Why have settlements as POI been removed?

[CMDR Cillian Raynor]

Started playing again after a few months off last week and at first i thought it was just a luck thing but now i think it's 100% clear to me they have removed those mining operations or small settlements as POI. I thought in time they would increase the different kinds of POI. It seems instead we have less. 80% of the time it's containers. The crashed ship is maybe a 5% occurrence. The other 15% is either type of satellites. This is disappointing.

In fact i would say that one thing that strikes me as very disappointing about the Seasons 2 updates is that strangely almost nothing has to do with Horizons (meaning the planetside stuff). It's all been space stuff, no planetside. Ok well no, the engineers requires you to get stuff on planets but those rocks were there before engineers and frankly shooting at rocks is the least interesting thing to do on planets (and probably the whole game), in fact, i never do it. I was hoping a year in the amount (and quality) of things to do on planets would have been improved. It's been pretty much unchanged.

 

[Arnoldo]

Confused; personal experience is that they're not removed, I've spent the last few sessions doing skimmer missions for Fed rank up and have found many mining operations indicated as purple POI. WAI...

 

[[VR] Deggial]

Why do you assume, that FDev deliberately removed these POIs? (Edit: if it is true at all; see post above)
Unintended side effects happen all the time. They may have tweaked the PG formula (while introducing other surface elements such as gysirs and life forms) and those mining settlements might merely have fallen of the edge.
Internal testers simply can not verify each and every aspect in a vast PG galaxy (which contains so much more than mining settlements). They need the help of us players!

Checking your post history, it doesn't seem as if you created a bug report about this. Why not?
Please do so and don't assume, FD removed the assets just out of malice or ignorance or because they don't want us to have fun or whatever hidden reason they might have. It simply could be a bug!

And if not, a "works as intended" will be the answer. And then you may ask your question at the forum ...

 

[CMDR Cillian Raynor]

Well that is sure weird then. Because i've been driving on populated systems planets for basically hours everyday for over a week and so you can easily say i've come across 300+ poi probably in the last week alone and none of them was a settlement. Maybe they have been relegated to very specific kinds of planets? Either way i don't find it an improvement IF intended. I mean i suppose you could argue its a minor thing but anything to increase the diversity of the scenery on planets is a welcome thing.

 

[Bryan K]

They're out there, I found at least two while wandering the crater near Lei Cheung's base looking for ruthenium. The generation is random, as far as I know, so you may have to fly for a long time to find them. Plus, some of the smaller unlit ones are difficult to spot from the air, and they take a few seconds to load in once you enter the POI area.

Stay about 2km above the ground as you enter the blue circle and keep your nose at a slight down angle, they usually appear right in front of you. Also, it seems to help to stay within 100 km of a marked settlement.