There are two Game Events planned for Saturday Evening.At 5pm Central (10pm UTC) "Flag Battle #3" will be run by developer Raybondo in Pelatus D11.At 7pm Central (Midnight UTC) "PvP Free For All" will begin in Edras I8.Hope to see you there!
VO 1.8.509 includes:- Added experimental chat abuse reporting tool. Type /report "character name" to open the UI to select the offending text and category to submit it for administrative review.While this is still early in feature development, this is a big step down the road towards our being able to react more quickly and effectively to toxic and inappropriate chat behaviour, when it should arise.Basically, this will replace the "vote mute" system, instead providing a Report mechanic, where-in people can select an example of the bad behaviour, from their text-chat history, and submit it along with their "report". This has two effects, first that it makes it much easier for administrators to make a decision about specific behaviour, and secondly it should drastically reduce the abusive use of vote-mute itself to make organized "attacks" against people who may not actually be behaving badly.The results of submission may have several effects. For instance, Reporting a spammer may have the same effect as "vote mute", where the spammer is temporarily silenced by a variety of people reporting their behaviour. Then, once the Report is also validated by administrative staff, the spammer may have additional repercussions, like a longer-term mute, or other action.Reports that are seen as inappropriate and invalid by administrative staff are also more likely to get a rapid reaction, up to (if necessary) removing an individual's ability to make a Report.People who submit Reports are likely to see whether or not their report was Validated or Invalidated at some point when the administrative decision is made. This will help them gauge their future reports, and hopefully also give some sense that their feedback has been evaluated and put to good use.The nature of "Mutes" themselves are also evolving. We've added the ability to permanently mute players on public channels of 1 and 100, if they're unable to improve their behaviour; and we may also change traditional administrative mute actions to function on a "logged-in-time" basis, rather than a "wall-clock" basis.To be clear, this "/report" implementation is only a prototype. We do intend this to become fully integrated into the game UI, and be usable by players on mobile devices, VR and PC. But, to begin with, it has been implemented as a console command.We would appreciate it if people would try to use this new system, instead of "vote mute" or Support Tickets, in the event of people behaving inappropriately on the public in-game chat channels (1 and 100).Have a great weekend, everyone, and be sure to stop by for the Events on Saturday!
The server maintenance has been concluded, and the game is back online. Thanks again for your patience.
The game will be going down sometime after 12:30AM CDT on Friday morning (5:30AM UTC), to update the game servers and do some improvements intended to increase scalability and resilience.We're defining a possible maintenance window from 12:30AM to 04:00AM, although it is our goal to bring the game back online as quickly as is feasible, so things may be back considerably sooner, if all goes well.Thanks for your patience, as always.
A variety of bug fixes went into place over the last week, based on player feedback.- Addressed a problem where Escort/Convoy ships were sometimes getting behind, or stuck in previous sectors, depending on various factors. This should be rectified.- Unaligned Pirates now choose their own jump points instead of using the group's jumppoint.- Fixed a problem with certain types of Unaligned Pirate escorts not spawning correctly.- If bots take too long to reach their jump point and trigger manual movement by the server, they will now appear to properly jump, instead of simply vanishing.- Lots of new analytics to help track mission activity and usage, across both "static" type missions, as well as the dynamically generated Kourier missions (Hive, Escort, etc). This includes a lot of insight into how and why particular missions have failed, to help us identify when things are a problem, and how they need to be fixed.Beyond this, there will likely be a scheduled outage during the coming week, for server maintenance, upgrades and capacity improvements.Please keep an eye out for a Developer-run Event next weekend (the 28th), as well as (hopefully) a Newsletter update.All the best everyone!
VO 1.8.508 includes:- Static queens are now more likely to attack capital ships, and remain aggressive.- Convoy traffic should no longer block docking queues under certain conditions, or choose jump-out positions that are unnecessarily far away.- Fixed rendering issues with the OpenGL Reference driver on Windows and MacOS, which were causing inverted CAPTCHA displays and other problems.Some of these bugs were time-consuming to track down, but hopefully we've resolved the related issues that people were running into. As always, if you see anything that's obviously not working correctly, please post it to Bugs and let us know.Additionally, we've had some development and testing going on, related to increasing the capacity of the game, and measuring how far we can push individual sectors, which we expect to be relevant as we experiment with more elaborate and intensive sectors (similar to Bractus P1).As always, have a great weekend.
VO 1.8.507 includes:- Escort mission convoys now attempt to stay together more effectively.- Keychain list now properly updates when access rights change.- Added Help menu information to Gunners tab.- Additional analytics and log data to try and debug the rare "dud avalon / missile" problem, reported on Bugs. Please continue to post specific (date/time) reports on that forum.- Generally biased all NPC action preferences to favor "following" goals over "destination" goals, while their follow target is around; part of the Escort mission fixes, but may have effects beyond that as well. Please report any issues on BugsHey everyone, some additional fixes and tweaks. Please particularly let us know if the Escort missions are improved. Hopefully players will get full-credit for staying with the capital ships now, for instance. Plus, the missions should generally be more fun, and more interactive with the entire convoy around.Have a great weekend, everyone.