Sectors sleep a couple of minutes after a player leaves, I assume to reduce server activity.

This generates a problem during an escort mission with faster ships and a capship, such as a dent or capella. The players task is to escort the convoy as a whole but the faster and more vulnerable ships jump ahead and the player jumps with them to protect them. The sector then sleeps and the capship just sits about waiting for the player to backtrack and wake the sector up leaving the leading ships open to attack.

This happens both at whs and when passing through storms.

This doesn't make a lot of sense from a RP point of view. Would the captain of a dent just sit there given that he has orders to fly to a destination?

So simple suggestion, make the timeout for a sector longer or add a condition that sectors don't sleep if a ship associated with a player mission is present.

Interesting. The feedback is much appreciated.

For a variety of reasons, we aren't likely to extend the sector timeout. But, we should be able to examine and improve the cause of this situation. Ideally, the NPC behavior should be pretty transparent, regardless of the sector state. There are mechanics in place to make that happen, but they clearly need improvement.

" add a condition that sectors don't sleep if a ship associated with a player mission is present."

This seems like a decent solution to the problem.

Edit, sorry Incarnate, I didn't see your post till after I hit submit, I typed then got distracted for a while.

No worries. We aren't going to arbitrarily keep sectors alive if missions are present either, disaster could result from something like that.

But, we've already discussed some likely options internally, and we'll take a look.

just make the faster ships wait for and defend the slower one(s)

just make the faster ships wait for and defend the slower one(s)

We should do that too, but that's an additional behaviour change, we need to fix the fundamental problem ("offline" sector bots not behaving correctly across offline-to-online transitions).

And, we've done that (I don't think it's been released yet). Basically, this was a long-standing issue dating back to an improper initial implementation.

This is another example to show that, if a particular issue is long-standing, but bothers you, please do bring it up occasionally (in a nice way). Just because someone "told the devs" doesn't mean we're fully aware of the impact of all issues at all times. We track a tremendous amount of stuff, to operate this game, and it can get a bit chaotic on our side.. helpful and respectful reports like this can provide really useful insight.

Fyi, this should be fixed as of last night's server restart. Please let us know how it's working?

Seems fine now, thanks

One escort I let run all the way though serco space seemed to behave properly if the locations given in the group list are to be believed.

Good to hear. Basically, this was always "intended" to work properly (this was not actually a design oversight, unlike some issues), but there was a super-longstanding bug in the implementation of where the timer was being tracked, that caused it to get restarted and ships in "offline" sectors to fall behind. They would emerge eventually, but it took quite awhile.

So, with that fixed, it's now functioning the way it was always intended. No need for sectors to stay online extra long, or anything else.. it just had to be debugged and fixed.