The same target faction for all delivery missions. Almost.

drty · Jun 9, 2019

Situation:
Let's assume there is a faction named Faction-M. It has a presence in several systems - some of which it controls, some not. This faction is a Patronage, by the way.

Problem:
Any delivery mission I can find, leading to the system Faction-M is present in, automatically picks this faction as a target faction. It doesn't matter what is the source faction i'm getting this mission from, or what is a system i'm currently in. The only requirement for this - is the destination system. If given system is one that the Faction-M is present in, then Faction-M will be chosen as a target faction. Meaning, Faction-M works like a magnet for any delivery mission. And I'm facing this behavior for quite some time.

Question:
Is there a reason why this works like this? Is there way to stop this?

Jmanis · Jun 9, 2019

There are a few systems like this. No real reason other than buggy mission generation which I've prattled about for years.

There was a system near me with plenty of neighbours (about 20 within as many LY).

Every massacre mission targets the same neighboring system's pirates
Every assasinate pirate Lord mission targets the same system.

It used to be every "urgent terrorist kill order" (which requires scanning a beacon first) also used to target the same base/ beacon... but it seems FD fixed that and it doesn't happen anymore. But the assassinations and massacres are still the same.

No rhyme or reason to it... just broken mission rng

Factabulous · Jun 9, 2019

Jmanis said:
No rhyme or reason to it... just broken mission rng

"Any sufficiently complicated mission generation systems is indistinguishable from broken mission rng" - as A.C.Clarke would probably have said

Walter2 · Jun 9, 2019

Often works in your favour if you support Faction-M.

Going slightly off topic, it's the slow churn in mission types that annoys me. All too often the board is dominated by missions of a single type - all very well if you find mining an enchanting pastime or your aggressive streak is turned up to 11. In the (good) old days the bias in mission types was towards fetch/carry cargoes; now you have to patiently wait for these missions while they take their time to bubble to the surface. When they eventually do, of course, they tend to sideline the miners and assassins.

drty · Jun 9, 2019

The problem is that I'm considering this faction as a foe and don't want to give them any passive INF points. And this basically mean, that I can't take most of the delivery missions. It's ridiculous.

Anyway, thanks for the answers.

Factabulous · Jun 9, 2019

Walter2 said:
Often works in your favour if you support Faction-M.

Going slightly off topic, it's the slow churn in mission types that annoys me. All too often the board is dominated by missions of a single type - all very well if you find mining an enchanting pastime or your aggressive streak is turned up to 11. In the (good) old days the bias in mission types was towards fetch/carry cargoes; now you have to patiently wait for these missions while they take their time to bubble to the surface. When they eventually do, of course, they tend to sideline the miners and assassins.

yeah, I find pax missions especially annoying - get a board full of single jump bulk missions, call that ship over - then the board never sees them again and is full of sightseers.

Also agree about the benefits of clumping - attempting to get factions into a negative state would be far more difficult if factions chose from a larger pool of target factions. I need to do more research on how the mission factions are chosen, it is complex, rng or not.

Jmanis · Jun 9, 2019

Walter2 said:
Often works in your favour if you support Faction-M.

Going slightly off topic, it's the slow churn in mission types that annoys me. All too often the board is dominated by missions of a single type - all very well if you find mining an enchanting pastime or your aggressive streak is turned up to 11. In the (good) old days the bias in mission types was towards fetch/carry cargoes; now you have to patiently wait for these missions while they take their time to bubble to the surface. When they eventually do, of course, they tend to sideline the miners and assassins.

Yup. People incorrectly claim "it's the BGS! It works in mysterious ways!" all the time... and it's totally incorrect.

It's incredibly easy to prove that's not the case... and instead the BGS just generates random missions, but that randomness is blobby; when it selects one mission type, it tends to generate many of that one type. The 10 minute cycle just changes what one that happens to be.

Kietrax · Jun 17, 2019

drty said:
Situation:
Let's assume there is a faction named Faction-M. It has a presence in several systems - some of which it controls, some not. This faction is a Patronage, by the way.

Problem:
Any delivery mission I can find, leading to the system Faction-M is present in, automatically picks this faction as a target faction. It doesn't matter what is the source faction i'm getting this mission from, or what is a system i'm currently in. The only requirement for this - is the destination system. If given system is one that the Faction-M is present in, then Faction-M will be chosen as a target faction. Meaning, Faction-M works like a magnet for any delivery mission. And I'm facing this behavior for quite some time.

Question:
Is there a reason why this works like this? Is there way to stop this?

If this is happening all the time then it might be worth submitting a bug report with system names, dates etc as it is my understanding and experience that things are supposed to be more random than that so there could be an issue that could be fixed. Of course you might just get the response that it is working as intended. Maybe others are getting the missions to deliver to not Faction-M from other modes before you? Unlikely if it is consistent, but possible these days ...

drty · Jun 17, 2019

Kietrax said:
If this is happening all the time then it might be worth submitting a bug report with system names, dates etc as it is my understanding and experience that things are supposed to be more random than that so there could be an issue that could be fixed. Of course you might just get the response that it is working as intended. Maybe others are getting the missions to deliver to not Faction-M from other modes before you? Unlikely if it is consistent, but possible these days ...

Get the response for submitted issue - are you kidding? Response from whom? Never got any responses for any of the submitted issues so far. Even when the issue was obvious, trivial and easily reproducible. No comments, no confirmation statuses, nada. That's not FDev style to give responses. I don't even think they track that tracker at all. So why anyone should care to submit something there. I have more faith in getting help from the ED community than from the ED developer. That's the reason why I posted this question here.

Kietrax · Jun 17, 2019

drty said:
Get the response for submitted issue - are you kidding? Response from whom? Never got any responses for any of the submitted issues so far. Even when the issue was obvious, trivial and easily reproducible. No comments, no confirmation statuses, nada. That's not FDev style to give responses. I don't even think they track that tracker at all. So why anyone should care to submit something there. I have more faith in getting help from the ED community than from the ED developer. That's the reason why I posted this question here.

Well OK then, but all you will get here is other players opinions … other players cannot investigate the mission server or have any impact on fixing it, all you could possibly get is confirmation that this happens and, so far, in the responses above nor in my personal experience I'm not seeing that. If you don't want to submit a ticket, post some evidence here - again there is a chance the right people might see it as they do frequent these forums.

Edit: Just to add - I know the missions team would be happy to investigate if you can provide screen shots of the mission board and location data. There are a large number of factors that feed in to the generator and things occasionally get skewed because of this. If you can add a bug report that would be the best way, adding a link here would help too.