When a mission chain breaks, for example an NPC doesn't spawn, is that typically due to a link in this chain being broken?
TL;DRBroken mission elements like unspawned NPCs usually aren't caused by the node chain but by a backed-up spawn queue, which they keep working to make more efficient, and Server Meshing should help.
So the chain they were on about is me connecting my nodes together, and the answer is no. Usually that could be to do with anything. Everything has to go through a spawn queue, and sometimes that spawn queue can get very backed up because we have a lot of stuff in our game. So you could be at your location waiting and someone's just gone to microTech, and that planet kind of needs to be there first because that's an entire planet. You're going to either go into it and it's going to spawn around you and you'll die or whatever. So there are things that are priorities in queues, and the queue system could be huge, but we're constantly working on it to try and make it more efficient and make it so that fewer requests are handled. And things like Server Meshing should help, because the spawn queue would be dedicated to each thing that runs that area.