It’s probably way faster to do all showdowns in Mendoza and yolo snipe suspects than to bother about finding the real leader to gift a duck to tbh :x
(Although for the final one I’d probably stick with Miami / Paris / Whittleton since with 9 suspects there’s a high chance that the leader will be in a hard-to-snipe location.)
The exploit still exists in the game where if you have the objectives set to auto they’ll only pop up when you bump into the real leader. So it’s really simple to find the real one and get them to pick up a duck and detonate it near the exit (though sometimes they’ll try to get other people to pick it up).
I thought they patched it out months ago but I was wrong. However, on rare occasions something else will cause the objectives to pop up as you bump into the wrong suspect and it doesn’t seem to trigger properly if you bump into the leader on stairs. I honestly think they shouldn’t patch it out.
I read someone saying on reddit that you can complete the Collateral Kill - Accident Prestige Objective with two push kills back to back and decided to test it. And YES you can, and you don’t even need to be too fast for it to work.
I dunno, Mendoza sniping takes like 2 minutes (which is mostly running to the vantage point from the temple if you have the misfortune to spawn there) so it’s really fast and as an added bonus, you don’t even need to deal with lookouts or switch to a civilian disguise to get near the target if the level’s alerted, since well, you won’t need to be anywhere near the target. Also no exploits are involved :x
I’m the same as you to be fair. I’m maxed out on the mastery now, but I’m holding off prestige for the foreseeable. I’ve done it once, but I enjoy playing Freelancer with my full inventory 
Absolute respect to @lukefsje for maxing out Prestige though 
I try and do all my Showdowns in Mendoza to be fair. The sniper spots overlooking the vineyards are great!! They also give you a nice quick exit to the car as well
Thank you very much! This was it. Not skipping cutscenes and result screens worked for my Cold Feet challenge.
Truly incendiary stuff, how do you know this?
Because that’s how it works when you’re not the one in charge.
I was thinking about this more tonight after playing Freelancer and I think it would be really cool if the below changes eventually came into the game……
A ‘blend in’ option for 47 to use the fire poker in the actual fire to adjust the logs.
Also, it would be really cool to have a further case next to 47’s current ones, possibly replacing the empty boxes on the end of the row.
We could add more of the missing ducks (which is the red standard explosive duck and the duck with the glasses), the Lethal Poison Pill Jar, Botulinum Toxin, Lethal Syringe Mk III etc. There’s obviously more items we could have, but the below is just a few ideas for 47’s forth case
Source: I made it up
Presenting things as fact when, in reality, you are entirely speculating based on your own balance of probabilities is ignorant at best and outright dishonest at worst.
That… feels like quite the assumption. 
I doubt there was much malicious manipulating by the team leaders at IOI. Any “Don’t tell the Players about this!!” sort of thing.
From what we know based on what Clemens and Travis have told us, it’s that IOI doesn’t seem to have mastered this Live-Service single-player scheduling. It takes up many different branches of the company, constant back-and-forth communication on what’s planned and how development’s going, which has lead to many innacuracies in their schedules over the years or promises that never panned out.
IOI has mostly stuck to “announce thing, if it doesn’t get made, don’t mention it. If it does get made, wait until very close to release to confirm, just to make sure.”
Personally I’d be happy if they only changed the model for the lethal pills to have a white cap and label for consistency :x
He’s not the one calling the shots, and a lot of the answers he gave us when we pressed for further info on things was essentially along the lines of “we know you want that, it’s being looked into.” Add these two facts together, and what I said stands. He was told what he was allowed to tell us, as any public relations/company spokesperson is. That is how that position works. I’m not blaming the man for any lack of clarity to what IO has communicated to us over the years; in fact, I made it pretty clear that I don’t think he received enough gratitude for trying to tell us what he could whenever he could as we would go to him with our complaints when what we got didn’t measure up to our expectations.
Never suggested that it was malicious.
Yeah I forgot about them. They could be all thrown in there as well 
Reposting this here because it’s just turning into a conversation about Freelancer specifically.
Yes there are. Start paying attention.
That is how the mode penalizes you. If you want to play it without seeing a sign of failure on your part to complete in accordance with the terms listed, even though you succeed, you don’t succeed as well as you should have, and you don’t get the Mercers you would have gotten otherwise.
No, it’s not actually penalizing you in the same manner that not completing a mission SA in any other part of the game doesn’t, but it’s been established long ago that such an outcome is how the game’s fullest potential was meant to be experienced, and here, by the addition of the objectives, optional or not, if you are a completionist, this is how it is intended to be played. And that was an infuriating decision on the part of the devs.
If you have to qualify your argument by the statement “if you’re a completionist”, then it only applies to those people who cannot, for whatever reason, tolerate having the word “failed” show up on their screen. Those objectives are, and always have been, optional. That, by definition, means that if you don’t do them you are NOT penalized.
The word Penalty means “a punishment imposed for breaking a law, rule, or contract.” We are not being punished for not doing an optional thing. Are we getting as much of a payout as we could have otherwise gotten? No. We are not, because we didn’t do the optional thing, but that is not the same thing as earning a penalty.
The only guaranteed payout for completing these contracts is the base payment that is agreed upon at the start of the contract. If you don’t do any of the optional objectives that base pay is not reduced (which would equal a penalty). You still get the base pay even if you kill everyone on the map.
I know that, pathologically, so-called “completionists” simply cannot stand to see that little word “failed” on the screen but it is NOT equivalent to being penalized.
No it’s not. A penalty is something you already have and that you lose. Like SA. You fail an objective in the parameters of silent assassin, then you are penalized by losing your SA rating.
Should have? No. If you choose not to do it, then it’s not failing. You take it too literally.
If you choose to do it, then fail, then….uhhh…”git gud”. Lol.
There is only 1 proper outcome and that’s the base pay. Everything else is gravy.
So basically you’re saying you want IOI to cater to your OCD cuz you can’t see the word failed on the screen cuz it does what, drive you bonkers? Do you realize this is a video game? Seriously, don’t take it that seriously. Sheesh.
So then it’s true, you’re just nit picking for the sake of nit picking cuz that’s what it’s actually doing, not penalizing you.
To both of you (@schatenjager/@47saso47)
If they were truly optional, they would not affect us at all. Is it true that you can complete a mission without completing them, unlike, say, destroying the virus in World of Tomorrow? Yes. But it still affects your outcome in a negative manner if you don’t do it. Just because you have the option to not do something does not mean it’s truly optional to not do it if your outcome is negatively affect by it. If it made no difference either way, whether you did it or not, then it would be genuinely optional.
While it may not be a requirement to finish the mission, well, technically, neither is killing the target: you can leave without killing all or even any targets and go back to the safehouse, and not in the manner of the main game where you have to actively quit to leave the mission, but it doesn’t count as a mission performed from start to finish. Freelancer lets you do that, and by your logic, killing the target at all is strictly optional. But, you are negatively affected by not completing the mission properly.
The objectives are the same way, just smaller scale in terms of the consequences; instead of the whole mission listed as failed, only a part of it is, but the only reason why that failure is even part of the equation at all is because the objectives were made part of the mission. Unlike the prestige objectives, which you have control over outside of hardcore mode, you can’t turn them off. They are part of the mission. The fact that you can finish it without completing them is no more relevant that exiting the mission itself without killing the target, technically completing it in the sense of moving past it and moving on to the next one, but still failing in what you were supposed to do in order to get the best possible outcome, which the game is set up to assume you are always striving for.
The base pay amount is not the actual contractual amount being offered to take up the hit; that’s just the amount you get for having done it at all and having done so by successfully killing the targets, which it is established that you don’t really have to do at all, in which case even the base pay is not a guaranteed amount. The total amount of the contract is the base pay plus successfully completing the objectives requested in the contract. They are not truly optional, because they are there if you want them or not, and they affect your outcome, whether you want them to or not, so you either do them, or your end result is affected by your choosing to not do them. And while you may be making the choice, you are still penalized for it, because what is set to go to you is taken away by your not doing it, both in earning amount and score success. The prestige objectives, which you pick and can turn on and off at will, are the ones that can be considered a bonus and are truly optional, because the original terms of the contract stand if you should choose to not proceed with them. They are not there to begin with, and if you decide not to do them, nothing happens to the set specifications of the mission that was already presented to you. Those are truly optional. The other objectives, while optional in terms of finishing the mission, are not optional in terms of not having your outcome negatively affected, and if that doesn’t bother you, then why bother killing all the targets at all?
You seem to take issue with just two elements here.
You seem to think that the objectives are not optional because you didn’t choose them. Are you suggesting that something cannot be optional if you had no say in it? If your wife asks you to pick up dinner and gives you money specifically for that purpose, and then as you are pulling up the restaurant says, “and if you want, grab yourself some dessert too”, is that an optional thing? Do you feel like you are now required to get dessert because you didn’t think of it? To me, this is exactly the same thing.
You also take issue with the idea that the payout is less if you don’t do them. You have said over and over that the “total amount of the contract is the base pay plus successfully completing the objectives requested in the contract”. You cannot separate the amount you personally earn upon completion with the original payout of the contract. I don’t know why this is, but you cannot do it.
If I tell you I will pay you 50 dollars for mowing my lawn, and then you mow my lawn and I pay you 50 dollars, presumably you’d be OK with this (assuming you are in the business of mowing lawns in the first place, obviously).
Now if I tell you I will pay 50 dollars for mowing my lawn, and I also tell you that if you want to earn an extra ten dollars you can also spray for weeds after the fact, is that weed spraying mandatory? If you only mow the lawn and don’t spray, am I penalizing you by not giving you the extra 10 bucks?
