Rant/Plea to fix Wing Beacon issues present since 2.1

I play ED almost exclusively co-operatively in a wing.

I have come to grips that co-op missions weren’t a part of ED even with the introduction of Wings in 1.2 in March of 2015.

I have accepted that there is no built in way to share mission rewards with friends when helping with a mission, and that if I want to give payment to someone I have to buy 50 tons of platinum and eject it for them to pick up, or vice versa, and that it’s such a pain in the butt it’s not worth doing.

I have accepted, over time, that sometimes the internet just hates you and getting in the same instance with a friend won’t happen, or that even if you do you may not see the exact same enemies.

But for the love of Braben, I can’t accept that Wing Beacons/Nav Lock has been broken since 2.1 and has still not been fixed in 2.2. It's been five months since a primary multi-player feature has been broken in this multiplayer game.

The issue: when a wingmate activates a wing beacon, other pilots are supposed to be able to engage wingman Nav Lock to lock in on the wingman’s position so CMDRs can link up for navigation, salvage, sightseeing or combat purposes. This worked fine, most of the time. Your buddy gets interdicted? You can drop in to help. Your buddy has the same assassination target as you? You can drop into the instance and work together to take it out. You want to get together outside of a RES to mine? No problem, the first one in drops a beacon and the rest of the wing can join in.

Except now, you can’t. Ever since 2.1.0.X, released back in May, the using the Wing Beacon is useless at best, and can get you killed at worst.

1. Dropping connections/crash to main menu from wings during high/low wakes EDIT: Fixed in 2.2! HOORAY!
2. Dropping to wing beacons in current position rather than the beacon position, often millions of meters away. EDIT: Still not fixed as of 3.0.3. Booooo.
3. Rubber-band snapping back to the beacon location if the nav lock is not turned off and you low-wake away. EDIT: Still not fixed as of 3.0.3. Booooo.
4. Positional drifting caused by a wingmate's location changing, most evident when trying to dock at a station in an instance where a wingmate has already docked, resulting in a pilot's ship moving like rotational correction is off, making docking nearly impossible without relogging. EDIT: Fixed in 3.0.2! HOORAY!
5. Wingmate does not appear on scanner, only the wing beacon, which skips around the scanner as the wingmate's position updates every few seconds. EDIT: Still not fixed as of 3.0.3. Booooo.

According to this response in this thread, at least the connection issue is resolved:

We think this bug is fixed in 2.2

After playing for 3-4 hours in a wing last night, issue 1 may actually be fixed (hallelujia!), but I can confirm issues 2-4 are alive and well and frustrating as hell. #4 in particular can get you killed in a hurry from scraping you into the walls of the station, or getting you blown out of the sky for loitering.

[video=youtube_share;gs_eIlmws3c]https://youtu.be/gs_eIlmws3c?t=70[/video]

Bug reports have been filed since May. Port forwarding/firewall config isn’t the cause as these issues did not happen until the release of 2.1. Something got broken and needs to be fixed.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...out-of-supercruise-unexpectedly-while-in-wing
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ips-appearing-Offset-from-their-True-Location
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/256026-Inside-Station-has-low-LOD
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/267405-Landing-rotational-correction-bug
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/267392-bugged-station-drop-with-nav-lock-(wing)
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...on-doesn-t-work-inside-stations-while-in-wing
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...on-bug-collision-Texture-bugs-(Claim-request)

Please, FD, look into these issues, and if you as a CMDR have run into these issues post in this thread, file a bug report, make some noise about it while Frontier is still putting out patches for 2.2.

Otherwise it may not get fixed until 2.3, or ever. :(
 
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Having purchased Elite for myself followed by Horizons expansion, followed by Elite and Horizons for my brother

I am continually gutted that the game wont allow us to play for more than 30 minutes before one of the issues listed in OP happens

I will shamelessly bump this thread too o7
 
Our faction had many different instances of the game crashing and freezing. The common condition we determined was it always happened while in wing.
 
Personally I find point 4 the most annoying. This really needs to get fixed.

Point 4 is a shortcut to the rebuy screen. When it hits your first inclination is to try to keep landing, but you can't. Then you get a loitering warning and try to get out of the station, and you can't because you're either stuck to the wall, spinning out of control, or the screen goes out on you completely.

Your only chance at that point is to log out. If you're expecting it to happen you get good at anticipating your escape (or exiting the wing any time you dock) but good grief we shouldn't still be having this problem after so long.
 
+1 from me

i ended up after a few CTDs last night in that situation again where you are half in an instance with your wingman ie you can see them only as a solid dot. this needs fixing as the mucking around needed exiting out at each end and jumping in and out of instances to get back into the same one i sometimes just give up at .

No idea why this hasnt been fixed, perhaps its something bad wirth how its architected that makes it difficult without a lot of code being re-written.
 
Out of curiosity, do you and your friends have port forwarding enabled and put the relevant file specifying the port into the ED directory?
Doing the above has helped me and my mates a ton.
 
Bumped due to the frustration I have with consistent Wing actions as well. I have seriously wrote group play off since it hasn't really worked for me (consistently) since wings started and that was not cool to discover. Every major patch I re-convince a buddy to login and test wingaling things. It feels like 50-50 at this point, sometimes flawless other times less so (see above). We mostly end up as individual players in voice comms doing our things in our Elite private group.
 
Can't believe it's not better! :(

1. Dropping connections/crash to main menu from wings during high/low wakesCheck!
2. Dropping to wing beacons in current position rather than the beacon position, often millions of meters away.Check!
3. Rubber-band snapping back to the beacon location if the nav lock is not turned off and you low-wake awayCheck!
4. Positional drifting caused by a wingmate's location changing, most evident when trying to dock at a station in an instance where a wingmate has already docked, resulting in a pilot's ship moving like rotational correction is off, making docking nearly impossible without relogging.Check!

+1 x 100 bump for this thread too!

This has gone beyond a joke for me and my friends now. We regularly play in a Wing and post 2.1 have experienced all of the above. Unfortunately 2.2 doesn't appear to have addressed any of these issues.

Wing beacons/nav lock works in a similar RNG fashion to that of rolling an Engineer mod (might be good, might be bad, where bad is anything ranging from crash to desktop or leaving the handbrake on and immediately dropping out of supercruise)

We've all tried the port forwarding dance which doesn't appear to have helped at all.

Love the concept of Wings and don't quite like the prospect of this being a single player only experience so am just reaching out for any other potential things to try or links to other posts I could have a look at?

Cheers!
 
Bumped due to the frustration I have with consistent Wing actions as well. I have seriously wrote group play off since it hasn't really worked for me (consistently) since wings started and that was not cool to discover. Every major patch I re-convince a buddy to login and test wingaling things. It feels like 50-50 at this point, sometimes flawless other times less so (see above). We mostly end up as individual players in voice comms doing our things in our Elite private group.

Again, setting up port forwarding and putting the file into the ED directory solved pretty much all the issues me and my friends were having. Note that the file needs to be put into the dir after every update.
 
I have accepted that there is no built in way to share mission rewards with friends when helping with a mission, and that if I want to give payment to someone I have to buy 50 tons of platinum and eject it for them to pick up, or vice versa, and that it’s such a pain in the butt it’s not worth doing.

I have accepted, over time, that sometimes the internet just hates you and getting in the same instance with a friend won’t happen, or that even if you do you may not see the exact same enemies.

But for the love of Braben, I can’t accept that Wing Beacons/Nav Lock has been broken since 2.1 and has still not been fixed in 2.2. It's been five months since a primary multi-player feature has been broken in this multiplayer game.

The issue: when a wingmate activates a wing beacon, other pilots are supposed to be able to engage wingman Nav Lock to lock in on the wingman’s position so CMDRs can link up for navigation, salvage, sightseeing or combat purposes. This worked fine, most of the time. Your buddy gets interdicted? You can drop in to help. Your buddy has the same assassination target as you? You can drop into the instance and work together to take it out. You want to get together outside of a RES to mine? No problem, the first one in drops a beacon and the rest of the wing can join in.

Except now, you can’t. Ever since 2.1.0.X, released back in May, the using the Wing Beacon is useless at best, and can get you killed at worst.

1. Dropping connections/crash to main menu from wings during high/low wakes
2. Dropping to wing beacons in current position rather than the beacon position, often millions of meters away.
3. Rubber-band snapping back to the beacon location if the nav lock is not turned off and you low-wake away
4. Positional drifting caused by a wingmate's location changing, most evident when trying to dock at a station in an instance where a wingmate has already docked, resulting in a pilot's ship moving like rotational correction is off, making docking nearly impossible without relogging.

According to this response in this thread, at least the connection issue is resolved:



After playing for 3-4 hours in a wing last night, issue 1 may actually be fixed (hallelujia!), but I can confirm issues 2-4 are alive and well and frustrating as hell. #4 in particular can get you killed in a hurry from scraping you into the walls of the station, or getting you blown out of the sky for loitering.

Bug reports have been filed since May. Port forwarding/firewall config isn’t the cause as these issues did not happen until the release of 2.1. Something got broken and needs to be fixed.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...out-of-supercruise-unexpectedly-while-in-wing
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ips-appearing-Offset-from-their-True-Location
https://youtu.be/gs_eIlmws3c?t=70
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/256026-Inside-Station-has-low-LOD
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/267405-Landing-rotational-correction-bug
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/267392-bugged-station-drop-with-nav-lock-(wing)
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...on-doesn-t-work-inside-stations-while-in-wing
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...on-bug-collision-Texture-bugs-(Claim-request)

Please, FD, look into these issues, and if you as a CMDR have run into these issues post in this thread, file a bug report, make some noise about it while Frontier is still putting out patches for 2.2.

Otherwise it may not get fixed until 2.3, or ever. :(

You cannot buy Platinum!

I agree with everything else though ;)
 
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Again, setting up port forwarding and putting the file into the ED directory solved pretty much all the issues me and my friends were having. Note that the file needs to be put into the dir after every update.

Often Wing up using another ED session on the same pc with my alt account and these issues are most vexing. Wonder if port forwarding will make any difference when I'm on the same pc?
 
Again, setting up port forwarding and putting the file into the ED directory solved pretty much all the issues me and my friends were having. Note that the file needs to be put into the dir after every update.

I've done the port forwarding/firewall dance many many times. It helped with instancing but this is a different issue, especially since before 2.1 the Wing Beacon worked most of the time, and immediately after one of the 2.1 hotfix patches, wing functionality broke. There was a definite before/after effect from a patch to the game that broke this functionality, specific to the issues I outlined above.

The dev team broke something when they introduced a patch. It happens. But it needs to be fixed.

Call me a whiner or an alarmist, but it needs to be fixed NOW, while Frontier is in the mood to patch 2.2.

Otherwise it won't get fixed until 2.3, if then.
 
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I can't say you're whining.. and I agree totally that this issue needs resolving, especially before multicrew or well just lol
 
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Just realised I do have something to contribute. I did actually broach the subject of instancing with someone (Zac?) at Lavecon. I got the impression they wanted to help. What they needed was debug logs from both players covering the period of the problem. If you and your wing buddies could deliberately set out to do this ... attempt to wing up, jump into an instance together and fail to connect, and then submit a bug report, attaching both of your verbose log files to the bug report ... I do think it might genuinely help. It's all very well saying there's a problem but actually supplying hard solid evidence might prove far more useful. The Fuel Rats probably encounter instancing problems more than anyone (these days I'm genuinely surprised if I actually drop into a client's instance with their ship visible on the first try) but the problem is that the other person is typically new to the game so asking them to dig out their log files is a big ask - plus it's too late to ask them to turn on verbose logging).
 
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