Deneb Run this weekend! Check the in-game Event Information!VO 1.8.357-358 included:- Fixed rendering issue with fog on Android.- Added setting to toggle fog blob particles on Android. The setting defaults to on for Android 5 and above, and for higher-end Tegra and Snapdragon devices. The setting is at Options -> Advanced -> Graphics -> Show Fog Blobs if the effect is too slow on your device.- Specialty development for an upcoming OEM promotion, across phones, tablets and TVs.- Improved UI navigation with gamepads and remotes.- Rearranged some hotkeys for Capship PDA tabs.- Attempt to improve issues with ANR (Activity Not Responding) errors on Android.- Reduced black screen time on startup on Android and slower PCs.- Fixed issue where selecting the Livery button during the initial in-game ship purchasing tutorial would cause the tutorial to restart.- PatchStorm Update Server cloud has new nodes in Dallas, Texas and Sydney, Australia.Usually our development is based on a "soft" schedule (defined by us, internally), and sometimes we're trying to work around "hard" dates defined by an outside party. In the case of this past week, we were offered an opportunity by a major OEM (electronics company) to help them test some new promotional channels to their millions of users. That bumped up the priority of related development that would make the promotion possible, and quickly tweak/improve the game on the respective devices.We expect to return to our internally-driven development goals next week, and continue the push towards VO 1.9. Thanks for your patience, everyone. Have a great weekend!

This is a final note that we are, for the moment, wrapping up our investigations in historical "PK farming", or the process of cheating to increase the PK stat by repeatedly killing a drone "alt" running on another account (in some cases, thousands of times). This practice is not welcome in Vendetta Online. The PK stat has little inherent value in gameplay; but it still carries a perceptual value within the community, as an indication of experience and skill.After concerns over the issue were raised by people within the community, we started the research process in our logs, and found half a dozen or so suspicious cases that merited further investigation. The fact that we found a number of cases of different individuals meant two things:1) The issue was common enough to require a "policy" response. We couldn't just deal with one person quietly, or even two: we had to create a response we could apply more broadly and fairly to a larger group of people, and potentially maintain moving forward.2) The individual cases still required considerable time to investigate. People kill each other all the time in VO, and there are a lot of factors to consider in identifying this kind of behaviour. We wanted to be absolutely sure we didn't punish anyone inappropriately, so some depth was required.Because this process was so time consuming to research and correlate (and we're already busy), some people were "punished" before others. This only resulted from the "luck" of who was in more recent logs, or had cheated on a grander and more easily-verified scale. The order and timing of our actions was simply based on when we came to some certainty from log data.While investigating the individual cases, we found some people had been doing this kind of thing for as far back as we had logs (about a year). This presented a conundrum: for these players, we couldn't really provide any realistic count of the person's "actual" PKs vs their "fake" PKs. So, in fairness to the apparently overwhelming majority of players who don't engage in this kind of activity, we zeroed the PK stats of the people who had been definitively cheating.This wasn't a step we took lightly, some of these players had been with us for a long time. Regardless of how this issue came to light, we probably would have come to the same conclusion on the appropriate minimal action. It seemed to be as fair as we could be; if we had had older log data available, we might have tried to do more to mitigate the punishment, but that simply wasn't possible.Above and beyond this, some individuals really kicked up a controversial mess in regards to the "cheating", with the issue basically being used by different factions to troll one another, both in-game and on the forums. This further elevated the level of controversial hysteria over the problem, and gave everyon

VO 1.8.356 includes:- Fixed a server crash caused when too many hive skirmish missions were created at the same time.- Fixed player online status information leaks.- The automatic guild disband timeout that is started when there is less than 5 council members has been changed from 48 hours to 7 days.- Guild Commanders can now limit display of current-login status of their members, via interface on the website. - Improved server resilience to certain types of potential cloud issues. - Improved server status, emergency monitoring.- Fixed a server-side bug related to tracking of reloaded swarm missile ammunition, and a few other cases.We did some critical work this week, and it appears that we have drastically improved the stability of specific server-side components. We've also strengthened our monitoring, and also updated and improved our ability to roll-back from a faulty release, should one occur (always a possibility).So, obviously this is a lot of infrastructural work and not "exciting gameplay changes". But all things considered from recent experiences, these were pretty important issues to resolve and improve.If all goes well with stability over the weekend, we intend to swing back to our previously-interrupted development schedule next week, and move forward with some planned game improvements. The delays of the last month have put us up against another hard-deadline at the end of next week, for a particular game partnership/promotion, which will also be taking some dev time (albeit just a few days).In other news, we have some seriously new environmental content in the works, intended to demonstrate how we're changing some areas of space, and give some notion to the kind of "scale" we'll be rolling out in our game universe. It should be noted: these are purely graphical improvements right now, and are not delaying gameplay changes at all; but rather they will play a very important part in the forward evolution of the game, through version 1.9 and beyond.Also, be sure to stop by some of the new player-organized Events that have hit the schedule lately! I'm sure they'll be a lot of fun.Thanks for your patience, everyone, have a great weekend!

We had an unplanned game downtime on Weds morning of this past week, and this post is intended to fill people in a little on what's been going on.The basic problem was the "Kourier" AI subsystem, which controls the Hives, going a little bonkers and trying to create over 32,000 hive-NPCs at once, in a single sector. This then caused cascading failures elsewhere. The root issue, however, turned out to be quite complex, and not even a "new" issue, but rather something we've been lucky to avoid in the past.Because of this, we've spent some effort over the last few days, to clean up and re-work the "Kourier" system, to make it more robust. This should also eliminate some of the other related problems that have plagued us for some time, like not-enough or too-many missions appearing for certain types of dynamic gameplay.We did not plan for this development to be happening now; but now that we're aware of the problem, it has become the top priority and we've allocated our resources there. This has further pushed back other development that has been in the works. Such is the life of building a live, online game.A lot of our planned gameplay improvements will also hinge on this same codebase (dynamic territory ownership with conquerable stations, a better Deneb War, etc), so there are other benefits to our doing this work, but it's still inconvenient timing.We don't expect this issue to delay other development for more than a few days to a week, but, obviously server stability is critical. So we appreciate your patience in the meantime.

VO 1.8.355 includes:- The Windows version now defaults to DirectX 11 on initial install.- Oculus Rift support has been temporarily disabled, until we can complete our update to the 0.7 beta of the Oculus SDK. Rift support will likely return next week.- Fixed crash bug when changing certain Video options and multi-threaded rendering is enabled.- Increased the font size of the list of available liveries on mobile.- Fixed hotkey for the 'Livery' button to be 'i' instead of 'p'.- Changed game-pad help placeholder text to say '(none)' instead of 'Stuff'.Those Windows users who want to try the auto-detected DX11 settings can rename their "wgaf.cfg" and "config.ini" in their install directory, and re-run the game. We welcome feedback and bug reports (Bugs forum) on DX11 problems. Thanks!More was planned for this release, but we've spent a great deal of time dealing with administrative issues surrounding people farming for statistics (and still working on it this weekend). Hopefully by early next week we can get back on track.Have a great weekend, everyone.

It's been some time since this was last discussed, so it seems a refresher may be in order.There have been those, lately, who have espoused the opinion if that if some gameplay mechanic within the game is exploitable in some way, then it must be "fair game", because "it's the dev's fault that it exists, until they fix it!". Allow to me clarify that notion:Exploitation of a bug, flaw, or inherent issue in this game, always comes with the potential for an administrative response. The more egregious the exploit, the harsher the response, up to and including being permanently banned from this game.Everyone knows we have very limited resources, all of which are spent trying to improve and administer this game. Our response to any given situation is at our discretion, and may happen whenever we choose, be that days, or weeks, or months later, based on our availability.There are also some gameplay rule-lawyers who similarly want us to administratively respond to every small infraction, and batter us with their inflamed sense of self-righteous indignation. We are not receptive to this either. If there is a real issue, simply report the specifics (by Support Ticket), and move on. We'll apply an administrative response to those situations that we believe warrant it, in a manner and time of our own choosing.For those who ask "but how will I know what is not allowed?": try applying common sense. Those who egregiously and repeatedly exploit a known issue, for their own benefit, particularly on an industrial-scale level, are those individuals who are the most likely to receive an administrative response.Similarly, our response may be proportional to the amount of our time that you waste. Again, we have limited resources, and wasting our time with stupid stuff (be it dumb exploits, or excessively inflamed injustice over someone else's dumb exploits) is not going to be well received.This is the reality of administrative response within Vendetta Online. It has been like this for 13 years. It is not likely to change any time soon. We spend quite a lot of time (every week) privately talking to players, telling them to be more polite, or to stop testing the technical limits of our patience. We do this quietly, and non-dramatically in the background, and we have no interest in public floggings. While many parts of the game, abuse-reporting mechanics and other systems will continue to change, the quiet way we handle things is not going to be one of them.Please keep this in mind, for the future.John "Incarnate" BergmanGuild Software, Inc.

VO 1.8.354 includes:- Enabled multi-threaded physics engine, defaulting to 4 threads.- Fixed rendering issues for ships with liveries applied to them.- Livery is no longer applied to the Anniversary Edition Vulture.- Fixed issue with livery setting not being saved in ship presets.- Fixed issue with not saving /alias commands correctly if they contain double quotes.Several issues conspired to delay development this week. For one thing, we were notified of a maintenance that will impact our web-server next week, which prioritized some re-organization and administrative work on our end.Similarly, we hoped to launch the DX11 engine into production this week, but we found a threaded-renderer bug at the last minute. By the end of the evening we pretty well resolved that issue, but chose to delay release until next week, to allow further testing. So it goes in the world of development.As always, thanks for your patience, we have to get these things done to make 1.9 happen.Have a great weekend!