific purpose to achieve a specific objective.

The idea that clearing out the rescue mission board would clear the system or "save the day" is a nice thought but it makes no sense in the context of how the war machine actually works.

Rescues are one of the specific activities that fdev have given us to move the progress bar to clear an Alert or Invasion system. Like AX, deliveries, tissue sampling, salvage, AX Reactivations etc.

It takes X many of those activities to retake a system (or kick the Thargoids out if it was previously unpopulated). X many rescues, X many deliveries, X many kills, X many samples etc. For example 616 tissue samples to clear an unpopulated Alert system at 18.46 Ly from a Titan after the latest balance pass.

All those other activities don't run out of missions or work to do (since there are no missions for tissue sampling and salvage).

As I hope you can see it would be far too easy if only 100 or so rescue missions cleared a system and would also require them to be worth about a hundred times more than AX or deliveries or any other war activity. If that was the case nobody would bother with anything else, we'd all do a couple of hundred rescues and clear ten systems a day and then the problem would be how unbalanced and powerful rescues were compared to other activities.

So no, that's not how the war machine works. You need to do many many more than that in order to clear any system and with the missions running out all the time that is a problem because you cannot do it consistently - with one of the activities they specifically give you to do it with.

It needs fixing. And when people are done pretending it doesn't, or pretending it's about something else, it still needs fixing.

 

[BackToTheMud]

Again this misses the point and has been addressed already.

This is not just a role play exercise. It's for a specific purpose to achieve a specific objective.

The idea that clearing out the rescue mission board would clear the system or "save the day" is a nice thought but it makes no sense in the context of how the war machine actually works.

Rescues are one of the specific activities that fdev have given us to move the progress bar to clear an Alert or Invasion system. Like AX, deliveries, tissue sampling, salvage, AX Reactivations etc.

It takes X many of those activities to retake a system (or kick the Thargoids out if it was previously unpopulated). X many rescues, X many deliveries, X many kills, X many samples etc. For example 616 tissue samples to clear an unpopulated Alert system at 18.46 Ly from a Titan after the latest balance pass.

All those other activities don't run out of missions or work to do (since there are no missions for tissue sampling and salvage).

As I hope you can see it would be far too easy if only 100 or so rescue missions cleared a system and would also require them to be worth about a hundred times more than AX or deliveries or any other war activity. If that was the case nobody would bother with anything else, we'd all do a couple of hundred rescues and clear ten systems a day and then the problem would be how unbalanced and powerful rescues were compared to other activities.

So no, that's not how the war machine works. You need to do many many more than that in order to clear any system and with the missions running out all the time that is a problem because you cannot do it consistently - with one of the activities they specifically give you to do it with.

It needs fixing. And when people are done pretending it doesn't, or pretending it's about something else, it still needs fixing.

Only, you don't take time onto account. You clear a board before it can reset; that's impossible for any other mission type. If you took a reactivation mission there's a decent chance you wouldn't even have made it too the settlement in that time. And how much time would it take you to gather those 616 tissue samples compared to the time it would take to have the same impact by only doing rescue missions?
And your rescue missions aren't being targeted or bugged here, it's just how the mission refresh work; it's just that the other mission can't be completed fast enough to clear the board.

 

[Kira Goto]

Only, you don't take time onto account. You clear a board before it can reset; that's impossible for any other mission type. If you took a reactivation mission there's a decent chance you wouldn't even have made it too the settlement in that time. And how much time would it take you to gather those 616 tissue samples compared to the time it would take to have the same impact by only doing rescue missions?
And your rescue missions aren't being targeted or bugged here, it's just how the mission refresh work; it's just that the other mission can't be completed fast enough to clear the board.

I don’t think you realize that this was not an issue when the war scenario had (I assume) unique bulk passenger missions which offered significantly larger amounts of passengers per mission, and didn’t appear to be rep-restricted.

The latter of those facts is certainly quite dumb when you look at it as being war evacuation work, in my opinion. Why would you care that the person who showed up specifically to get your people out hasn’t worked for your faction before? Do you want them to get rescued or not?

For the bulk/group transport missions, that is. I’m not gonna talk about the entitled ‘VIP’ transport missions(mostly from an RP standpoint, though they also don’t seem to be as good as bulk transport).

 

[Phill P]

Only, you don't take time onto account.

On the contrary, I specifically point out that it's the cause of the problem because nobody thought it through. They just lazily copied and pasted a standard mission board, changed the descriptions and thought "that'll do."

They are the ones still not taking this into account.

You clear a board before it can reset; that's impossible for any other mission type.

Yes. I mentioned all this in the OP.

It's something they really should have thought of and taken into account when they designed it. They didn't but ok, I can cut them some slack for not thinking of everything at first but it's now been an issue for 6 years. Plenty of time for it to be addressed or changed, for the thought to be put into it that wasn't at the start, but it never has been.

And how much time would it take you to gather those 616 tissue samples

This has nothing to do with the actual problem of missions running out. I gave that figure as one example of what other activities would need because a) I had it to hand and b) you didn't seem to understand that clearing a mission board is not "saving the day" because the war machine doesn't work like that and nor is this just for RP, so it was in response to your misconceptions.

But since you ask getting 616 samples in an Alert would take around 3-4 hours solo depending on how fast the NHSS turn up and given the usual RNG with limpet fail rate even at 30fps. Obviously it would be faster in a wing.

Although 616 samples is to completely clear an unpopulated Alert at 18.46 Ly from the Titan where there are obviously no rescues anyway. The number to clear a populated system at the same distance would be higher, where 616 samples would do around 18%.

compared to the time it would take to have the same impact by only doing rescue missions?

Again this has nothing to do with the point of missions running out but again since you ask all other activities would take longer to achieve the same progress. However, unlike rescues they are not further exacerbated by running out of missions and having no wing activities. Which is still the actual point.

And your rescue missions aren't being targeted or bugged here,

Good job I've never said they are then.

I said they suffer from problems that other activities don't as a result of a 6 year old fundamental design flaw that still hasn't been fixed.

I don’t think you realize that this was not an issue when the war scenario had (I assume) unique bulk passenger missions which offered significantly larger amounts of passengers per mission

Which only masked the problem instead of solving it, yes. Plus it was only for Passenger Board missions. Mission Board missions e.g. critical wounded in an Invasion still ran out even with the longer distances to the rescue ships, which only slightly reduced the underlying problem with the refresh rate. Had the passenger missions run out as well, like they do now, any Invasion system in its last week with only one damaged station left, where there are no deliveries, no AX and only rescues to do there would be screwed for clearing it.