EVE Online players has been experiencing this BUG for a long time.
You start an Epic Arc Mission. For whatever reason you do not finish it in one go. But you do not despair, because “This mission does not expire”. The days go by. One or many Downtime’s occur. One day you decide to resume the mission which is still active. You set course and Warp to the designated Mission Site. What you discover is that the Mission Site is Empty. It was removed during one of the Server Maintenances.
To solve a problem of this nature, usually you try to reset the mission site by docking and undocking from a station or leaving and reentering the system. Or even speaking with the Agent again to restart the mission that was Auto-Reseted. This would be the normal procedure. But this usually does not occur in the case of Epic Arc Missions. With Epic Arc Missions the norm is that “You Are Stuck” and your only way is to ask GM to Reset the Mission for you.
I’ve been doing many Epic Arc Missions with all my characters to increase the Faction Standings and I’ve come across this problem several times. And I’ve been bothering GM alot requesting to reset missions.
I would like to ask CCP to, once and for all, address this Epic Arc Missions BUG. By implementing a better and more raliable After-Downtime Respawn System. Or even an Auto-Reset Epic Arc Mission System. And not only trying to mitigate the BUG by asking players to not initiate an Epic Arc Mission without being sure that you will be able to finish it before the next Downtime.
The BUG exists and will continue to exist until it is actually solved.