During skirms such as deneb and hive ones my "group" kills enemies but the bots do not however drop materials when they are killed. Is this meant to be or is it a common glitch?

NPCs only drop items if they were damaged by a player at some point. It's fine for another NPC to deal the killing blow, and even the vast majority of the damage, but if a player hasn't at least scratched them, they don't drop anything.

And yes, this is incredibly lame and stupid. The devs didn't want people to be able to just sit in the distance during a skirmish where the bots wouldn't see them while the drops accumulated for hours. Instead of coming up with a good fix, they did this.

you did not say what a "good" fix might be.

Don't automatically start the skirmish the moment an un-missioned person enters the sector; just leave the hive bots milling about and vastly outnumbering any interlopers. Only spawn the faction ships and start the battle when the mission has been taken, or when the mission has sat around untaken for a few hours. Then, if the good guys lose, reset the timer and wait another few hours before the next auto-attempt. This way people who want to just hang back and let the bots kill each other will have to at least take the mission each time -- making it a process that can then be easily regulated. People who want to do this repeatedly would have to keep taking and failing the mission.

Now, I'm not in the habit of failing skirmish missions, so I don't know what penalties if any the game already imposes. But if there isn't already, there needs to be a one hour cooldown after failing a skirmish mission before that specific mission can be re-taken by that specific player, to prevent them from just constantly grinding the mission. Additionally, the faction should reduce the maximum size of skirmish that is offered if the player's overall failure rate is too high, so that to have access to the bigger skirmishes they'd have to actually win sufficiently often.

If there is concern about people cycling between alts on a bot to keep restarting the mission immediately after failure, a global cooldown could be implemented (if there isn't already one).

After all of that, would people still be able to just drop in on active battles (or take and fail the mission) and then scoop up a bunch of loot? Yes, and there is nothing wrong with that. Scavenging is an acceptable play-style.

Would they be able to abuse it to anywhere near the level they used to? No.

+1 Rin!

-1 to the 1 hour cool down. I like the rest of Rin's solution though. I think this idea would penalize people who actually try when taking the missions. What happens if the player takes and then aborts the mission? Do the good guys leave?

To my knowledge there aren't any current penalties to losing any of the skirmishes, hive or deneb. Imagine new players, particularly on a mobile device trying a hive skirmish that is beyond them and the hive or enemy win. Now they would have to wait an hour before trying again. I have taken plenty of missions where my activity just wasn't enough to sway the battle- particularly when starting from a deficit. Even if the missions by this alternative were going to start at the beginning each time rather than the middle, which for immersion I kind of like but don't think is essential, newer players and players on mobile will likely have a tougher time winning the mission. These players would be caught up in the same penalty net with the abusers.

As far as that goes, back in the day, I had a character that actually did nothing but scavenge drops from these missions, so I agree it is a legitimate playstyle.

To be honest, I never saw the original situation as a problem that needed to be fixed. The solution caused me to discontinue and delete that character.

If I remember correctly, we were also having challenges with tracking a million different persistency-expiration timers for items dropped by NPCs, throughout thousands of sectors. Plus, I think the drops were blowing up the octree in the respective sectors. There are other "solutions" to these issues too, but at the time I didn't think it really merited the development, testing and debugging time.

There's more going on in the background of a skirmish than is evident on the surface. The Hive is making strategic decisions based on individual successes and failures, and some of these decisions are time-dependent, so I'm not comfortable putting the player in a position of delaying whether a skirmish is actually happening (although perhaps the "simulated" outcome could just take priority if no one takes the mission, but all of this requires considerable code modification, and a whole lot of time-consuming testing).

Anyway, I'm not against the "scavenger" play-style, but it would require re-thinking some things.

The fact that bots used to drop excessive loot was not a big problem, when that loot was mostly just scrap metal. Now that bots drop synthetic silksteel and hive cores, loot is worth a lot more than it used to be. if we make it easy to collect synthetic silksteel, this will dramatically alter the current player determined market price for that item.

Sure, I would love to drive into a skirmish sector and load up my xc with synsteel, but I would not have any pretense of being able to sell it for anything worth my time.

The current system is stingy, but that is the primary factor in the current market prices of hive derived loot.

Even as it stands now, I do not bother trying to recover all the scrap metal. There is just too much of it.

I disagree Roda. The rate at which normal skirmishes drop sss is low enough that farming skirmishes for it isn't really productive. The best method remains farming arklans. It would take much longer via skirmishes to accumulate enough to bother with in comparison imo.

Exactly so Fluffy.

The way it is now, you can farm Arklans for hive drops, or do skirmishes, for skirmish reasons.

But if loot dropped the old way, there would be more sss, from skirmishes, than you knew what to do with.

The main reason I am disagreeing is because I have used the trident exploit to farm hive queen sectors and while I did collect a modest amount of sss, it wasn't a huge amount. The real benefit I got was in collecting neural nodules. I would probably agree with you about those becoming too easy to collect if we went back to the old way if they weren't such a pita to get in the first place.

"Imagine new players, particularly on a mobile device trying a hive skirmish that is beyond them and the hive or enemy win. Now they would have to wait an hour before trying again."

They'd only have to wait an hour to re-take that specific skirmish mission. They would not have to wait before taking one of the other skirmishes.

"challenges with tracking a million different persistency-expiration timers for items dropped by NPCs, throughout thousands of sectors" Inc... Too many sectors? Imagine someone who wants to hunt enemies engaging in these activities without a multi-sector scanner.