Who was responsible for the simplest mission design with built in stupidity?

[GraXXoR]

Commander started his first on foot mission after much trepidation and lowering my expectations as much as humanly possible as to what to expect, quality wise, given what I've read about Odyssey over the last few years...

Follow mark down to settlement. Find nice flat area to land.. shht goes south from here...

Spoiler

Settlement is in the mountains.
Manage to land the ship at the outpost. Kinda excited to get out of the ship, but decide to drive the 200m to the entrance of the building since its 23K and warning lights are flashing all over about the cold.
Find a dead console go back through my settings to find a key that looks about right.
Find the power transfer thingy and fire it up.
Power on the terminal
Go thought bunches of random stuff like corridors and lockers with passwords and stuff.
Find something that looks power related. it's 150m away or so.
Get in my SRV to drive over... Get out... Signal has gone after getting out of the SRV... .Walk back to the Terminal and find the power thingy again.
Walk back to the building past my warm SRV...
Cut through a panel and power a few doors and finally in.
Engage the console that says offline.
Realise that now I can't put the regulator in the thingy because it started to shut.
Have to wait for it to power up completely for a few minutes...
Not have to Shutdown the site again...
HAVE TO WAIT WHAT SEEMS LIKE 5 MINUTES DOING "BURGER" ALL.
finally it's shut down.... place the power regulator
reengage the power.
BOOM BOUNTY GIVEN for blocking landing pad.
5 seconds later BOOM SECOND BOUNTY GIVEN for blocking door to the bunker in SRV...

So let me get this right? The commander gets bounty FOR USING THE FRACKING LANDING PAD TO LAND HIS SHIP WITH ZERO TIME GIVEN TO LEAVE AFTER THE MISSION IS COMPLETE...

NOBODY WARNED him not to use the pad.

Dismiss his Ship....

Drive away from colony... Recall the ship.. Due to uneven landing, ship lands several KM away..
Drive to ship over almost impassible terrain... Ship is on uneven ground, cannot get my SRV back under the ship to dock due to low access (it's a Viper MK4).
Dismiss ship again.

Ship lands another few KM away. drive over hideous ground to ship again.. finally manage to jam the SRV through a gap.. and get back on the ship.

Leave to see that commander is now wanted throughout the entire FRACKING system... Kill on sight... no remorse.... for completing a mission...

Seems my expectations for quality of FDEV content were not lowered low enough...

FDEV really scraped the bottom of the barrel for this absolute shocker of a starter mission!
If this is what new players are going to face, I pity them. SMH

 

[Pville_Piper]

Power restore missions are simple. Others can be more difficult, particularly when you have to do something covert.

Most missions in Elite are relatively easy...

 

[thistle]

Commander started his first on foot mission after much trepidation and lowering my expectations as much as humanly possible as to what to expect, quality wise, given what I've read about Odyssey over the last few years...

Follow mark down to settlement. Find nice flat area to land.. shht goes south from here...

Spoiler

Settlement is in the mountains.
Manage to land the ship at the outpost. Kinda excited to get out of the ship, but decide to drive the 200m to the entrance of the building since its 23K and warning lights are flashing all over about the cold.
Find a dead console go back through my settings to find a key that looks about right.
Find the power transfer thingy and fire it up.
Power on the terminal
Go thought bunches of random stuff like corridors and lockers with passwords and stuff.
Find something that looks power related. it's 150m away or so.
Get in my SRV to drive over... Get out... Signal has gone after getting out of the SRV... .Walk back to the Terminal and find the power thingy again.
Walk back to the building past my warm SRV...
Cut through a panel and power a few doors and finally in.
Engage the console that says offline.
Realise that now I can't put the regulator in the thingy because it started to shut.
Have to wait for it to power up completely for a few minutes...
Not have to Shutdown the site again...
HAVE TO WAIT WHAT SEEMS LIKE 5 MINUTES DOING "BURGER" ALL.
finally it's shut down.... place the power regulator
reengage the power.
BOOM BOUNTY GIVEN for blocking landing pad.
5 seconds later BOOM SECOND BOUNTY GIVEN for blocking door to the bunker in SRV...

So let me get this right? The commander gets bounty FOR USING THE FRACKING LANDING PAD TO LAND HIS SHIP WITH ZERO TIME GIVEN TO LEAVE AFTER THE MISSION IS COMPLETE...

NOBODY WARNED him not to use the pad.

Dismiss his Ship....

Drive away from colony... Recall the ship.. Due to uneven landing, ship lands several KM away..
Drive to ship over almost impassible terrain... Ship is on uneven ground, cannot get my SRV back under the ship to dock due to low access (it's a Viper MK4).
Dismiss ship again.

Ship lands another few KM away. drive over hideous ground to ship again.. finally manage to jam the SRV through a gap.. and get back on the ship.

Leave to see that commander is now wanted throughout the entire FRACKING system... Kill on sight... no remorse.... for completing a mission...

Seems my expectations for quality of FDEV content were not lowered low enough...

FDEV really scraped the bottom of the barrel for this absolute shocker of a starter mission!
If this is what new players are going to face, I pity them. SMH

What was the purpose of the mission? It's not clear from your post, was it just to restore power?

 

[Nadreck]

Looks like you landed on the pad without permission. Then when the power came on, you got blown up for being on the pad without permission.

It is possible to request landing permission even when the power is out, which would have avoided this problem. Though admittedly it doesn't seem to make sense...

 

[mtfatboy3006]

Did the mission at least complete? It used to be that if you boarded a ship or SRV after disembarking to restore power before you had restored the power, the mission would auto fail because you "left" the settlement.

 

[B.Roberts]

Some missions require more thinking than others, this is normal. Fly over before landing and scout the area. Land offsite and take a walk. Sometimes I'd land further out and use SRV if possible, or just keep on hiking. Do any kind of violence or whatever it is you going to do and leave (preferably quietly). Nobody messing around with your ship. No angry scavengers, no defense turrets. The only time I use landing pad is when I'm delivering something and I need access to the settlement's mission board or other facilities.

 

[GraXXoR]

Did the mission at least complete? It used to be that if you boarded a ship or SRV after disembarking to restore power before you had restored the power, the mission would auto fail because you "left" the settlement.

The mission succeeded and I was able to get the check mark next to the mission.. but unfortunately, there was a bounty so had to fly to a different system, get to an InterFactors to clear it and fly back... It was just poorly executed for a game that's been around for over three years at this point.

Getting into an SRV causing the mission to fail automatically is kinda.... stupid, tho....

What was the purpose of the mission? It's not clear from your post, was it just to restore power?

Restore the power to a settlement. I was assured those are the simplest missions.

Looks like you landed on the pad without permission. Then when the power came on, you got blown up for being on the pad without permission.

It is possible to request landing permission even when the power is out, which would have avoided this problem. Though admittedly it doesn't seem to make sense...

Yes. exactly this.
Retroactively, I know what happened but since there was no voice requesting landing permission and no warning landing on the pad...

Wow, did not know you could request permission from a deactivated landing pad.

 

[Shadowsnog]

practice makes perfection

 

[Kira Goto]

Wow, did not know you could request permission from a deactivated landing pad.

Settlements "shut down" from a BGS state will still have their landing pads active. It's always worked like that, to my knowledge. However while power is offline you won't get any of the usual trespass warnings. When you do... well, that's probably what you experienced.

What I find far more obnoxious is when I A, have the ship parked some 2-300 meters away and not near any of the actual pads of the settlement, which are too small for a medium, and an SRV equally not blocking anything... "Bounty : Blocking landing pad"

Yeah, go right ahead and have a finger, Odyssey. The settlement owners in that case were lucky I didn't decide to wreck the entire place on my way out.

Also, word of advice - ONLY the large orbital starports and any dedicated planetary ports get voiced flight controllers. Neither Odyssey settlements, orbital outposts, nor megaships, will have them. Good thing to keep in mind.

 

[Medane]

I'm glad to see there's still a lot of cope about how Elite is actually not badly/obtusely designed after being away for almost half a decade.

Whatever the case may be, I venture to argue that this is endemic to how I feel about most on foot missions, or anything on foot. Obtuse, unclear, with absolute nonsensical game design decisions that don't tell you how bloody anything works. There's clearly a strong attempt at depth of game design (kudos to the devs) but a failure in implementation, explanation, and logic that is broachable until you begin to follow the esoterica that they have developed.

Imagine my first time using the genetic sampler and watching my idiot of a commander take the sample jar and incerniate what's inside because apparently we're not allowed to carry multiple sample jars in this universe. Maybe this is to prevent "data save" bloat if you only partially sample 9000 exobiology things - but I still argue that, lol why. I would just abstract it to say the partial samples don't last more than a week if you leave the system or whatever, feels like a better compromise than only being able to sample one bloody thing at a time. (Then, what's the point of having multiple flora even be next to each other except to make you throw your arms up in the air and exclaim, who in the world smoked the flayleaf?) For a game that purportedly prides itself in realism, it, more than any other game, quintuples down in trying to explain obtuse game mechanics as being "in universe" in a very tongue in cheek way, except it doesn't even deserve it. It feels more like it's spitting in your face when your FIGHTER PILOTS TAKE A FLAT CUT OF ALL MONEY YOU MAKE (is THIS still a thing? Do they still have the tooltip that says "Fighter pilots need to eat too!") then they have the audacity to charge the exorbitant amount of credits for carriers which were clearly scaled relative to all the money metas that plagued the game over the years so that anyone who wasn't abusing them now got royally screwed over.

Somehow, that being tied to the "AI lore" (just look at the slop that people peddle around with machine learning garbage today) that plagued humanity and stagnated development, actually works for the magnamity of dumb that a lot of the mechanics do have, but obviously that's even close to being an excuse. Things need to be done better.

 

[Shadowsnog]

i always say there is more than enough things that elite could do better (my favourite is your ship needing a special module to autoland when you sit in it, but can land just fine when you are on ground), but it still does much more things very well. almost enough to justify playing it for thousands of hours...
its just a game
dont take it too hard

 

[Talespinner1]

Commander started his first on foot mission after much trepidation and lowering my expectations as much as humanly possible as to what to expect, quality wise, given what I've read about Odyssey over the last few years...

Follow mark down to settlement. Find nice flat area to land.. shht goes south from here...

Spoiler

Settlement is in the mountains.
Manage to land the ship at the outpost. Kinda excited to get out of the ship, but decide to drive the 200m to the entrance of the building since its 23K and warning lights are flashing all over about the cold.
Find a dead console go back through my settings to find a key that looks about right.
Find the power transfer thingy and fire it up.
Power on the terminal
Go thought bunches of random stuff like corridors and lockers with passwords and stuff.
Find something that looks power related. it's 150m away or so.
Get in my SRV to drive over... Get out... Signal has gone after getting out of the SRV... .Walk back to the Terminal and find the power thingy again.
Walk back to the building past my warm SRV...
Cut through a panel and power a few doors and finally in.
Engage the console that says offline.
Realise that now I can't put the regulator in the thingy because it started to shut.
Have to wait for it to power up completely for a few minutes...
Not have to Shutdown the site again...
HAVE TO WAIT WHAT SEEMS LIKE 5 MINUTES DOING "BURGER" ALL.
finally it's shut down.... place the power regulator
reengage the power.
BOOM BOUNTY GIVEN for blocking landing pad.
5 seconds later BOOM SECOND BOUNTY GIVEN for blocking door to the bunker in SRV...

So let me get this right? The commander gets bounty FOR USING THE FRACKING LANDING PAD TO LAND HIS SHIP WITH ZERO TIME GIVEN TO LEAVE AFTER THE MISSION IS COMPLETE...

NOBODY WARNED him not to use the pad.

Dismiss his Ship....

Drive away from colony... Recall the ship.. Due to uneven landing, ship lands several KM away..
Drive to ship over almost impassible terrain... Ship is on uneven ground, cannot get my SRV back under the ship to dock due to low access (it's a Viper MK4).
Dismiss ship again.

Ship lands another few KM away. drive over hideous ground to ship again.. finally manage to jam the SRV through a gap.. and get back on the ship.

Leave to see that commander is now wanted throughout the entire FRACKING system... Kill on sight... no remorse.... for completing a mission...

Seems my expectations for quality of FDEV content were not lowered low enough...

FDEV really scraped the bottom of the barrel for this absolute shocker of a starter mission!
If this is what new players are going to face, I pity them. SMH

Exactly! Fun, isn't it? I love it. I am on my 5th account!

 

[Lahgtah]

Yeah the on-foot missions feel rather awkward. Reboot missions are the least dumb, but still have nonsense like having to request docking permission from an otherwise abandoned base.

My least favorite are the assassination missions:
-go to this system, get tresspassing bounty for scanning hub
-go to a completely different system to find the target
-have to process-of-elimination surface scan EVERY PLANET until you find it

As soon as I found out the latter, I abandoned the mission and never took one again. In fact, the only time I do ground stuff is if they're reboot missions or I don't mind having notoriety for the next week because I cannot be bothered to deal with the awful stealth gameplay.

 

[metatheurgist]

I never use the landing pads when doing missions at dead sites. Not because I think it's silly that the pads are somehow still active but because why would I waste the time docking properly at a pad potentially a long way from my objective when I can just park it next to the building I want to go to. Even if I'm doing a mission at a live site and there's no reason for me to dock I don't do that either.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

i have never tried it but what happens if you land on a pad at one of those offline bases without requesting clearence?

 

[DjVortex]

Maybe approach the entire thing from a somewhat different perspective: ED doesn't hold your hand.

Most other games will shove a big neon sign in your face telling you exactly what to do, and a bright glowing arrow and target marker telling you exactly where to go, and would even probably tell you exactly which buttons to press to get there if it could fit the neon sign. Often the only "challenge" in these games is whether you can read the instructions and follow an arrow.

ED doesn't explain much. Did the settlement go haywire when you powered it up and started giving you bounties because it detected that your ship was trespassing? Well, lesson to learn for the next time! Next time you'll be wiser. It's a learning process.

 

[mtfatboy3006]

The other thing I hate about these missions is that they automatically fail if scavengers/raiders find and blow up your ship with small arms fire, (and that it is stupidly easy to blow up a ship with small arms fire). You still have the power regulator, can still kill the scavs, and can call ASAP for a ride. Doesn't matter. Your ship was destroyed. You failed. Can't do an on-foot mission without a ship, apparently?

 

[Shadowsnog]

i have never tried it but what happens if you land on a pad at one of those offline bases without requesting clearence?

you cant request clearance when the base is offline. and if you land in prohibited zone and turn he power on, see op.

Can't do an on-foot mission without a ship, apparently?

dismiss ship if it cant stand the heat and you dont listen to the warning messages.

 

[Walt Kerman]

Commander started his first on foot mission after much trepidation and lowering my expectations as much as humanly possible as to what to expect, quality wise, given what I've read about Odyssey over the last few years...

Follow mark down to settlement. Find nice flat area to land.. shht goes south from here...

Spoiler

Settlement is in the mountains.
Manage to land the ship at the outpost. Kinda excited to get out of the ship, but decide to drive the 200m to the entrance of the building since its 23K and warning lights are flashing all over about the cold.
Find a dead console go back through my settings to find a key that looks about right.
Find the power transfer thingy and fire it up.
Power on the terminal
Go thought bunches of random stuff like corridors and lockers with passwords and stuff.
Find something that looks power related. it's 150m away or so.
Get in my SRV to drive over... Get out... Signal has gone after getting out of the SRV... .Walk back to the Terminal and find the power thingy again.
Walk back to the building past my warm SRV...
Cut through a panel and power a few doors and finally in.
Engage the console that says offline.
Realise that now I can't put the regulator in the thingy because it started to shut.
Have to wait for it to power up completely for a few minutes...
Not have to Shutdown the site again...
HAVE TO WAIT WHAT SEEMS LIKE 5 MINUTES DOING "BURGER" ALL.
finally it's shut down.... place the power regulator
reengage the power.
BOOM BOUNTY GIVEN for blocking landing pad.
5 seconds later BOOM SECOND BOUNTY GIVEN for blocking door to the bunker in SRV...

So let me get this right? The commander gets bounty FOR USING THE FRACKING LANDING PAD TO LAND HIS SHIP WITH ZERO TIME GIVEN TO LEAVE AFTER THE MISSION IS COMPLETE...

NOBODY WARNED him not to use the pad.

Dismiss his Ship....

Drive away from colony... Recall the ship.. Due to uneven landing, ship lands several KM away..
Drive to ship over almost impassible terrain... Ship is on uneven ground, cannot get my SRV back under the ship to dock due to low access (it's a Viper MK4).
Dismiss ship again.

Ship lands another few KM away. drive over hideous ground to ship again.. finally manage to jam the SRV through a gap.. and get back on the ship.

Leave to see that commander is now wanted throughout the entire FRACKING system... Kill on sight... no remorse.... for completing a mission...

Seems my expectations for quality of FDEV content were not lowered low enough...

FDEV really scraped the bottom of the barrel for this absolute shocker of a starter mission!
If this is what new players are going to face, I pity them. SMH

Loitering is punishable by death.

Count yourself lucky.... you loiterer.

 

[GraXXoR]

i have never tried it but what happens if you land on a pad at one of those offline bases without requesting clearence?

You get a bounty the moment it powers up and shot at by any police in the system under the same faction as the ground base. Then you have to leave the system and clear the bounty via Interstellar Factors. lol.

So stupid.