Greetings Overseers!
Today we are announcing the beginning of a big push over the next few weeks to finish implementing some important mid-game and late-game content goals for players. The major things we'll be tackling over the next several weeks are
1) Pirates will take over abandoned player bases for other players to assault
2) Pirates will randomly build their own bases for players to assault
3) Massive improvements to pirate raids - pirates will be bringing warbirds, jetbikes, mind controlled animals, and more varied base assault tactics to make late game pirate raids a real challenge for players!
4) World bosses - massive unique animal bosses that will require raid-style tactics to take down, with huge rewards
5) Loot rebalance, with ultra-rare drops from high level pirate captains (from both raids and pirate bases) and world bosses, which will unlock some ultra-powerful Tier 4 gear
Today we'll be releasing our first pass implementation of #1 above in our test server with the patch, and hopefully have it live by Friday.
In addition to the above, we'll be implementing Cataclysm mode on our servers with rolling resets built into the official game mode. Every 2 weeks our servers will be wiped with the previous "winner" of biggest corporation enshrined with their name as the server champion. In the future, we will be adding persistent account-based rewards that will be unlocked from "winning" a Cataclysm event, stay tuned for more information on this!
Finally, with this big push towards mid and late game content, we will also be refocusing a bit on fixing some major bugs. We've been trying to get a ton of new features and content in, but as we round out this next batch of stuff, we will start to naturally slow down a bit on getting "new" stuff in and focus a bit more on fixing the "old" stuff. This means constant tweaks of balance, small changes, bug fixes, exploit fixes, performance upgrades, and more.
Full Patch Notes below
World
- Fixed some duplicate resources
- Fix some holes in terrain
AI
- Animals will no longer float above ground and rubberband on server
- Fixed Bot Auto-Unstuck so it no longer falls through the ground
- Increased radius of manual bot unstuck/drag to 25m
- Add a message when too far to manually unstuck/drag a bot
- Bots that fall through the world or go outside map bounds will be respawned at the player's command center
- Bots will go to multiple containers if necessary to deposit more stuff up
- Bots will be better about depositing things they no longer need
- Bots will only grab one stack at a time when crafting so they have sufficient space for results
- AI Bots set to "hauling" will now attempt to harvest plants from planters
Structures
- Abandoned player bases (4 days, 6 hours without login) will be claimed by pirates!
- Pirate bases can be assaulted on PvP, PvPLite, and PvE servers for loot and glory!
- Fix for bug allowing damage to Territory Claimers and Command Centers in PvE mode or during ORP
- Planters now give 50 * tier resources per 10 min
- Destroyed CCs will now reset the player's Corporation level
- Fix for cases where inflow and outflow pipes can be disconnected on reload
- Turrets now shoot at enemy vehicles
- Added a new AOE repair structure which uses repair packs
- Added a wind generator, which increases power generated with height and wind strength
Game
- Fixed readability of the first line due to the UI initalization and animation playing. delay first line a bit.
- Fix some Gaia->Gaiya typos
- Subtitles are now printed in chat log so player can re-read them
- Some items in machine shop have been renamed and reordered for consistency
- Added throwable grenade, TnT, and C4 explosives to machine shop
- T2 rocket launchers now have much higher speed and slightly higher radius, and more damage
- T3 rocket launchers still fire at slow speed, but have a MASSIVE radius and VERY increased damage
- New FX for T2 and T3 rocket launchers, including a thermonuclear mushroom cloud and earthquake effect
- Fix some big possible performance issues with Animals on dedicated servers
- Fix a stats exploit with rapidly swapping weapons
- Attempt to fix vehicles flying off when dismounting, and not being found
- Welder will now heal vehicles in stead of damaging them
- Added binaural wind corresponding to wind strength
- Added Jetpack to robotics factory crafting - these will let you jump extremely high
- Added new visual for Speed boots
Let us know your thoughts on these upcoming changes!