I will say that the bug with the pelican leaving with only one player is actually pretty funny. It can be consistently reproduced by dropping directly onto the pelican with your drop pod, it will insta extract and leave everyone behind.
As soon as you see flames or smoke from the pelican you're fucked. Its atleast so well reproduced that we will routinely drop all samples on one guy, and turn it into ESCORT THE VIP. Makes for some fun not gonna lie.
Could it be a hidden/removed feature where the Pelican can take damage, but leaves instead of being blown up? That also explain why someone mentioned that dropping on top of it also triggers this bug.
We've had the pelican end up in the ground and no one could get in. The one where no one could get in was fixed by diving into the pelican (not recent).
For the two Pelican bugs, it's not really a bug from what I understand. If the pelican gets lightly damaged by stratagems, it will leave with only one player. If it gets heavily damaged, if will start burning and then you might as well call a 380 on the team (unless there's a kill major order)
I don't have many crashes anymore since the last three updates or so, but I get a connection lost error every one in five missions or so now. Usually right before extraction after 30+ minutes of clearing the map.
It's seriously destroying my drive to continue playing.
It does really suck ass since these bugs waste the most time, but I think it's the rarity of these bugs that makes them hard to fix or even notice/report/reproduce. I've also had two missions fail in my time, once we couldn't get on the extract, and once on a fuel shuttle mission the shuttle simply never arrived to be fueled.
But in 130 hours each of those bugs have only happened literally one time each for me, so reproducing and fixing them is probably complex because it's so rare.
Each of us has a combined five failed bugged missions, but only one of those types sounds like the same problem that was reproduced, and that's one time for each of us separately, and neither of us will likely remember all the different things that happened to get to that point and trigger the bug, and for the devs to have these bugs reported accurately is also not always clear
for instance you mention a defense mission, but when you say defense mission I think of an eradicate mission where you kill a number of bugs and extract, but then you mention missiles, which means it's probably the newer mission type where you defend the gates and large missile launcher, which I don't remember the specific name of. if arrowhead received that report and tried to reproduce it on an eradicate due to miscommunication they'd never figure out how to fix it. Basically, it's probably complicated but should definitely be fixed
I'd rather have those than the half a dozen random crashes since the update. Everything runs fine, mission progresses, you are done and on the way to extraction. Boom desktop, game process gone, as well as 20 minutes of lifetime. Really kills the fun.
I will say I had an extra buggy experience last night too. Out of nine or so missions, we couldn't extract from two of them because no one could enter the pelican. If you did manage to clip into the pelican, you would just hang out in there and never extract.
I can see the justification of the pelican talking off immediately if its damaged. My team makes a conscious effort to consolidate samples and have that player enter the pelican first if it's smoking.