One of my favourite activities in VO are the border battles and i have learned the AI really well. I know when ships are going to fly to their deaths and i have specific bomber loadouts for different situations that the AI gets itself into. In the past i would fly back to station and equip a more suitable bomber and fly back and the battle would still be in pretty much the same shape.

Unfortunately, now that sectors reset so quickly i don't have time to fly home and back before all the capitol ships are back in formation in their own areas; making my new loadout not as effective as it would have been if the capitol ships were in the position they were before. Making it less fun for me.

My request is to make the sector reset time longer.

Thank you for your consideration.

Moved to Suggestions

Thanks Whistler.

I know I reported this back when they reduced the sector timeout, but it got buried. It's probably in a closed out ticket or something. :(

The bug here is that the NPCs all get reset to their starting positions when it happens. If they came back where they were the moment a player re-entered the sector, it wouldn't be as much of a problem.

Thanks abortretryfail. That solution would work for me as well.

Before i posted yesterday i had actually given up on a Large Skirmish because i thought i could win it with the new loadout. But when i got back and all the ships were in their starting positions i just gave up, which made me sad.

I haven't noticed any change to the sector reset time but We have seen in the past times where the sectors did reset far too early ie. in less then two minutes but that was some time ago, I do agree the reset time is a bit short and likely should be extended a bit to around ten minutes or so....

The sector resets are quite annoying all around. I think if they were increased to 5 minutes they would still be going to sleep a lot faster than the old 15 minute times, but things might not get so broken.

Writing out all the NPC states and shutting down the sector in a way that can be brought back up again in the same state is fairly complicated, and has a lot of ramifications for disk storage and database usage and so on (we shut down a lot of sectors per day). It's possible to do, but we're also trying to avoid it. Plus it only makes sense to do for a short period of time (an hour at most), after which we really want a "simulated outcome" anyway.

At the same time, we've been trying to improve the scalability of the server cluster, and get the most bang for our buck, because we expect a lot of people from iPhone (and perhaps some from Steam, GearVR, etc). Changing the sector timeout really improved that, and it also made the game a lot more robust in other ways, as we had to work through handling cases that had been left as "fine when left at N minutes"; plus it causes popular sectors be more transient and self-balancing around the server cluster, instead of potentially running for days on end, on a single server, because people keep flying in there (newbie sectors still run for days at a time, but it's less common elsewhere).

ARF is right, the timeout issues just haven't been very high on our priority list lately, especially the last couple of months. If there was a ticket, it wouldn't likely have been closed out. We've just been too swamped to look for other tickets. Anyway..

I will look into the possibility of special-casing the Deneb system with 10-minute sector timeouts, or perhaps just special-casing the actual battle sectors somehow. Will have to talk to Ray about that.

This is happening elsewhere too. While clearing out a Serco blockade in Edras, everytime I left the sector and came back I would have to watch the serco dents fly back to their positions by the wh. My time away from the sector was way less than 2 minutes.

Yes, it happens everywhere, because we reduced the sector drop time everywhere.

So, if there are specific cases and situations that are the most problematic for sectors being dropped (like deneb battles, or perhaps blockade sectors), it'd be helpful for people to list them, and then we can see about possibly special-casing them in some way.

A basic list would include every sector that will contain NPC Cap Ships. This is also a problem for wormhole sectors in grey space when the Itani or Serco nations send their NPC fleets to the enemies border.

A preliminary list would include:
All Deneb sectors where Medium, Large or Border battles will take place.
All Wormhole sectors on the Fleet path from, or to, Edras and Ukari. (But if i only get Deneb i'll be happy!)