The Mysterious Case of the Broken Index Mission

Nightwave being back means that there’s always a bunch of somewhat obscure elite, weekly tasks for us to do. For the first week of Nightwave, we got two somewhat tricky tasks – to kill or capture a Hydralyst and to complete three rounds in a row in the Index without the Corpus scoring any points. Neither of these are that difficult but they can be a pain in the ass if you’re unprepared.

So of course, I went to do this Index task only slightly prepared. Knowing that the Corpus can be sneaky bastards, I took Khora, who has a really nice ability that stops most enemies from moving. It’s basically a massive “NO” and is slightly more foolproof than things like Gara’s walls of glass because Ospreys sometimes fly over those. I did however forget to change my weapons, but since I was using an Atterax and my Pyrana Prime, I assumed I’d be fine.

I queued up for a mission and before long, I was thrown into a match with another player, a Wukong Prime and a Wisp and one Specter, an AI-controlled Warframe that ‘help’ you until you get a full squad of four. Thankfully we got the Wukong Specter, who at least uses his abilities. Most Index Specters are just about okay but at least they’re not Frost Specters, who sometimes walk off ledges. Someone else did join later a Vauban, but I didn’t see much of them.

Suddenly, just as the Wukong deposited 20 glowing green orbs, bringing us up to 35/50 points needed to win the third round, everything froze. The enemies froze. The map froze. I froze.

IT WAS A HOST MIGRATION.

But it wasn’t any old host migration. It was a spooky host migration. A host migration that took at least 3 minutes to actually drop me back into my mission.

In the background, as I watched my character dance around on her own, as that changed to the old flying Liset loading screen, I could hear noises. Something was attacking something else. The screen was somewhat darker than normal as well, but sometimes you get darker clouds on loading screens anyway. No, the sounds were the scary thing. I could hear my metal Kavat, Venari, being attacked.

All of a sudden though, I heard nothing. The fighting sounds disappeared.

I finally loaded back in, only to find that Venari was dead. As was one single member of the Corpus Index grunts. Otherwise, I was completely alone. And the score had changed to 4/50 index points. This was a bad thing because I now needed to score 45 points to end the mission and successfully extract. There was no way to earn points though as there were no enemies around. Nothing at all.

I wandered around the dead map for a bit and, somehow, I found 1 single point, next to a corpse that never despawned. Venari did eventually respawn (she respawns automatically after a minute or so after dying) but I was kinda screwed. Not even Cephalon Sark was around to brighten up the place. There were no voices, no sounds, nothing. Even the item spawns didn’t work.

Then I had an idea. There was theoretically a way I could win. I could kill myself by jumping off the ledge, which would drop a single point which I could then use to score. And since I had about 10 minutes of time available, I’d slowly but surely be able to score the points I needed to win.

Turns out, that didn’t work. Not because I didn’t drop any points, but because I… I never respawned. I watched as the timer counted down to zero… and went past zero.

I was stuck in limbo. Actually, I was stuck on an invisible death floor beneath grey fog, but basically the same thing. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t move the camera. The /unstuck command was useless too because I couldn’t open chat. Clicking did nothing. Right-clicking though… well, it made a creepy noise, like someone bashing their head against a wall two rooms over. But that was it.

All I could do was sit there and watch the timer, hoping that maybe I could at least salvage the first two rounds. Nope, I couldn’t even do that. The timer simply continued to count down.

As the timer hit zero though, all I was met with was a grey screen. No loading, no mission complete, nothing.

The only way out was to quit the game. And that meant forfeiting my initial 30k that I’d used to get in.

Rest in peace, 30,000 credits.

Luckily, trying the mission again with a new squad seemed to work absolutely fine, and aside from that bastard Auditor nearly screwing us over (as it was immune to both Strangledome and Atlas’s rocky walls), we got through the mission no problem. We actually managed it in spite of the Volt Specter that had spawned, although, to its credit, it did get a 2:1 kills to death ratio. Not bad for an AI character with a Braton and a Skana.

But that lost Index mission? That was freaky. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen again.