uh ... that may have been me.. I was trying to provide valuable data to help debug this issue ..just that!

it seems to be pretty easily reproducible by killing a bunch of queens.

Hive skirmishes still have those weird lag spikes at times. If I let those missions fail and take them again everything seems to be ok.

If I take out a queen, the queen that the remaining bots migrate to seems to get stronger shields. I'm not all that sure about this.

If they migrate to the stronghold its shields go negative. I'm even less sure about this cause the bots often just disappear on the way, but I've definitely seen this twice now! :P

I think the migrating bots disappear if they jump into an inactive sector.

some cosmetic things:

If the stronghold sector goes inactive at the wrong time there will be 4 cap ships in the sector for the next mission. I think it happens when the sector goes inactive between the mission ending and before the cap ships can jump out. Not a serious issue, the extra ships leave immediately, but it's kind of weird.

In bastions, queen and trident seem to spawn in the same spot and after some bouncing move away from each other.

When the stronghold goes inactive the levi gets reset to the center. May be intentional to prevent it from spacing out but it's kind of weird.

Yep, I'd agree with mr spucks observations.

I have also come across groups of lost bots . For instance 5 or 6 dentek assaults regularly appear in Nyrius A 16, a normally empty sector. They are just parked there are show no aggression.

It may well be that they have been spawned for some mission other than HS, and then not cleared . Not a problem for a player, but maybe a loose end that could affect something else.

The dantia HS gives a mission to i8 , which is a "star" sector , not normally accessible to players .

The mission , once triggered potters along of its own accord without the player . Npcs like it hot ?

Ok, cleared all the hs critical missions in dantia , rhamus and initros .

Took the central in e12. Takes about 2 mins to load the sector . On entry everything seems frozen , nothing moves or fires . Every 30 secs or so the sector updates , things jump hundreds of meters .. shots register for a few secs , then another 30 sec freeze .

The levi seems to wander a long way from the roid ring , then jumps back suddenly
Nothing registers damage , I see hits but get no hit beep . .

I may be wrong , but since we had that server problem a few weeks ago things have been really odd with hs , and very jerky in bs .

yah ... those "lag spikes" can get pretty extreme in the stronghold. I've had the sector freeze up for like minute at a time recently .. trying to dock at a cappy with that was fun! It usually goes away after a while though.

The levi and stronghold queens still have negative shields at times, but it's not as bad as before.

After destroying all bastions the levi shields are slightly positive and go negative after some of the stronghold queens were killed.

In the dantia->rhamus wormhole sector I came across a queen that was on its way to the stronghold in rhamus. When it arrived there were 6 queens in that stronghold (including mine). My queen immediately moved back to dantia and parked in an active bastion with another queen.

The end result was what I've described a few posts above ..a bastion with two queens, one guarded one not.

Wow- that is thoroughly odd. Thanks for the report spuck.

During a central hive skirmish the stronghold sector started getting increasingly laggy. Eventually after a minute long spike I got disconnected. When I logged back on, the levi and all other bots in the sector had disappeared the roid ring was still there.
The rest of the hive is still active so the levi didn't get blown up.

The central skirmish for that sector is still available but without any bots it's impossible to finish.

I think I've had this happen before, but that time there were still bots spawning in the stronghold so the mission eventually failed (with some help from me), which caused the levi to respawn.

For this one the bot counter hasn't gone down since the levi disappeared so it probably won't finish on its own.

Earlier I had a look at the rhamus levi sector , again like mr S , very long lag ( a minute or more ) with no movement or firing from the bots in the sector . After about a minute the sector seemed to wake up. Everything jumped hundreds of meters instantly.

During that time several players elsewhere complained of considerable lag, as if the levi sector was causing lag all over. I might be completely wrong to link the two , but it just felt that way .

Oh, so it respawned on its own? puh .. I was afraid the serco hive would be stuck like that for a week :P

edit: boo .. I guess you didn't mean today. cause the levi mission is still empty

There was no hive skirmish for the stronghold in serco space today. The mission didn't just end or something .. I've waited for quite a while.

After the levi dies every collector in the system seems to jump into the stronghold and leaves again... could be other bots too .. it's a bit hard to tell.

If a hive skirmish fails in an inactive sector a new mission often only starts after somebody enters the sector (could be that it just takes a very long time for them to start).

The constellation seems to always ram the levi when it enters the stronghold .. which causes the constellation to spin a heavily. It looks pretty dumb and makes docking with it painful.

Bots are sometimes initially shown as being in sector "101 B-1" in the group listing.

I got kicked from the game twice within an hour now, during a critical hive skirmish and a central hive skirmish. In both cases all the bots in the sector disappeared and don't respawn. The rest of the hive seems to think that they are still there, cause when I finish a skirmish belonging to that bastion the collectors jump to that place and if the levi was really gone there shouldn't be a hive at all...

Yes , just had a look around dantia /rhamus . A number of the hs shown as missions just have the serco npcs , no sign of hive . This includes both dantia crits and the central.

As an aside aborting the mission when docked back at a station does not release the group . /group leave is needed .

The missing-hive thing got fixed later that day (was due to a bug in the targeting optimization). The shield problem, at least, and one that might account for the double-missions or long-time-before-human-retry issues, have been fixed. Please let me know if you see any more "odd hs behavior" (including what's been previously reported) from here on.

The mission to dantia I8 still shows up from time to time.

There appears to be a bug concerning small , common or large HS where the mission ends before the player gets to the sector.

Lets say a player takes an HS , where there are only a few hive bots left to kill . If a delay getting to the sector occurs ( caught in a storm etc ) and the defenders kill all the hive before the player gets to the sector then the mission counter does not seem to set to zero , and the mission remains on the mission list at its original size.

Subsequently , a player taking the mission jumps in to find an empty sector , and has to abort.

There's a bastion in rhamus f7 which didn't have a hive skirmish for at least two days now.

Queen kills in the stronghold don't count towards the queen kills counter and there's no combat xp for them.

Sometimes missions that are supposed to have an ion storm don't have one.

Missions from which you get kicked for friendly fire are still recorded as completed. (ok.. that's not a big deal)

I did a couple of hive skirmishes in bastions. Some of them were pretty interesting.

During two there seemed to be twice as many bots of of every type as there should be (except the queen). There were two tridents, 8 helmans and so on. My group had enough members to run beyond the screen. When the missions failed the extra bots left.

One mission had two queens. One was guarded the other one not. At some point the guarded one left (I guess that one was the actual target of the mission). Eventually the mission failed, in that moment another queen spawned. I killed the unguarded queen right after the mission ended and before he next one started which had no effect.

All of the missions were pretty laggy.. I often could only kill the queens by dropping their shields between missions.