We missed one or two, but that was down to the Closed Weekend and all the associated preparation, so you can forgive us we hope! This week has been spent on some seriously big changes that are not in this patch - some things just take more than a week of work, you know - but we've still managed to cram a few significant bits into the game for you.
SYSTEMS!
This is a doozy. So... a bunch of the Systems in the game were not working, or had not had the big sign off. The idea is that anything you can get/equip should work as you'd expect, or we should take it out until it does. There is one catch - we rely on Playfab for all this backend goodness, and right now it's playing silly buggers, so we're not seeing the changes populate the live server. Patience will be required.
MEV SIPHON, ENERGY EFFICIENCY, REPLUSOR & LIMPET BOOSTER
are all now limited to Upgrade Level 1 (we'll introduce upgrades soon!)
HP RECHARGER
was never fully implemented, so we've removed it temporarily.
XENOTAPH DEFENDER SPAWNING
is now nerfed, and nerfed HARD. We've taken a fairly generous stance with this, but basically we'll be re-balancing down the line, and didn't want you all to be bashing your heads against the previous difficulty until we did. You'll only face Fighters, and not very many of them for now.
LOOT CRATE DROP RATES
these were broken, but now are fixed. Soz. You'll see a good drop rate for them from all kills now, be it Drones or Asteroids.
LOOT CRATE AUDIO
this addition is probably my favourite. When you open a hard-earned Loot Crate, you'll get a lovely audio sequence to go along with it. At last!
DRONE FLEETS
are no longer able to send their troops out into the null zone (off the edges of the map) so you should see a lot more fighting and back-and-forth between factions, as well as big fights to stumble across. Basically because all of the Drones they spawn will actually stay inside the game world :P
TUTORIAL ASTEROID FIXED
it used to occasionally spawn a bad guy when you blew it up, and that's just mean, so we stopped it.
NO MORE SKIPPING THE TUTORIAL
because we need to know how robust it is outside of our own internal testing. Also, we need to know that everyone who's experiencing the game understands the darn rules :D
SHIELD VFX FIXED
because it annoyed our Designer that it faded in and out on a loop. So now when you equip it and turn it on, it'll stay solid, which is much better at communicating it's effectiveness, purpose, stateblah-blah shut up Smiff.
AUTOMATED LOG REPORTING
we introduced this over the Closed Weekend, and you can still opt out, but now it's all fixed and we'll be geting tons of useful anonymous info from you lovely people!
You'll notice some of those snuck out in the little midweek patch we did but most of you won't have spotted that methinks!
Next week'll be good, we're hoping the first pass of the new features sneak in. Essentially we're rejigging the progression and what you earn/how you spend it so it's all a lot tighter, more rewarding, and easier to understand. We'll be introducing XP of a sort, and permanent progression as we get a step closer to the Weekly Wipes coming back. Exciting times! It's pretty complex, hence working on it in the background, but it'll be worth the wait!