*** Vendetta 1.8.324
- Experimentally tweaked Crystal aquisition rates, for upcoming improvements to level caps and other F2P barriers.
- Reduced the number of votes to mute someone to 10 votes.
- Increased sound falloff of new ship and swarm explosions.
- Added a reminder that chat channel 1 is only for Help questions and to /join 100 for main chat after every fifth time you chat in channel 1.
- Increased usability of gamepads to navigate through the UI using mostly just the D-Pad and A button. The D-Pad now performs a key repeat for quicker scrolling.
- D-Pad Left/Right no longer scrolls up/down. Instead they switch to the previous/next control.
- Changed the default mouse-over/focus highlighting of buttons and tabs to be more noticeable.

I'm not seeing anything about case sensitivity in there.... But i do see a few other items i have championed.

"- Added a reminder that chat channel 1 is only for Help questions and to /join 100 for main chat after every fifth time you chat in channel 1."

Yay!

I'm going to assume that the grasshoppers mean that this release is super-awesome and exactly what everyone was hoping for. Hooray!

Well, it's not just a bunch of graphics/sounds/mobile tweaks, so I suppose that calls for a celebration. Grasshoppers all around!

I'm definitely eager to see how the vote mute change ends up affecting things. Fairly solid update, I think.

Was any change made to the duration of /vote mute?

I ask because 24 hours or longer is a long time to punish someone who may be having only a momentary crisis, and 10 votes is actually attainable now.

Actually the grasshoppers were a reference to this thread:

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/2/29650#355070

However yes, you can say that those grasshoppers are doing happy things, celebrating the awesome patch!

On the condensed UI on my Android phone, the d-pad isn't particularly useful with this release. It seems like the focused control gets stuck in a box and can't escape. For example, on the "Mission" tab of the PDA, it will get stuck flipping between "Options" and "Close" and only the Tab key or using the touchscreen will get it to go elsewhere.

Yes, we're aware. We've fixed some of those cases already, but not released it yet (Mission tab yesterday), and intend to ship some more fixes later this week.

For gamepads that have analog sticks, one of them is usually configured as a virtual-mouse as well, which can be used instead of the d-pad. But, we are trying to also enable the d-pad as much as possible.

"- Added a reminder that chat channel 1 is only for Help questions and to /join 100 for main chat after every fifth time you chat in channel 1."

thank god, really sick of seeing people cross chatting to 100 from 1

Does this mean I can control my ship with my Rock Band P-Bass controller, and there will be an X-Box port soon?

[quote]
Mon 06:44PM Savet link
Was any change made to the duration of /vote mute?

I ask because 24 hours or longer is a long time to punish someone who may be having only a momentary crisis, and 10 votes is actually attainable now.
[/quote]

how is 24 hours too long? I think it's totally appropriate.

24 hours is about right if you irritate 20 people. It's a bit much for 10 though. The suggestion to lower the threshold also included shortening the duration to 2 hours.

I agree with Savet. Lessening it to two hours reduces the damage when vote mute gets abused. And it will be abused, and not always intentionally (cultural dissonance). Two hours is still enough to silence the majority of spammy fuckwads, while low enough to significantly reduce the number of people complaining to the devs that they were inappropriately muted. A lot of people might just shrug off a two hour mute that they didn't feel was justified, whereas they'd be more likely to complain if it meant they couldn't communicate for an entire day.

HOW ABOUT WE WAIT TO SEE IF IT GETS ABUSED BEFORE NERFING IT?

More than several vets have multiple accounts. Now it's lowered to 10, it only takes two or three of those vets to permamute someone.

Also, since anyone can make f2p accounts on android, it only takes 10 instances of VM android on your workstation to personally bring the mute hammer to anyone you like, FOR FREE. Perhaps they should take away the ability to vote for f2p players to prevent it being abused this way.

It's not hard to see that it WILL be abused to death, both intentionally and unintentionally.

I thought you could only /vote mute once per account, and only on subbed accounts?