I received my tier three diplomacy rating a while ago and one of the benefits of this rating is to get First Contact Missions.

Since then I've gotten one in the past 4-6 weeks I've been this ranking (don't recall exact date).

My question is, should they be this rare and hard to get or is this a bug?

The only thread on this I could find was: sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=325871 and it had no feedback at all.

I have the same issue.
I haven't seen any First Contact Mission since the day after season 6 went live. I was able to do only 3 of them before that day

Not 100% sure about this so I probably shouldn't post..

But I thought you got the option to do those missions upon entering one of the nebulae or "black sectors". Try go to one of them and see if you don't get the button?

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Also found this guide (from 2011):

http://fleet.stonewallgaming.net/dip...uide#section-4

I probably should have titled this First Contact instead of Dip investigations

I've only received one first contact mission too. I thought we'd get more than just the one mission

Firdst Contact missions have been broken in this way since Season 4. Plenty of players have /bugged it, yet the issue persists, so obviously, it's either VERY VERY VERY low priority; or Cryptic has no clue how to repair the problem.

(And it's the same with the 'Borg Red Alerts where the button has just popped up in your instance - you press it immediately - yet find yourself in an EMPTY/devoid of Borg enemies instance -- and they used the same broken code base for Tholian Red Alerts as the above happens with them too - but this is also a case of something that has been brokn and /bugged by players since Season 4; yet no fix has been forthcoming.)

The Devs may not realize the bugs still exist as they probably don't attempt to play the content much themselves; and after spending time doing NUMEROUS tickets on the subject, they may not be seeing anymore bug tickets in their queue as most players (myself included) don't feel like wasting time reporting a pretty obvious issue that -- for whatever reason (good or bad); the STO Dev team has no real interest or ability to correct (IMO - because if they did, these bugs wouldn't still exist after more than a year -- OR they'd try to get some focus testing on Tribble or something to find and fix the root causes.)