Hey guys,

Long time no update! We skipped the meeting last week, and with the patch notes up I figured we didn't really need an update. I have some raw notes for you guys, as well as player issues:

Raw Notes:

Note: Decisions are in bold.

• We really need to beef ubers. A single zerker is enough to DPS any uber in the game. Then you need one or maybe two healers. Maybe a SD or a DM to handle spawns in some cases. Some are done without a healer, some are done with just one zerker and one healer. So 1-4 chars is basicly enough to do anything. Makes the bigger part of a team useless.
  
  • Actually not all ubers, the ones that use base shields are considerably tough (Albatross, Emperor?, Nathaniel, Corrupted Guardian, Guardian, Qokujii'Qaik). MS is also rather balanced. The other bosses, like anaconda, lion, panther, zebra and rhino boss, copper blob, and most of t20 ship bosses do need a beef. I suggest doing something that can be patched in right away to the weak bosses. After that is done we can look at every boss individually the way HAL suggested in his Boss Rebalance thread. Though I should say that the bosses are weak because people are much better geared now than they used to be, more than anything else. The playerbase is now rapidly progressing and the only real way to solve the problem is by introducing higher tier content.
    
    • My problem is that so much content can be done with just a Shm and a Zerker. Im trying my best to make myself useful to the team but in all honesty the team have no need for either another Shm or another Zerker. I find myself useless 99% of the time. The Emperor for example should require atleast 3-4 damage dealers and atleast 3 healers. Not one healer and 1 zerker.
      
      • PaperTiger will beef bank on all weak ubers

• On another note we need the chat rules posted on a better place. Cant expect everyone to read the forum. They should be somewhere on the main page, easy to find. Also some very clear information about where and how you create a ticket if you need help. I would also like to request a short login message in trade chat that explains the basic rules of trade chat. The same goes for help chat, I would like to replace the current login message with a short explanation of what help chat is for. Having a message that tells people if no chat mods are on is a bad idea.
  
  • Pip will add Support and Rules links to the main page
    
  • HAL will add login messages to the server for help and trade chats.

• I would like us to consider hard capping the number of combat slaves, like we did with drones for DM. Then maybe give an FC skill bonus slave slots, and have the wild slave skill give FC bonus wild slave slots that are independent of the regular slaves. This will prevent low tech slave swarms, and make wild slaves useful.
  
  • I don't think low level swarms are unbalanced. They require a lot of micromanagement, which is annoying enough already, and if you decide to use higher tech gear on them the gear costs would increase dramatically. Plus they look cool and add variety to the game. I really like the separate wild slave slots idea though.
    
    • Jey will make AIs smarter about choosing their targets, including low shield AIs

• GSA spawning is imo a big problem in UZ. Someone can follow a team they dont like in a stealth ship and spawn GSA's on them to ruin their runs. We should come up with a way to prevent this.
  
  • Seems like a viable strategy though, a sort of partisan warfare. Now you get the message saying the name of the person responsible, so if they spawn GSA sout of malevolence, you have the means to find out who it is and punish them. If someone spawns GSAs because they are at war with you, end the war. In any case GSAs aren't invincible and if you're disliked enough to cause people to resort to these kind of tactics, it's your own fault.
    
    • This is part of the game

• Patcher - need to make it so it can skip files that are not important, and have patch notes shown during the install.
  
  • Pip will look into it

Other issues:

• Can a cool down be added to electron clouds so players cant spam with them?
  
  • No real reason to implement a cooldown. The issue will be reviewed after the new visibility system is in.
• Rosmarinus should get a little extra hull space.
  
  • Will be looked into and changed if Rosemarinus is underpowered on the balance sheets.
• Warp 4 AI needs to be available somewhere with only warp 3 for the Paxius mission to work.
  
  • Caelestis will add a DG with them in it.
• Specialized Gigantic Transference Facilitator is Gunner only, the other specialized trans facilitators are MF only
  
  • That's the way its meant to be.
• Slaves can use fighters and missiles against enemy F2P in warp 0?
  
  • Bug has been found (HAL).
• Seer class underpowered?
  
  • Seer is currently being revamped.
• Vicar needs to be changed. Takes too long to build, costs too much and is worse then a Parsley.
  
  • ORB will look at it.
• Bases take to long to become abandoned. They should also take time to repair, so its not possible to insta-repair a destroyed base.
  
  • HAL will make it so chain repairing is harder.
• Pods and spirits should not be able to dock at a base. When capping a base, someone can come along and cap the base into a lower pvp range, destroying the work of those doing the capping. Maybe limit capping to someone the base has hate against?
  
  • For a short time, irradiated things will be cappable by the person who irradiated them only. (HAL)
• Two single base augs are better than two double base augs (1 regen aug and 1 firing aug is better than 2 assault augs) while double base augs being 4x the price.
  
  • I believe this has been fixed already, according to XMLs at least.
• Midas Touch is 900 dps with 1.33 eps and is obtainable by players, needs to be nerfed.
  
  • I think torpedo type weapons haven't been rebalanced in general.
• The Dark is still not doable. Ais are too low vis.
  
  • Being looked into (HAL)
• Need to ensure that all ubers roam peril space. Currently we have Speedy and Rackham that spawn Wild space and instantly killed by bases. Any others?
  
  • What about dg ubers like Barbe, DC, Bart etc etc
• There has been a huge increase of theft/sabotage recently. John12345, WillyWonka, Bling. Is this acceptable ? Is is player error ? Do players need to smarten up or has it become increasingly easier to steal or sabotage from bases with/without being caught.
  
  • All of these were verified to be player error. HAL has made it so you can no longer set buy price above sell price.

I think that's it for now. I'll try to do a Dev Update Questions near the end of the week now that the major patching is done for a bit.

-pip-

Does that mean the RC rules will be modified?



If it's changed, do Vicars under construction change also, or are they still built in the old format?

One thing that caught my eye is the vicar thingy. If you change the build requirements for it, you will be screwing over all the people that allready built one. Also, it is a cool, rare, and unique ship, and i think it should stay that way, i've only seen a few used. Likely part of that is because of the bad stats, but i also think that a large part is the difficulty of building it. Many players will not put the effort into building one, but for those who do, it should be significantly better than other ships.

Longish post, boils down to:

Beef the vicar, Dont Nerf the build cost.

You should read the entire post. As you can see at the top, the bold bullet is the decision for each list of bullet points. We are not changing RC rules, just making low level swarms for low level players a bit less OP by making AIs smarter at dealing with them.

Yay! Finally we need no longer backup all our customized ships and replace them after update!

thank you kind admins, for this blessing upon the community

The rosmarinus was already decided to be fine. Not sure about the other stuff yet.

Client 2 will have custom folders that will be checked before the default folder, so you wont have to replace things anymore anyways.

I love you guys.

Mine's at 36% at the moment

Oh yes, and it is Fleet focus, after all. 2 slaves does not make a fleet.

Personally, im against any hard limitations beyond the skills themselves. I dont like how drones were changed, I dont like the speed cap, and i wouldn't like it if slaves were capped.
I dont use slaves, i have in fact been killed by slave swarms before.

The ONLY thing you should look at about slaves is decreasing the graphical lag they create, possibly by reducing their particles the more slaves you have? Maybe have a limit of a certain number of particles over the number of slaves you have, meaning you get full graphics with 2 slaves, but with 15, you get 2/15's the particles per slave.

Yeah... our little 4 man squad had been assaulting the dark for about 5 hours. Only got 10 Radar20 commods xD maybe double the drop rate for impossibles and double it for verys?

wasnt a certain someone banned for spawning GSA during runs?

beef the DG ubers they are too week specially All of them except alby !
Beef the UZ just a little not to much ... 4 ppl should be enaugh to do half of the ubers at least .
Anyway i was thinkink players progresing rapidly is you idea - Now you can find t3 commods everywhere and UZ ubers drop their remeins much more then they used to

Keeping ubers a challenge is one thing however..

1) We need more content added into the game, eventually it'll come bringing with it new ships, higher tech weapons, higher tech augs, higher tech ubers.
2) There's always going to be a difficulty scale that gets easier with old content and harder with new.

When there used to only be a couple ubers in the game, back then, sputty, scorch, rackham and marco those were damn hard and they took a huge amount of people to do. Over the course of time new content was added, ubers were changed around, people got better ships, many times higher tech became available.

What happens though is this:

If you always balance all main ubers for the end game section of the player base then none of the new players will ever stand a chance until they reach the same "level" as the current end game players.

If they don't get on a high end team by the time they do reach that level the content will have already moved on and the ubers that they could have done will have been rebalanced to be many times harder.


There are issues involved, namely high end players going in and killing ubers quickly and stocking up on loots however at times I'm not sure if this is really a problem.

We have lockouts and while there is still room for it to hurt the market the lock out system does work quite well for the ubers that are of concern.


I honestly think we should be adding more content and progress with the game instead of pushing 1% ahead in content amount and then beefing the last 30% because the 1% has gotten slightly better at killing it. Way to ruin it for new players.