JB, I moved your hive-missing thread to bugs.

I (and I imagine this is true for the other devs) check bugs more often than the other forums. I spend most of my in-game time on the test server obviously. And, though I do get on the production server to check on Deliverator once in a while, the users are far more likely to be the first to see an unknown bug.

In JB's thread he says the he "heard" the Hive had been missing from Sedina for 3 days. I immediately jumped on the server and checked, but either someone else fixed it more than 24 hours ago, or someone was mistaken. The point is that someone was under the impression that the Hive was missing for *three* days, and to my knowledge there was no bug report, either in the bug system or the forum.

This game wouldn't exist without your support, and we know many would like to help us in non-financial ways too. We want this game to include lots of player-created content, but there are things that need doing before we can make that possible.

For now, the most helpful thing you can do is report bugs. To maximize how much your bug report helps us, it is best for you to:
1) Experience it first-hand
2) Tell us the *characters and npcs* that were involved (I don't expect you to remember the hive bot names or anything, though that would be helpful)
3) The sector(s) it happened (or didn't happen) in
4) The *time* it happened as accurately as you can
5) What exactly happened without speculation as to cause
6) A snippet of your errors.log file if there were any relevent messages (like a string of mission messages).

I imagine that sometimes everybody thinks *somebody* reported a bug that you all know about, but you should know that we don't get as many bug reports in the bug-reporting system as we do in the forum. Assume that if you don't see a thread about it in bugs, we don't know about it. Also, *please* don't use the bug-reporting system to suggest things!

Aye, posts to the forums aint always the correct way to go about it, the *hive* was missing for 3 days (he did hear this from me) I later discovered there had been a levy hunting group that knew nothing about the planned event.

How can you plan an event around an ingame thing? ingame, simple as :D

since none of the missions worked, i didnt really care that it was gone. i, probably like others, figured 'oh thats that thing that they are still working on so im not even going to waste my time with it'. the hive mission i tried, 'scan the hive', had me returning to the station, but gave no reward nor even acknowledgement that it was finished. after that i didnt really bother. its not really fun to chase around empty sectors for 25 minutes trying to find a hive that is right now just pretty to look at.

after all the history of mission bugs, esp. everyones favorite the hazard materials mission, which hasnt been fixed for, oh, more than a year, id wager that many of us just dont bother with stuff we think is 'still being worked on'. we are used to stuff not working.

now, if a new update had come out, then i might have checked on the hive to see if anything was fixed. alot of times things are fixed at an update. but until then, no. not even gonna mess with it.

too busy pwning n00bs in b8.

PS if you really want all those details in bug reports, you should put separate forms, or at least a pre-filled textarea with section headings, on your bug reporting page to remind people to fill it in if they can.

From the ms access thread in suggestions it is clear that ananzi is a troll, and not a subtle one. In any other forum, I wouldn't feed him, but I feel a need in this case because his post threatens to give casual observers the impression that our game is broken and buggy.

The salient facts are:
1) If "none of the missions worked" I would hope there would be a thread or bug report indicating that, but I can easily tell you that this is not true. Any bug causing even a single well-used mission to be unusable would go straight to the top of our priority list (assuming nothing more fundamental was broken).

2) The prototype of the stateful Hive (expands and retreats), was released Aug 11. It is my impression that it has been doing what it was designed to do in this incarnation since then. There have been some bugs with it, and there are many aspects that require tweaking pending user reports (difficulty and such). Mostly it awaits other functionality to be tied in to.

3) We recently released an update including several things that were first products of our new tools. Among them was my first mission made with Ray's editor: "find the stronghold". Since the mission code required knowledge of the stronghold's location, we created an interface for mission-editor-made missions to access Hive data. As far as I know, this mission is working fine except that faction points aren't successfuly rewarded at the end of the mission. If anyone can report differently, I would like to know.

4) Also in that update was our first mission to be managed by Deliverator. This involved creating many new interfaces between the sector code and Deliverator. These interfaces may still have bugs, and one in particular requires a lot of work to make it scale to thousands of available missions.

5) This first mission, Hive Hunt, relies on new interfaces, functions and data storage that are not perfected. Never the less, we wouldn't have released it if we didn't think it worked. And, as far as I know, it does work in most cases. Unfortunately at the moment, the Hive has filled the space we let it with Bastions, and the Group Hive Hunt mission for Bastions has not been written.

6) In the same recent update, we intended to populate the universe with trade convoys composed of a variety of ships carrying small to enormous amounts of cargo. We discovered, when we released it, that the way it was written would not scale to accomodate the present user base. Since we obviously hope to have a much larger number of users, we clearly needed to really rethink the design of the system.

7) This has largely been done. We're almost ready to rerelease the convoys. In the process of reorganizing to more efficiently handle the convoys, I've rewritten large portions of the Hive code. Once we release, I will want to know about any Hive-related bugs you find, even if you think it is an older bug.

Well, I didn't mean to feed a seven course dinner to a troll, but I hope that apart from encouraging ananzi, this might help some understandably impatient players understand that we are making progress, and perhaps result in a few more bug reports.

Sincere thanks to our supportive users!

I would usually have posted to the bugs report if it was first hand information. Every time i did check last week there were no bots in sedina. I posted in general because i wasn't sure if something was announced and i was just out of the loop.

thanks momerath42 and i'll do the right thing in the future.

Thanks JB, the reason I felt the need to post was mostly about not knowing there were no bots, rather than the post being in the wrong forum:)