Escort missions should end when all (remaining) ships enter the station NFZ.

I've been doing quite a few escorts lately, and you have to wait for quite a while sometimes for all the ships to dock for the mission to complete. This becomes problematic when the escorted group jumps in behind another large convoy... wait times have been up to 15/20 minutes for the mission to complete due to ship queuing.

It's been even worse when the ships get stuck in the station struts or blocked by other ships and go into collision avoidance mode and get confused. They fly around and bounce spin sometimes.

Absolutely +1

+1 it would also help if the fake convoys were limited to x ships per docking port as some stations have 1 while others have 4 or 5

waiting for 16 fake ships to try and dock at 1 docking port is a pain

I'd actually be happy if it was once they're in the station sector but either way

+1

We're open to that possibility. It opens up chances of exploit, if the cargo is really high-value for some reason. But, not in most cases.

Still, it may be easier to solve the fundamental issue here (from a codebase standpoint) by just prioritizing player-convoys over non-player convoys, for docking purposes.

or by not spawning a fake convoy if a real one is in sector

Again, that's not as simple, spawning convoys is handled by a completely different system (Kourier) versus the docking of convoys, which is managed by the sector.

FYI, an improvement will go into production later tonight:

Basically, "real" convoys will gain docking priority over "fake" convoys.

However, there are sometimes more than one "real" convoy that are docking at a given time, and we can't currently (easily) prioritize the one with the player-escort.

Escort missions are also taken by NPCs, which then actually deliver items as well, so if those coincide, there may still be a delay. But.. this should mitigate the annoyance, most of the time.

If it still is a problem, we can also look at the NFZ solution and other options, so please let us know.

Thanks! I understand this is a quick turnaround fix and will let you guys know if there continues to be issues.

It seems to be better now but "Fake convoys" are a pet hate of mine.
I just dont see the point of them.
ok maybe in capital sectors so noobs dont feel lonely
but everywhere else they just get in the way and increase server load

/rant off

Well, they were mainly a stopgap while we fixed the "real" NPC convoys. But the fundamental problem that's the issue here (convoys docking, not enough ports) really has nothing to do with whether the convoys are "real" or "fake". The same issues need to be addressed, regardless. Might as well improve that now.

convoys with capital ships in them dont seem to work the same way as "normal" convoys
the moths race ahead and leave the copital ship behind and if you wait for the capital ship you get penalised

"you were with the convoy 66% of the time"

even tho I stayed with the capilal ship 100%

Okay. But, that's a bug report, which really belongs in Bugs, and has nothing to do with any subject in this thread, as far as I can tell?

Also, when you make the Bug report, please let us know if it's current? I've had some trouble in the last couple of months with vets reporting "old" problems without validating whether we had fixed them.

We did a bunch of work on the whole capship/moth convoy timing issue a little while back, and we definitely want to know if it's still broken. But only if it actually is still, currently broken.

As far as I know I haven't had problems with it. But I'll look at it today if that helps

FYI that the underlying problem of convoys "drifting apart" should be a lot better now, as of the release last week.

I'm not saying that mitigates the issue to eliminate the need for this Suggestion, but perhaps people could just continue to see how it's working and evaluate if things are functioning well enough now, or if further tweaks are needed. Thanks.

I've taken multiple convoys from and to grey, I seem to always get one behemoth heavy... with a single other NPC escort... I must say, the prioritization for convoys docking has been very nice. Good job on the queuing.

As for drifting apart, as of a couple of times this week, the behemoth seems to lose it's NPC escort craft more often than not.