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Broken Mission = Infinite Farming?
wraithshadow13
Member Posts: 1,728 Arc User
Map: Gravity Kills TFO
Essentially, there is a bug that's been happening on this map for a few months now. Once the Particles are collected and the U.S.S Jupiter hits the final, closest station with the beam to sink it, the station just... Does nothing. It doesn't fall into the black hole, it doesn't have any targetable anchors to destroy, it just becomes a static thing and the mission becomes incompletable. There IS no way to finish the mission.
That is the bug aspect.
The infinite farm aspect comes from what happens AFTER that. Once the mission becomes impossible to complete, you're left with two separate groups of enemies. One protecting the station and one attempting to attack the U.S.S Jupiter. I don't think the IKS Kor really DOES anything but regardless, those two groups keep respawning. Infinitely. I tested this, just for the sake of reporting it, but i spent a good 20-30 minutes just destroying ships and was earning nonstop XP, SP, EC, and who knows what else at that point. With the right build, this could be done completely AFK, INDEFINITELY, so long as you check back every so often to keep from getting booted for being AFK.
It was a slow gain, but it was steady and constant and the bug is frequent enough that it might be a good reason to fix the mission.
Essentially, there is a bug that's been happening on this map for a few months now. Once the Particles are collected and the U.S.S Jupiter hits the final, closest station with the beam to sink it, the station just... Does nothing. It doesn't fall into the black hole, it doesn't have any targetable anchors to destroy, it just becomes a static thing and the mission becomes incompletable. There IS no way to finish the mission.
That is the bug aspect.
The infinite farm aspect comes from what happens AFTER that. Once the mission becomes impossible to complete, you're left with two separate groups of enemies. One protecting the station and one attempting to attack the U.S.S Jupiter. I don't think the IKS Kor really DOES anything but regardless, those two groups keep respawning. Infinitely. I tested this, just for the sake of reporting it, but i spent a good 20-30 minutes just destroying ships and was earning nonstop XP, SP, EC, and who knows what else at that point. With the right build, this could be done completely AFK, INDEFINITELY, so long as you check back every so often to keep from getting booted for being AFK.
It was a slow gain, but it was steady and constant and the bug is frequent enough that it might be a good reason to fix the mission.
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The endless respawns are working as they should, I think. It encourages players to use other tactics than just destroying enemies.
As for the mission being blocked from progressing: they need to come up with a solution in general for issues like these. Cause similar things happen in other instances as well. Miner Instabilities for example: the Gorn Engineer who has to disable the drill simply stopped doing anything. Best Served Cold: sometimes freighters will stop flying, with no interaction being possible anymore.
In all cases the result is the same: the mission doesn't progress because some NPC stops working, or a map element isn't triggering what it should trigger. The mission then becomes unfinishable and players are forced to get hit with a leaver penalty. It is probably the most annoying type of bug that exists and so far I'm not convinced that it's being prioritised as it should be.
Personally it has made me avoid most of these kind of missions. If it is possible, they should introduce some sort of backup-mechanism, something that the player can do to get the NPC to work properly again. Or, allow players to take over the actions where possible.
I know, this is simple to say especially because the causes of the bugs may be very different - just offering some thoughts on how issues like these in general could be fixed.
FYI to whoever may be troubleshooting this, I can tell you exactly what does this. Science ship secondary deflectors (inhibiting or deteriorating) when triggered within range of the anchors will kill the anchors before the shield bubble is down, causing a break in the mission. You can test by using Charged Particle Burst and flying near the station and popping it while within 5km of all 3 anchors a few times, then after you deliver the particles and the Jupiter fires, you won't have to damage the anchors because they are already all gone.
Most of the time the mission just proceeds as usual but sometimes it gets hung up on them.
I haven't experienced the same behavior as OP, but similar behavior for sure. After 5-10 minutes the final boss dreadnought spawned in and killing it ended the mission. I've never had to wait 30 minutes but it was a really long time before anything happened and at least one of my teammates gave up and warped out rather than wait and hope the mission "fixed itself."
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True, but at the same time, this is why they never released things like a holodeck mission to help up track and adjust DPS. It's one thing to be going mission to mission earning rewards, but an entirely different thing to just be able to AFK a mission and earn millions in resources. A good ship build could EASILY do just that on normal difficulties. It's not even just the one resource, either. A low level character with a hardcore DPS build could hit max level just as easily, just checking in here and there to avoid the AFK. More so, if you have an entire team willing to just farm this.
And as Anubis77c said, they KNOW what causes it, which means they could technically trigger this bug at anytime.