Letting Missions Expire
21 Dec 2020Wilddoktor
I'm an Epic Freebie with 3 days 16 hours 25 minutes of experience under my belt so far. :-) Under the guidance of Youtube (Cmdr Hawkes gaming, mostly, but with smatterings of others) I've managed to accumulate some space bucks and an Asp Explorer fitted out for mining and exploration.I'm in this for the exploration / mining aspect, but I ran across another couple of videos about the Ceos / Sothis missions, and since I was relatively close (a couple hundred ly), I decided to do a "road to riches" exploration route that ended at Ceos, and then try out some missions to see if I like that sort of thing.
I only have an hour and a half to 2 hours to "play" at a time, so the "road" took me a few days to traverse. I got to Ceos and landed at New Dawn Station, then turned in my data, which netted me 17.2M...not bad at all for a couple hours of newbie work! Logged out and was done for the day.
I logged back in the next day and started learning how to "do" missions. I did the Fed donations, of course, and then finally bit the bullet and - with some trepidation - I loaded up some data delivery missions.
Next, I headed to Babbage Gateway, did more donations, and loaded up some more data delivery missions.
Off to Brunel Hub, rinse and repeat. As I prepared for the jump to Sothis, I saw that one of my data delivery missions was to Babbage Gateway. Hum...I'd not noticed that when I picked it up. Well, that's fine; I'll head back to Babbage and see how completing a mission works.
Pretty straight forward, actually; completed the mission, chose the "rep" option, and yay...rep!
So I headed to Sothis. Once I got there I got a message saying that if I could get data to Velinski Enterprise within the next 10 minutes I'd get a bonus. Cool! So I headed to Velinski Enterprise and got interdicted on the way. But...NPC. Not hard to evade, just annoying because it cost me time.
No worries; I got to Velinski Enterprise in plenty of time and turned in the missions. I then picked up some missions that ended up in Ceos and headed to Don's Inheritance. When I got there I completed a couple data missions and donation missions, and picked up some others that ended up in Ceos.
So far, things are going pretty good! I'm ranking up a little with Fed and learning the ropes, and this might be something to hold my attention for a little while.
At that point it was time for me to log off, so I did.
The next day I logged on for just a sec to check something (I can't remember what, actually; but I only had a couple minutes, so I wasn't planning on staying long), and wow...my inbox was lit up like a Christmas Tree! What's it all about, I asked myself? Well, I opened up the inbox and...ugh! Bad news. Apparently missions expire...I didn't know that. And very obviously, the Feds don't like it when you let them expire! They dropped my rank a bit, and even told me (twice) that they knew I was a "sh**ty" person when they first laid eyes on me.
Really? Wow...what a stupid reaction to my first infraction. It was so unexpected that I physically balled up my fists and was about to yell "Yeah? Come say that to my face, I dare you!", when I realized that, you know...it was a game. :-)
So, that's where things stand at the moment. With Christmas coming up, I probably won't have time to log in any time soon, but at least now I know, and I'll be sure I don't leave any missions hanging when I next log off!
Merry Christmas commanders, and my you have a happy and prosperous New Year...both in game, and in real life! o7