As of tonight, destruction of Hive vessels by fire from Capship Turrets will result in a drastically reduced chance of their dropping rarer items, like Synthetic SilkSteel.It should be noted that, since last week, these same rarer items are no longer displayed in the bot's scannable cargo manifest, as other mechanism now after to determine whether or not they will spawn. Thus, the fact that a bot does not show Synthetic SilkSteel as cargo, does not mean that they won't drop it.

VO 1.8.568 includes:- Remote Capship commands may again be issued by owners, from inside of Turrets.- Certain Hive drops, like those commonly used in Capital Ship manufacturing, now have absolute per-unit-time drop limits, per-sector. This means that once a sector stops producing specific drops, no more will appear until a time limit expires. Both the drop-limit and the time-limit are randomized within ranges, varying across sectors. If a sector has been exhausted, it will be best to avoid that sector for a few hours. In this way, intensive "farming" activity of Hive drops will need to move from sector-to-sector, over time, to achieve successful yields. The absolute quantity of possible yield is defined server-side, regardless of the number of players or the technique involved.- Sectors now send analytics when their drop limits have been hit, for a particular item, giving developer insight on the locations that are commonly reaching existing limits (limits may be adjusted, across the galaxy, while the server is online).- "Emergency" restrictions on Capships, from earlier this week, which impacted drops from enemy ships, have been removed.- Capship Turrets no longer increment the "kill" counters.- Additional analytics added to the client, measuring startup problems, tutorial progress, and initial performance.- Following player feedback, ES3 Android devices have been reverted to disable Dynamic Lights and Dynamic Shadows by default. Players wishing to directly configure the options can find them in Options, Advanced, Video.Another week unfortunately marred by reports of player-exploits, and a lot of associated usage of development time.On late Weds night we received the reports, and locked down the ability of Capital Ships to be used to generate rare bot-drops from bot kills. This ability has since been restored, as of tonight.We've also taken a new "drop" system, which has been in Production testing with the extremely-uncommon "Rarified Heliocene Alloy" since last-year, and expanded it to include a number of other, better-known drops used in the Manufacturing process of various goods and items.This system allows direct control over the quantity of drops that can be generated per-unit-time, as explained above. The exact limits won't be disclosed, and they are randomized both in quantity and in the length of time that a sector may be "depleted". The definition of these values will continue to be tweaked as time goes on.It is the intention for this system to only function as an "emergency brake" against future exploits and "farming" concerns. There's always a risk of an "economy of scale" problem in an MMORPG, due to inherent player organization and communication.Goal is to further enhance the native reactions of the Hives to large-scale aggression, and other more evident tweaks to gameplay, to create a robust enough "sliding scale" of difficulty to ke

As of last night, a couple of server-side updates were pushed into the game:- Remote capship commands are no longer cancelled when the owner docks with the capship.- New, additional Corporate Sector Run race, scheduled for 9am UTC (4am CDT), 12 hours after the main race at 9pm UTC (4pm CDT).- Improvements to server-side analytics.Please report any bugs or issues on the Bugs forum, or use Support Tickets for exploitable problems. Thanks.

Earlier this week, we discovered major problems in the "new" Latos dynamic economy, which were causing items to be priced at a small fraction of their intended value. This problem had been present for some time.The economy was reverted to a prior working model, earlier in the week and is currently in a "reasonably sane" state.This problem was not reported to us. For some players, this is could be understandable. They might simply be unaware of common pricing differentials in the universe.For other players, however, it's difficult to understand how this bug was missed. Certain people, among the most experienced traders in the game, were able to generate nearly a Billion credits in a week, using casual trading with a single system jump, and focusing *purely* on this specific problem.Here's the thing, if you're currently able to solo-generate a Billion credits a week, with fairly casual trading, this is not an indicator of you being a "Trade Genius", it means something is "broken" and should probably be reported.Because of the large-scale exploitation of the issue, we've spent the last several days doing forensic tracing of every the outcome of every related trade made by every player: people who prefer to hold goods in storage as-goods, people who trade for player-items, people who move credits into their guilds, etc.We have chosen to roll-back the profits of only the "top" individuals in this case, the ones with the most drastic profits, which is only six players. We have not completely removed all profits, but we have "adjusted" them to match what the outcome *would* have been, if the pricing had been correct, and made a generalized assumption of "profit". This is a pretty positive outcome for those involved, we did not "zero out" the revenue, or take punitive action, we've simply "normalized" things.The application of this action is different for each individual player, because of how the resulting profits had been moved around. In some cases, we simply removed credits from the given character's bank. In other cases, they had moved their credits to other accounts, and we removed it from those locations. For some people, who held large quantities of "items" in storage, without selling them, we removed an equivalent number of the items. Still others had given large quantities of credits to their guilds, we removed those funds.As a result of the time-consuming forensic research that went into this, all development was halted earlier this week. We had planned for a number of improvements and updates to debut this week, but as of right now, we're not sure what (if anything) will end up being released tonight.To make that point a little clearer, let me remind people that "Vendetta Online" is practically unique within the game-industry: a cross-platform MMORPG with a 100% custom in-house engine and back-end, developed by an indie team.As a resu

VO 1.8.567 includes:- Capital Ship commanders may now focus turret fire onto a single selected target. The turrets may be bound to a single key or button, like "/bind l +ActivateTurrets". Then, with a single target selected, and that button depressed, any turret that can "see" the target within its respective active field-of-view will fire upon the target. Projectile and energy turret weapons will not fire on targets beyond their maximum range (missile turrets will fire).- Capital Ship turrets now utilize energy from the central Powercell (Reactor, etc), of a given capship. This is only partially implemented, at the moment, and most weapons still don't use much energy, if any. But, you can expect this to become a factor in due course. This may eventually impact shield strength as well (effectively an offense vs defense tradeoff, based on energy availability).- Android touch and TV devices with the ES3 renderer will now have Two Lights and Shadows enabled by default. If you wish to disable this, for increased framerate, you can find the settings in Options -> Advanced -> Video.- Completely new Default touch control flight interface, solely in testing on Android. Existing control configurations will be maintained, but anyone wanting to try the new defaults (recommended), should go into Options -> Advanced -> Controls -> Touch and hit "Defaults". It will utilize..- Half the touch-screen is now dedicated to steering inputs, which can be made anywhere on that half of the screen (the right side, by default). Touch-to-select on remote objects no longer functions on the "steering" side of the screen, although we will try to add this back in before long, it requires some experimentation. The buttons on the right-side of the screen will continue to work.- "Touch Look Mode", similar to Mouselook on PC, allows high-precision input on the touchscreen to exceed the turning capabilities of the ship, but the ship will turn to match the new heading.- "Relative Touch Origin" will consider the point of touch as the "center" of the touch region, instead of the visual-center of the area. Better for adaptation for differing size devices (and various sized thumbs), as well as preventing instant movement on first-touch.- "Delta Movement" measures the change in movement, instead of accumulating the changes, making it feel more like a "mouse". You may have to lift-up and re-touch if you hit the edges of the input area, but with the new Input Sensitivity settings, this is fairly infrequent.- Aim Sensitivity range increased from 0-2x up to 0-20x. This extended range is pointlessly "sensitive" for the joystick-style input methods, but is very useful for the mouse-style input, which now defaults to 10x.- Aim Input Filtering is now enabled by default, this is an existing option that helps smooth out the very high-frequency mouse-style input. It adds a very slight