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 keep people from easily bumping against the absolute limits. These changes to the Hives are not in place yet, and will take some time to roll out over the coming weeks.

The hard-limits themselves can be adjusted on-the-fly, or even automatically adjusted by the game when measuring other parameters, to deal with situations like In-Game Events or unusually high player concurrency.

We've also shipped a new Android APK tonight, with more functionality in testing, prior to a wider Mobile update.

That's all for now, have a great weekend, everyone.