Monthly Archives: January 2016

Perpetuum Online

Token shop upgrades

The random assignment system seems to be working great so far, but the items that you can get with the token rewards are currently a bit lacking. Our newest patch brings the long-awaited upgrades to the token shop, otherwise known as Syndicate Supplies.

We supply the love

New additions to the token shop

So first things first, T2+ and T4+ modules will be directly available in the shop for a relatively high combined token and NIC cost. The NIC cost is a new addition to the shop, just like the minimum relation limit you must have to purchase an item.

Balancing the prices is not easy, since we still need to keep the normal way of acquiring these modules through looting a viable option, but still not make them so high that it would feel like an endless assignment grind to get them. We’re of course open to feedback here.

Oh, black bots you say? Yep, those are in as well. Don’t expect them to be cheap though.

As previously announced, in order to minimize the impact of the current stocks of faction tokens in the game (which were sometimes acquired using certain shortcuts in the past...), we’ll apply a one-time 10x inflation of both the token shop prices and the assignment token rewards. So you still have a little time until the patch tomorrow to buy some ammo or TAPs for the current prices.

I’m feeling lucky

Another new and hopefully interesting addition to the token shop will be the requisition slips. To quote their ingame description:

"From time to time the Syndicate does a sweep of its vast storages and hands out excess items to their hard-working Agents.

By purchasing and activating a requisition slip you can claim one of those items. The catch is that they don't really have an exact listing of their inventory, so what you get in the end can be a bit... random."

Requisition slips

We have requisition slips representing each faction’s technology: Pelistal, Nuimqol, Thelodica, Industrial, and Common. These correspond to the technology pages in the research facility, so you can refer to those if you would like to know what modules you can get from a slip.

Furthermore, each faction has 3 quality levels, making up a total of 15 different slips:

  • Bronze: includes T1, T2, and T3 modules
  • Silver: includes T2, T2+, and T3 modules
  • Gold: includes T3, T4, and T4+ modules

Bug me not

Last but not least, the patch will also include quite a few fixes: corrected token reward amounts for assignments, the missing notification about new assignments, various bug fixes when equipping your robot at a field terminal, some robots not occupying any space in containers, the item not found errors when reverse engineering from a container, the broken public chat channel blocking... just to name a few.

We're also fixing various gamma issues with emergency timers, energy levels, etc. being screwed up during a server restart, which basically had a common cause. Since the fix will be only applied after the server shuts down, do note that these issues might happen again, but hopefully for the last time.

Patch 3.6.3 will be deployed on Monday, February 1st, starting at 15:00 CET/server time (14:00 UTC).

Vendetta Online

Vendetta Online 1.8.368

VO 1.8.368 includes:- Missions that may only be taken a limited number of times for a given period will now remain visible, but grayed out, when unavailable. A countdown timer indicates when the mission may be taken again.- Border Patrol now tells Itani players to go to Deneb and records the final destination sector to the mission log.- Optimized rendering of individual stars in the background.- Active mission dialog now says to check the mission log for more information, and the nil 'Location' line was removed.Hopefully the new handling of limited-availability missions will make things a lot clearer to newbies, and also be helpful to veterans. This was raised in a Suggestions post recently, and was pretty fast to do, so we bumped the priority to get it in there.Speaking of priorities, we have a lot of other big changes going on right now, which are time-sensitive as we need to hit certain release dates that coincide with the shipment of other products. Much of this is VR and immersion related, but the changes we're making go well beyond VR, and this will all be pretty beneficial to the game as a whole.For example, we recently enhanced the ability of all game interfaces to be located on a panel that "floats" at a particular location in 3D space. This will be of significant value in allowing us to break up interface or HUD mechanics to different locations in a "cockpit" type environment, docked "hangar bay" scene, or other situations which are critical to a VR experience. But while many of these environments and interfaces are primarily targeting VR, we expect they'll also make a lot of people happier who have long wanted features like cockpits and the like.There are also a number of other benefits that fall out of this enhancement. For instance, floating signs could be interactive interfaces. Race Tracks could show signage with top times, and interactively display other data. To take this to the silly extreme.. with a bit of additional server-communication work, two players could interactively play "pong" over a common interface floating in space, while other players watch.Don't expect a lot of complex, interactive floating signs to suddenly appear in the immediate future, this is just to underscore that the game's capabilities are evolving, and we expect this all to be of significant benefit, both now and for future work on replacing and re-working the current menu system and user interface experience.Thanks everyone, have a great weekend.- Guild Software, Inc.
Vendetta Online

Forum Policy Changes

In the release last week I had hoped for more gameplay changes to make it into the build. These were delayed, in large part because of some lengthy conversations about behaviour on the Forums. Over the last few years, the general quality of conversation on our forums has declined, due to some negative, attack-driven behaviour that ratcheted up the degree of melodrama, and generally polarized or derailed a number of conversations that might have been otherwise useful. It's also created some volatile situations (like the PK-reset debacle of last October) which used up a tremendous amount of developer time, and would have been far better handled through Support Tickets instead of inflamed public forum threads.As a result, we've have established new guidelines for forum usage and behaviour (across all forums, including Role Play), which are now being enforced by our volunteer administrators. The specifics are in a sticky-post at the top of the General Forum. Please be aware of, and adhere to these updated, more specific guidelines, as violations will result in being muted on individual threads, across individual forums, the messageboard as a whole, or even administrative action that impacts access to the game.The last thing we want to do is mute or ban anyone, but things have gotten really out of hand lately, so some action is needed. The forums are intended to be a positive place for the community to give constructive feedback and suggestions about the game, and plan community events and the like. Obviously this can work well, as evidenced by some of the new content in the last patch. But while it's good that people have strong opinions about the game and its process of evolution, keep the discussions civil: debate the idea on its own merits, and not the individual posting the idea. Avoid attacking entire play-styles, but find a way to logically express how a change could improve and balance the game to the benefit of everyone.Thanks everyone.- Guild Software, Inc.
Vendetta Online

Vendetta Online 1.8.367

VO 1.8.367 includes:- Linux version no longer attempts to rescan for joysticks whenever certain keyboard keys are pressed.- Radar blip coloring can be modified by plugins again. When a plugin wants to change the status of a player by overriding the GetFriendlyStatus function, it must call the UpdateRadarFriendlyStatus() or UpdateAllRadarFriendlyStatus() function to update the radar with the new status.- The Advanced Combat Training and Border Patrol group missions are now available.- For multi-theaded rendering with dynamic lights and shadows, shadows are now processed in their own thread.- Raptor UDV armor increased from 10,500 to 12000.We're aiming to have some gameplay tweaks at the end of next week, and a major announcement before the end of the month. Have a great weekend, everyone!
Vendetta Online

Raptor UDV buffed.

Per a lengthy player discussion on the Suggestions Forum, the Raptor UDV has had its armor mildly increased from 10,500 to 12,000, to enable it to compete on a little more even footing in PvP combat. The Raptor has a fairly large frontal area, a long tail, and reduced maneuverability compared to some other ships, so this buff is intended to help mitigate those disadvantages a little.The Raptor in general is not intended to be "the best" at any given function (including combat), rather it's supposed to be one of the more flexible ships. It includes integrated storm-radar extenders, and the UDV further adds cargo/addon and mineral/temperature scanners. It also includes more cargo space than the average fighter-class vessel.These kinds of features are more in-line with UIT thinking: Flexible craft for long-term exploration, prospecting, defense. A good general-purpose craft that can cover a lot of bases. It is not intended to be a warfare-driven dogfighter on the level of a Valkyrie, or a heavy hitter like a Prometheus, or even a specialty light fighter like a Centurion Superlight. These are far more specialized instruments of combat, where the entire Raptor class did not evolve to address the same need within the UIT.The Union Defense Vessel variant of the Raptor was created to allow the UIT Senate (and member-factions), a reasonable vessel for border defense, anti-piracy and other interdiction needs, while still retaining many of the flexible advantages offered by the Raptor platform as a whole.More gameplay changes and announcements will be coming in the near future, we're a bit buried in development at the moment. Have a great weekend, everyone.