The NPCs in an enemy group are now sorted alphabetically, like everything else in the object list. This can make it extremely difficult to determine who the higher ranked actors are in ground groups, and to determine which ships will spawn in space groups. Before these were based on the order in the actor list, which I assume is still the case, but now when we rename the NPCs we can't see that.

I strongly recommend going back to the old system where there was a separate field for the name of the actor in the list, and the name displayed in the game, and what's more the actor lists inside a group should not be sorted alphabetically.

Additionally, giving more information about the properties of the actor (enemy rank on the ground, etc) would be very helpful.

I've just been working with this well in the last couple hours. The info on exactly what is in each group is (for ground enemies at least) shown in the lower right. I'm brand new at this, and only making a ground mission so far, but it didn't give me a problem. Actually seemed more intuitive than I would have thought.

The trouble is that on ground maps you can't tell which actor is what rank. For example, in a captain group, one of the NPCs is the captain, and the others are lower rank. So, if you want the captain to be your "big bad guy", you need to know which to change. It used to be you could tell from the order they were listed, but now it's alphabetical instead. You can sort of tell by where they are standing, but that is much more awkward and doesn't help if you move them around to a different formation (granted, you can set the NPCs before moving them).

With space it's the same problem, except you need to know which ships spawn depending on the number of players. That's based on this: http://starbaseugc.com/index.php/tra...ling-for-npcs/ But you need to know what actor number you're dealing with, in order to set them properly.

I'm actually afraid the scaling info I collected may now be completely obsolete, because it's not clear that the actors are listed in the same order anymore.

Edit: It looks like they might be in the right order still. Unfortunately, if you've renamed the actors before, they don't appear to go back into the original order. Also, as you rename them the rest of the unnamed actors get jumbled, so the only way you can tell what each is going to be is by reskinning them before renaming.

Unfortunately, this change has made it close to impossible to id the type of ship that's going to spawn by looking at the list.

This whole thing needs to be seriously reconsidered. It looks like the NWN system was just imported straight to STO but we really need the ability to identify different ships that spawn with different player amounts.

couldn't you just name each actor A,B,C,D etc and if the captain rank is actor named C for example then just redo actor C to be your big boss? I know it's messing around but......it's an idea.

What I'm doing is lining them up behind an invisible wall and then loading the map to determine who is the boss and/or the frigate. If I rename them all first, I basically have to delete the mob and start over.

I wish the game used more descriptive autogenerated names.

I just wish some thought had gone into jettisoning the separate name field, and sorting everything by name. There's no reason the actors in an enemy group need to be sorted by name. There's only at most 10 NPCs in each group.