We made some changes recently, which are entirely server-side, and require a restart. We don't really want to do the restart right now, when more people are playing, so it'll be later (maybe 2AM Central or thereabouts).

The changes include:

- NPC "defend position" code has been reworked. This was of particular note for Itani/Serco Blockade fighters which were not very aggressive. They should work a bit differently now. We aren't completely sure this won't impact other areas of NPCs, but probably not much.. there's very little that defends "an area of space" (a position) as opposed to defending a particular ship or some such.

- CtC will be pulled offline at the restart, due to a lot of people complaining about the bots and their relative broken-ness, and the fact that no one really uses CtC anymore. CtC is a really old codebase, and it doesn't use any of the more modern bot mechanics, which is part of the problem. If we were to bring something like this back, I would rather re-implement it using the newer architecture, than attempt to fix the old methodology.

Awesome!

no more CtC swarms ruining a good pew? bingo!

CtC is cool, but it does make Sedina B-8 a little less optimal for a pvp battle zone. Only thing I'd ask is what about the neutron MkIIIs? Would be awesome if they were made available everywhere, but had their license requirements and price increased.

or link it to the deneb war too?

Make them for sale like Darth said with a higher price like say if a mk2 is 2700 make the mark 3 3700 and tie it to a sub faction standing and only buyable at those stations. Valent for example that way its opposite to Axia and the AAP.

To be honest, back in 2005-06 CTC was fun, heck we didn't even realise how broken it was because people were doing it, and actually fighting with the bots/each other! Some of the bugs it has had over the years have been stupidly broken too, like the CTC cargo duplication bug :-) delivering over 400-500 cu's of pure xith at the end of a week was very fun, especially when the other team looked like they had it in the bag (well, until they worked out how to do it too heh).

Being one of the loudest complainers I'm actually happy that you guys pulled it rather than try to patch it some more, and I cannot wait to see what (if anything) replaces it in the future.

/me pours a drink for CTC - RIP!

If the code was old and problematic, then good riddance, but I for one will miss the CtC convoys and their ganktacular antics. I know some people were annoyed by them, but I always considered it part of the fun in fighting at Sedina B-8. Same goes for random potentially hostile trade convoys, especially back when we could actually dock with the non-hostile ones. If I wanted a fair fight with minimal chance of interruptions, I'd do it in some random sector off the beaten path. I prefer fighting at wormholes and stations because of the chaotic factors. VO should be an adventure, not an e-sport.

More aggressive war convoys sounds great. Here's hoping they pick up some of the slack until more roving menaces can be implemented.

Nothing says progress like removing game content.

It would be nice to see it some back in a less broken form some day.

Some of the problems I saw with CtC:

- Bots defend behaviour was inconsistent and buggy.
- Why were the bots defended by assault/collector bots commonly found in Hive?
- Bots would group up in sectors and remain there attacking all enemies of the nation.
- Why would a cargo transport announce a delivery on a non-nation-locked channel?
- Transport interaction with "sleeping" sectors is stupid, they just skip them for the most part and get war too far ahead.

- Why were the bots defended by assault/collector bots commonly found in Hive?

Because the hive bots are demon-possessed bots that were once engineered by people; just cause the Hive exists in the poor wretched metal of a bot doesn't mean we are gonna stop manufacturing new ones.

- Bots defend behaviour was inconsistent and buggy.
- Bots would group up in sectors and remain there attacking all enemies of the nation.

You said buggy twice ;)

- Why were the bots defended by assault/collector bots commonly found in Hive?

Because the only AI besides station guards was hive when CTC was made :) you should have seen the excitement when "ducks" first because a thing and NPC atlases with cargo were added to the loonyverse!

But yeah, it would be nice to see an implementation with normal escort style bots, atlases with pure xith at the start of a round, with the ships getting bigger/better defended until the end of the round, maybe ending up with capship(s) full of pure xi to score!

I'd also like to see these bots guarded by the local faction they spawn from a bit better, maybe with some really harsh drops for killing these right outside the station.

Nothing says progress like removing broken game content. - FTFY

Yeah! And if the game was 1 year old this would be a big issue! It is not like there has not been other content added since the 15 years or so ago that CTC was made (Deneb battles, border patrol, hive skirmishes, race tracks, behemoths, tridents, conc stations, escort missions - ok the latter are still somewhat broken but this list goes on) :p

689 weeks. so #sad

fyi i looked into that number cause i'm gonna crawl the stats for record keeping so that'll be me shortly ^_^

Here you go: Spuck held the all time lead for like 10 years but arf took over at the end

http://spenced.com/~spencep/vo/ctcstars.php

Kind of wish I didnt keep deleting my characters now heh

CtC got one big thing right. It's a way to draw players to the same place at the same time on a regular basis.

What're you going to do to replace that?

Should have been sorted by ctc kills, just sayin...

--Harpo