http://www.vendetta-online.com/h/news.html

Not much you didn't already know, but a few notes about what's coming.

linknowork.

woops, sorry.

Title is wrong too.

I'm curious... what happened to the FF changes and the economy redux, Incarnate? Those were the two changes I was looking forward to the most.

The economy redux won't work until the bot behavior is fixed by Kourier.

Looks good. Now I may be remembering wrong, but didn't the UIT mostly cause the hive? So shouldn't they have a hive in their space?

The FF changes are still coming, I've just been busy with day-to-day (and designing stuff for others, rather than implementing myself) and haven't been able to move forward with some of the setting-up-defenses stuff. We have to kind of streamline our whole "modifying the universe" thing. Right now it's sort-of necessary for me to generate an entirely new sector to replace an old one, which is quite a bit of time.

The economy is coming too. Like Whistler says, making sure Kourier is actually getting the bots to deliver their goods, and so on, is pretty damned important :). We're also still working out the build tree of items, plus I need to redistribute the ores and minerals of the universe, which goes back to the first paragraph of this reply, and how working with the universe is still kind of a pain in the ass.

It's not really that our focus and intent changes, so much as other problems and unexpected crap pop up and go "look at me! you have to fix me before you can do X!" and then we groan and go "ugh" and go work on that. You will continue to see development in the direction of the FF and economy stuff, it just isn't all done by now, like I hoped.

(Technically, the Hive was brought about by certain corporations, but not necessarily in UIT nation-space. Hence it being in grayspace. Regardless, having three hives was always the plan, the grayspace hive will basically be the "UIT" one, UIT has sufficiently small territory that I don't want to endanger newbies with a dynamically-growing AI enemy which periodically invades).

what about serco and itani newbies in their nation space?

Let them suffer!

It seems to me having a single main center of hive activity in gray space would bring players of different nations in contact with each other and make it all that much more complicated and exciting to hunt hive.

If queens or whatever were able to split off and start new hives, then neglecting them could cause multiple hives; but it seems kind of arbitrary to give a hive to each nation, and distracts from nations interacting in war or cooperation.

I'm assuming your reference to balance-changes with the current system of weapon customization is going to supplement, rather than supplant, the current system of Small Port/Large Port? Something, like, perhaps, the maximum power flow limit per second on a given port (or collectively, on a group of ports), or even perhaps power usage caps on the fusion batteries (or both)? I really hope we hear more about this in detail before it gets implemented.

Anyway, its good to hear that the Friendly Fire changes and the Dynamic economy are coming along smoothly (even if slowly), and that the transition to the Kourier system from Deliverator means that the Hive will be fully functional soon. The automated defenses are nice too.

The three hives will all be located in such a way as to not impinge on newbies starting out in the universe. UIT space is pretty limited, and this is kind of impossible there. I don't worry too much about a lack of multi-nation contention with the hive, as the grayspace hive will be located in a region with higher densities of the redistributed minerals that will be required for crafting/attaining certain high level items (like, perhaps, capships). In this way, there will continue to be multionational contention with the grayspace hive in particular, but there will be other hives as well. I think a balance can be found.

The new Power Grid system will supplement the existing parameters, so nothing current will be affected (unless specifically desired, at a later point). This is mostly for new addons, not for current ones. Down the road we might rebalance some existing stuff as well, but not for awhile.

Well, these other changes do sound just as exciting as the FF and economy changes. Seems to me like regardless of which features gain priority, we are going to see much new, interesting stuff. It feels like VO is moving forward at a little faster pace now, and that is great to see.