Since the last status post was well received, this is a small addendum (small because I am crushed with stuff to do and have an appt shortly). But here's what's going on:

To prep for the 10-year thing, I'm trying to pull out a bunch of stops on gameplay changes to yield the best benefit in the small time available. As a result, we're looking at two major areas, one of which has been announced and the other.. I'm just telling you about now..

- Factional stuff. Nuff said. Still going on.

- "All missions everywhere". One of our biggest problems with new people is that our available content tends to be concealed all over the place. PCC people make awesome missions, which users then have to ask where to find them, and so on. Content discovery sucks. Even when one completes one mission in a big tree, it sometimes isn't always obvious that there's a sequel available. As a result, I've long had the plan of changing the mission system into one where all missions in the universe (available to the player, based on the existing reqs) would be visible in the mission board, sorted by category and distance and so on (this was actually my original plan, which wasn't implemented for reasons I'll skip over). "Newly available" missions will hopefully be highlighted and bumped to the top, etc. We're in the midst of doing this, it's maybe half-done, with the hopes of a possible debut next week. You will still need to actually go to the location where the mission is posted to start the mission, but you will be able to see the mission's existence and extended description from whereever. In cases with a lot of duplicate locations, you'll see the nearest one.

This will evolve into a long-term vision where the mission board is central to a lot of aspects of the game, including players finding one another. For instance, we can create a dozen simple categories of mission that people can post themselves, from "Looking for a Queen-hunting partner" to people posting delivery missions to their player-owned station(s) so they can Manufacture stuff using resources that are supplied by others. Or "Need N people to attack the Grayspace Leviathan", where each signup subtracts one slot. So on and so forth.

We'll still have other mission delivery methods, like talking to specialized NPCs and so on, none of that has been abandoned. But getting lot of the "general cases" out there, and having the mission system be a whole sortable and searchable system for the types of content that people want.. will be of strong benefit, in my opinion.

If we eventually have a big influx of people, where we have to put limits on chat and chat-distance, this will still be a good mechanic for finding other people.

------

Those are the broad strokes. I have to run right now, if feedback is desired, please post to Suggestions with perhaps a link from here. We'll also look at some of the other stuff, like new people talking primarily on channel 1 and so on.. but right now we're trying to churn through the "hardest stuff" first. FYI.

Wow, that simple change to the mission system is completely revolutionary for vendetta. Especially posting of player made missions. If you were to combine that with being able to transfer between players items within station player economy activity would soar!

Keep up the good work!

Yup, that kind of thing is the idea. This has been on the drawing boards for.. a very long time, but I'm trying to make a lot of stuff happen this year. It's also not really a "simple" change, unfortunately (conceptually simple, developmentally complex). It's probably the most complex thing we've done to the game in quite awhile. Much more delicate than say, the key system or adding capships or even conquerable sectors and stations.. simply because instead of adding new content, we're changing the way existing content is delivered.. which touches a great deal of code in many places and requires a lot of thought and complex inter-linked development effort. Ray and Michael are really motoring on this, kudos to them.

But, I'm pretty jazzed about it coming to pass, it will help remove the blocks from a number of other design areas for me, and should be pretty cool in the long run. Let's just hope we don't break too much in the short term :).

Break it all I say! Then have fun putting the pieces back together :)

This is exciting news, reminiscent of the "old times". Looking forward to witnessing how this affects VO's opening game. Once again I am glad to be a part of this community.

Yep, go for it Inc. Things in game are getting fractious; space needs a boot in the backside to concentrate minds.

This would be a fantastic change

Awesome addition.

soon(tm) me guess : )

Are we there yet? :p

These would be great improvements.

This really sounds great! Thanks for the update.

It has often been said that quite frequently simple things are not easy things.

Good update.

I agree with this, as a more-or-less-newb I find it hard to discover some of the content (so I just go around grey and get blown up :-))

This would also allow you to limit the skirmish missions to their obvious stations.

Another option is to have the "nonstandard missions" in other systems available as a "rumor" in the station, with some degree of inaccuracy and/or an option for players to "plant" a rumor in a station.

Very pleased to read all of this. Thank you Inc and Co.

That sounds really cool, it's a good day when vendetta gives me goosebumps... :}

Stupid question probably, but is there a write-up of the upcoming faction changes somewhere?

The previous status update mentions (just like this one) that there is a major change coming up, but not what that change is.

Forum search points to http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/25980#317506, which seems to be a player suggestion rathen than a developer plan. Inc points towards http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/16468 in his last reaction, but that six year old post is probably already out of touch with reality (ie I though friendly fire restrictions had already been lifted?).

I have not made any specific posts about the faction changes yet.

Thank you very much, Inc.... next Vendetta will become really multiplayer, my votes to also become Massively!!!

Great stuff indeed... maybe add a simple browser tab to game client, so you can host manuals, reference guides, vo-wiki, PM system, so on, in-game!

Horrays for the multiplayer mission support! It will become much easier to automate events, creating the supporting mission set that integrates with existing missionn system...

Are any of these changes live on the test server? Some of us in the PCC might be able to give them a run through to try and catch any really bad bugs before they hit production.

All of the new server-side code is running parallel to the current system on the test server.
You will need client-side changes to be able to use it though.

This is very good news.