One of the things that has me playing VO these days is my Samo business. Tonight I spent waaay over an hour killing a lev JUST For the samo. Well I finally did, thanks to some help, and so I /exploded right away. I grabbed my moth and raced back. I made a swoop through the cargo pile, but iddn't get it, so immediately jetisoned and turned around. I turboed back, and JUST as I was gonna hit the pile, it all timed out.

It was less than 5 minutes before it timed, and I was robbed of an hours work.

I would really appreciate some amount of these 61 lost pieces, after spending so long with no reward

Yeah, I've been noticing cargo timing out faster than before. Probably due to the large number of convoys around the universe which occoasionally die in storms and the like. Life on the cargo seems to have been turned down to help limit the burden on the server...

Cargo timeouts have to be one of the most aggravating things in Vendetta.

This thread is like getting a small cupcake at the end of a really bad day.
Really warms my heart. Thanks smittens. :)

Yeah that sucks but uh... live and learn, right? Next time have someone standing by with a moth at the sector when the levi goes.

Well that WAS our plan, but somehow the lev lost two chunks of its health in its health bar that had nothing to do with any of us, so it was impossible to be prepared. Plus with all those bots its almost impossible to grab the Samo on a first-fly-by. Point is, I want my Samo for my Hour + of work, and also Time-Out Time should be upped

Perhaps you'll realize that you can't do it without help?

I helped ya FIND the damn thing, but I'm not staying on until 2 AM to kill a Levi which gives YOU samoflange to help YOUR business. (And gives me NOTHING except a odd feeling for having helped out Smittens for some reason.)

Pay me next time and I might stick around... Say, 250,000 per hour?

Leber, might that feeling... be GUILT?

>.>

Heh, no, more like unfulfillment or emptiness, specifically in my wallet area...

timeouts have been extremly short for a long time, I commented on this problem on the boards close to six months ago. I've seen timeouts in the couple of minute range, and that's getting kinda annoying. I'm sorry for your loss Smittens, just know you're not the first. I've lost CtC cargo like that more times than I'd like to count.

Now, I'm not entirely sure of this, but I seem to recall that cargo times out faster in an empty sector. In fact, the most troubling bit of getting the precious from the friggy was that if you died in it's acksplosion the cargo would be gone by the time you got back. If you survived, however, there was plenty enough time to warp out and come back in a whassit capable of getting the cargo you wanted.
I'm not exactly sure of just how long you needed to stick around to ensure that the cargo doesn't time out in two minutes, or if that even helped at all, but hey, worth a try, eh?

Edit:
"wah, wah, cargo times out wah!!! I lost such and such!!"
Grow a pair, will you? Why is it that I have plenty time to collect sixteen chunks of traderbot cargo in a ship only capable of carrying four at a time while you guys struggle to grab a single chunk of cargo you want?
You want cargo, you gotta think for it. Find the cargo you want, pick it up, drop, repeat until you've picked up and dropped all the cargo you want and enjoy the benefits of the longer time-out player-dropped cargo has.
Seriously, I can't ALWAYS be helping you guys out like this.

can't see why the devs don't put a time-out clock on free floating cargo.

We haven't touched the cargo timeout times that I'm aware of. It's fifteen minutes, except if the sector shuts down (five minutes of inactivity) they're all gone.

The real fix, which we are going to do, is to a) have timeouts vary based on what kind of cargo it is [i.e. junk scrap metal and other nearly worthless bot drops last about a minute, whereas unique items never ever time out, and a spectrum in between], and b) save cargo when idle sectors shut down, obviously. And, probably, c) have NPCs with magical infini-radar which pick up rare cargo spaced out in the middle of nowhere, so "space junk" doesn't accumulate.

actually a1k0n if I remember correctly while player dropped cargo has a 15 minute timeout..
bot cargo was dropped to 3 minutes WAY WAY WAY WAY back in the old universe right after the mission system reset because everyone was botting for thier new levels and there were like, 450+ units of cargo in each of the 3 nation claimed sectors[12,4, and uhh 6?].

Forgive my ignorance, but what is samoflange?

It's not just you. I searched 2 wiki's and these forums without finding an explaination. All the "cool kids" seem to know what it is though. Guess what that makes us ?

I asked this once before and the only answer that I got was "it is cargo and it's heavy". Wiki has no information on it and I've never seen it in game before.

It makes you New Players! Welcome to the wonderful world of rapid-cycle development where the vestigial and the undocumented come together!

Samoflange is just really heavy expensive cargo.

Its expensive to get it, cos you have to kill a levy, but you will be lucky to get more than 35c for it :P

It weighs 8000kg per unit iirc.