During yesterday's Deneb Run, we experienced a very, very annoying problem with grouping.

I was hosting the event, and was the creator of the racing group. For countless times, at random, without no apparent reason, my group would DELETE ITSELF, kicking all the participants within.

Having all racers in a group is absolutely needed to be able to conduct the event smoothly. Having to re-create it and re-invite everyone (and the players accept the invite) every few sectors is a major pain. Like sitting on a cactus. Naked.

Further details to help pinpoint and resolve the problem:

1) The group had members spread all over the galaxy - of course.

2) The date was sunday 3th June, at 00:30-02:00 GMT.

3) I was always the leader of the group. The other members were Raze Aretou, Jestatis Bess, Foo Fighter, Morgan West, Teutonic Crusader.

4) We thought that engaging in missions could have had an impact, before the race. When everyone aborted the missions they were in, and the problem kept happening, we excluded that being already in a mission could increase the chance of the bug manifesting.

5) The disbands were quite irregular timewise. At some point, it disbanded twice in around 20 seconds. During the long itani race stretch, it disbanded only once (it took ~15 minutes).

6) My ping is terrible. Probably it has something to do with timeouts, or something like that. Here my tracepath to the game server:

tracepath majikthise.guildsoftware.com
1: karis (192.168.0.2) 0.257ms pmtu 1500
1: gateway (192.168.0.1) 1.908ms
2: gateway (192.168.0.1) asymm 1 1.317ms pmtu 1492
3: <MY PROVIDER BORDER GATEWAY> 48.613ms
4: <MY PROVIDER CORE GATEWAY> asymm 5 48.183ms
5: 212.245.229.42 (212.245.229.42) asymm 6 48.707ms
6: so-6-1-0-dcr2.fra.cw.net (62.208.212.133) asymm 7 68.646ms
7: as0-dcr1.fra.cw.net (195.2.10.157) asymm 8 71.879ms
8: decix.mpd01.fra03.atlas.cogentco.com (80.81.192.63) 69.636ms
9: t3-1.mpd01.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.1.162) asymm 19 183.295ms <BLASTED COGENT! TRIPLING THE RTT!!!>
10: t4-1.mpd02.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.1.118) asymm 18 183.022ms
11: t3-2.mpd01.bos01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.0.185) asymm 17 182.424ms
12: t2-2.mpd01.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.6.18) asymm 14 180.977ms
13: vl3490.mpd01.ord03.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.6.206) asymm 15 181.664ms
14: g1-1.core01.mke01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.1.165) asymm 16 184.653ms
15: RedAnvil.demac.cogentco.com (38.112.26.190) asymm 18 185.667ms
16: no reply <This appears to be majikthise>

7) This bug severely impairs the Deneb Run. I will provide any additional information to help with its timely solution.

Thanks.

I've noticed some odd mission abort and group disband occurances in group missions before... I wonder if one of the players triggering a strikeforce has had something to do with it.

I do not believe lag is necessarily the issue, but this also happened during the Deneb Run two weeks ago.

This may be related to the bug where if you abort/finish a Deliverator-based mission (escort, hive/border skirmish) where you're in a group, you may randomly be forced *back* into the group you were in during the mission, even if you leave the group yourself AND abort the mission. It's annoying, and as Syylk said, it is a game-breaker when it comes to player-run events, especially the Deneb Run and the Nation Wars.

The players triggered strike forces during the DR. But the disbands started BEFORE the run, while we were waiting for people in Odia M14. And Raze Aretou (the only serco, and coming from goldspace), wondering if his ongoing missions could have had an impact on the bug, actually logged off and back on, just to be sure.

I've seen this bug happen during 2 nation wars now.

I think it happens when a player takes the border strike mission. Sometimes, with me anyway, I’d abort the mission and leave the auto-generated group. Moments later I will be sucked back into the border strike mission. If I’m in another group it will disband the group I’m in. The only way I’ve known it to stop is if the mission i took is completed or failed.

west0914 has hit the nail on the head.

I currently have a new guild member who is unable to take any missions in game due to this bug. He took a hive skirmish mission in Odia, and the mission ended and the hive was eradicated from Odia. He then tried to join a levi hunting group which kept getting disbanded by him getting sucked into a hive skirmish group. I have tried to help him in several ways, but nothing seems to cure this.

The player affected is quite new to the game, and he CANNOT advance his char now, this is a serious bug that needs fixing SOON and not Soon(tm)

I am the one yoda spoke of.
I dont know what actually caused it cause i had a border strike mission in deneb b-12 with the skirmish and had this bug start. I left and got the bug and I dont know what I did because it seemed to correct itself. And it only seems to happen when im in a AI group.

I dont know if time itself corrected it or what but I got pretty frustrated and it would be extremely good if there was a fix real soon.

Ah, I can lend further evidence.

When you accept the border patrol mission, you can keep the mission even when you leave to another system far, far away. In fact, I was getting combat xp (+10) for harvesting law neuts in Sedina D-14 while I had the bp mission active!! (Harvesting law neuts means using lightning mines to kill station guards in a sector.) The bp mission text updates no longer showed up on my HUD after I was a certain distance from Deneb, and it indeed seemed to be frozen in stasis. When I got back to the bp sector in Deneb, the mission continued as normal.