- Music now crossfades when changing sectors.
- Killing 3 players in a 7-day period, within a single faction's Guarded
space, will result in that faction placing Temp KoS status on the killer
for 24 hours. Exceptions are made for killing players of Hated or lower
standing with the local faction, and active duels. This only impacts
Guarded regions (ie, station sectors). Corvus stations ignore all kills
and are not affected by this change.
- Linux Sandybridge and Haswell Intel drivers use full shaders now.

I know there will be some controversy on the Temp KoS changes. These were actually proposed in one of my RFCs from years ago (this is just the first step). Let me be clear: this is about mildly mitigating repeat station-griefing of newbies, and is NOT about anti-pirate or pro-trader sentiment, which will become far more obvious when I can write a little more about it.

We may have a big influx of new users in January, so this seemed like a good time to do it.

There's still a lot of tweaking to be done.. improving the strike forces a bit (without them cheatingly stupid), but also adding risky-but-realistic ways of crossing borders when factionally KoS (smuggler, assassin, pirate usage type addons and things). I want people to breach borders, make no mistake, I'm just seeking an improved balance of how it all comes together.

The change should have no impact on the day-to-day fighter battles outside Corvus stations, as obviously it does not impact Corvus. If you like to have your battles outside TPG stations.. well, then relocate to Corvus.

-10. If this only applied to killing the same character in the same sector over the course of one 24 hour period, I probably would not complain, and I'd definitely believe that it was intended as an anti station camping measure. Having it take effect when killing three unrelated neutral characters in any of a faction's stations over an entire week, on the other hand, simply does not add up to mitigating station camping.

Did you stop to consider that if a trader defends himself from three random pirates over the course of a week, he gets penalized for an entire day?

This reeks of Bad Idea.

Love it. It's progress towards a decent faction system.

If this only applied to killing the same character in the same sector over the course of one 24 hour period, I probably would not complain, and I'd definitely believe that it was intended as an anti station camping measure.

That would also have made it useless. Any one newbie may not hang around to be abused that many times. I need to get rid of the killer, not make it specific to the newbie.

Did you stop to consider that if a trader defends himself from three random pirates over the course of a week, he gets penalized for an entire day?

Yes, that's a possibility. The numbers may need adjusting, and that's something we will continue to do, with player feedback. There will also be adjustments as other aspects of station/faction defenses change.

On the flipside, it's purely a Temp KoS status with one specific faction, so there are no (new) long-term ramifications. I'm not going to do anything with greater impact until there's a more balanced system that takes other factors into consideration.

I'm not hung up on the 3-kills-per-week numbers, or any specific numbers, but some variant of this system is going to be around in the future. We had a really limited window of time to implement this, so I made the simplest design possible, as opposed to my original, more elaborate and fully realized design (specifically the section on "Friendly Kills").

That 24 hour TempKOS could give the victim something they all sorely want: A chance to fight back without tanking their standing.

This should be fun.

Hmm, this also covers pretty much all nation border wormhole sectors too. Even the ones without stations are "Guarded"

Well, we haven't revoked the existing faction standing system. The tempKoS system doesn't replace it, but it augments it. So, fighting back can still tank your standing under the pre-existing factional impact rules. I'll be re-examining the whole system, moving forward, this was all I could get done in like a few available hours of Ray's time over a holiday weekend while he was on vacation out of town.

This will also work best with something like the "aggressor" detection system mentioned in my RFC post from years ago, but that'll take a bit more time to implement.

Anyway, at the very least we are re-visiting and working on improving the faction system.

Did we ever fix the conquerable stations to not adopt another station's tempkos? Or does this mean that if someone goes tempkos by this new mechanic, they don't get to manufacture for a week?

There's no penalty for killing someone who's TempKOS. That's your chance to fight back.

Yeah that conq station bug sucks :(

Humm, that does rather suck. I just got a development update on it, and we will fix it as soon as we can.

Ok, Ray has identified that Conquerable-Station TempKoS issue and fixed it in production now (thankfully we're able to just hotload the new code in the conquerable sectors themselves).

However, there is one limitation to the conquerable implementation right now, in that all the conquerable stations still share a "faction". So if you do become 15-minute Temp KoS with one of them (by legitimately firing on the defense turrets while holding a key), you will be Temp KoS with all the conquerable stations during that time.

Obviously we're going to work out a more open-ended system to allow unique Temp KoS status for an unlimited number of "factions" as players conquer territory and essentially become "factions" unto themselves.

+1

Shader support still doesn't show up under video options -> Shader Capability. (disabled is the only option)

Perhaps blowing off the config.ini file? Linux 64-bit clent btw.

vskye: did you try renaming the config.ini and letting it auto-generate a new one?

Also, is it graphically apparent that shaders are not enabled? Visibility of the option might not be an indicator of functionality.

Inc, that's at least a huge improvement to the prior bug. Thanks!

Awesome :). We're also looking at fast-tracking some of the aggressor-detection stuff, which could really improve things and make self-defense more of a reality. Fingers crossed on that..

EDIT: Disregard this post.
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"Let me be clear: this is about mildly mitigating repeat station-griefing of newbies"

"Any one newbie may not hang around to be abused that many times."

If he isn't hanging around and being abused, he is not being repeat station-griefed.

I haven't read that RFC yet. I'll go do that.

Instead of penalizing the aggressor, you should be giving the option to the newbie to get out of the sector for free, because that's the actual problem here. Penalizing the aggressor with local faction loss will never deter an aggressor, especially one who has specifically tanked his faction for the purposes of killing people in that faction's space.

Instead, low license level players who are destroyed in faction station space over and over should just be given the opportunity to re-home back to their home space. They can do this anyway if they cause tempkos with the local faction and then die, but many new players are unaware of that particular quirk.

Oh, derp, I mis-parsed that Inc. The use of the word "repeat" made me think you were talking about station camping, i.e. repeatedly killing the same poor sap over and over, preventing him from leaving. After reading that RFC, I now see that you're trying to deal with people who habitually kill within station sectors in general, not with only the specific subset of camping. I don't consider that to be a problem in the first place, so it didn't occur to me that it might be what you were addressing.

Inc, the shader options are fixed, game looks WAY better. :)

Thanks!