Cross-posting from News..

VO 1.8.479 includes:
- Launching from a personal capital ship will no longer cause homing missiles targeted on that capital ship to "lose" their lock, and the missiles will continue targeting your capital ship.
- The firing field-of-view of the Capital Rail Cannon has been reduced from 180 to 160 degrees. This may help mitigate its value as a forward-facing "assault" weapon. The FoV of all other capital ship turret weapons have not been changed.
- The Centurion Superlight may now be purchased (if it is in-stock) in Latos N2, by pilots who have completed the Hive Research mission with Corvus. Prices for the Superlight may fluctuate considerably.
- Deneb battles are now off-limits to players who have not joined either the Itani or Serco Militaries, and who are not taking the Mission related to the specific battle sector. Un-aligned "neutral" vessels will be attacked, including un-piloted capital ships.
- New Weapon: the Corvus Ultra Positron Blaster, a small-port, 18-grid, de-tuned variant of the MegaPosi. It is available in Corvus stations to tri-KoS pilots at 8/8, who have passed the "Hive Research" mission.
- The performance of server-side Physics interactions, in large capital ship battles, has been improved significantly.

We've been trying to ship this release for almost two weeks, so we're happy this is finally out. I'm sure it will have some controversy, so let me touch on a few points..

The change to the Caprail FoV has been in process since September. I was concerned when we made the turret FoVs 180 degrees, that the caprail specifically would be overpowered, and that I had no real way to balance its value as a "single turret" against its new value as an "unified assault weapon". The FoV change was the simplest additional mechanic, but it actually took quite awhile to implement, because the FoVs of turrets were deeply hard-coded.

This change was not made because of any specific player, or usage, as I said it's been in-process for quite awhile. But it should be understood that Capital Ships are not yet in a place where they are configurable enough, from the developer side, to be rolled out as assault-craft. Basically, they can't be "balanced" very well yet. It's very easy to make such an "assault" level capital ship quite over-powered, which means they need to be mitigated with concepts like finite ammo, tradeoffs with energy versus shield strength (or choosing temporary shield shutdown) and other factors to make them intriguing, yet properly-integrated into the game. Capships should (sometimes) be awesome and fearsome sources of high-grade firepower, but also vulnerable to a greater variety of Torpedo class weapons, and with their own set of challenges and factors to mitigate their capabilities.

We have plans for all of this, and letting people use "turrets" as offensively-aligned weapons was just a quick tweak to see how it would work, and what the ramifications of fully-automated turrets might be. It's been interesting and helpful for this. But, there are very few aspects of Vendetta Online that are not subject to on-going tweaking and adjustment, based on testing.

Some people submitted tickets about the turret FoV change, which changed back on November 30th, as "bugs". Those tickets went un-answered because, frankly, we kept thinking the release was going to ship every day, which would clarify the issue, and it kept not-shipping. Sorry about that.

The changes to Deneb will hopefully improve the battles. If spectating is desired, we might add a "spectator" mode that one could take as missions from one of the nearby Stations. We'll likely be introducing other balance changes to Deneb, in general, and also greater ramifications to the side who wins or loses. But in the meantime, this mitigation was a starting point.

We intend to keep expanding the value and usage of the Latos N2 prototype economy, and fixing things related to that. Much like the Capital Ships, it actually needs more developer-side tune-ables before it can go fully prime-time. We are working on that. In the meantime, things like the Superlight are an interesting test-case, and we're open to hearing more about other challenges and enhancements of the system, via the Suggestions Forum.

The improvements to server-side Physics are quite significant, and will hopefully allow us to continue to expand the scale and scope of the game, and should have a long-term beneficial impact on both player and NPC capital ships.

That's all for now, Happy Holidays everyone.

"The change to the Caprail FoV has been in process since September. I was concerned when we made the turret FoVs 180 degrees, that the caprail specifically would be overpowered, "

But CapSwarms dropping 18k of damage a pop with no aiming required other than selecting a target isn't overpowered?

The capswarms need to be nerfed as they can be used a fire and forget assault weapons, whereas the rails have to be airmed. Bring the capital swarms back to their pre buff damage and all will be good in the vo universe.

I'm fine with looking at capswarms as well. It's been on my list. We've just been juggling a lot of different topics lately.

Updates like these is what I like to use as proof that the devs listen to the player base. Thanks guy! Y'all are amazing! Santa oughta be real good to you this year.

Disagrees with Nihilus , im waiting for capella manu from 2016 december.

Great work Inc and Ray you guys do an amazing job.

No more missile lock exploit and we get Ultra Posis? Hell yes!

Wash has a good point. I think cap swarms should also be balanced as they are more often used than cap rails anyways and can be used to the full potential by just the pilot. Gunners aren't really necessary because of the fire and forget mechanic and the high reload. Also there are plugins that make them even easier to use, all you need is an afk player/bot and activate it and it will shoot targets that were previously chosen.

And while we're at it, maybe the capital gauss turrets could get a buff to make them more interesting and be used more but I don't have much experience regarding them so I can't say if a buff or change is necessary but it might be worth discussing.

Wash has a good point. I think cap swarms should also be balanced as they are more often used than cap rails anyways and can be used to the full potential by just the pilot.

I don't think anyone is arguing against that. But it isn't in this release. Everything can't make it into every release, all the time.

We have a Suggestions forum for basically discussing what could happen in future releases.

Just to shed a bit more light.. stuff like fixing the missile-lock exploit took a lot of effort, and basically required changing the way capital ships fundamentally work in the server-side engine. This is the kind of "Bug" that basically requires re-writing a lot of mechanics in order to "fix" it (which is why it previously had that limitation, for the longest time; it was just a known trade-off in development time. It was not an unforeseen "bug", or oversight).

So, seriously, maybe take some solace in "Stuff getting fixed! Yay!" even if it's not all the stuff, or the exact stuff you wanted, or whatever. It was a lot of work.

Can we make it just a little more rewarding for the devs to release updates? Maybe give them 12 hours of positive regard before we start in on the next thing?

Incarnate and whistler both have a point. The developers have done a great job so far. It is high time we thank them a lot more than we currently do. All they get is complaints bout the updates and bug fixes done. It is abundantly clear they love doing what they do. How about we show some kindness in return. And thank them for once.

Incarnate. Raybondo. Thank you for everything yoh have done so far. Same goes for the other developers vo had. Whistler, Phaserlight. Thank you for your contribution as well.

Dilan

Heres the rub. Capship to capship battles were almost balanced with 180 rail cannons. The advantage still went to the moving capship with at least 2 capswarm launchers.

Anyone who says 4 forward facing rail cannon turrets was op clearly has never tried to use it.

A capship firing two capswarms has a guaranteed deshield against another capship in range if its not turboing away. 4 rail cannons requires sub 1k range and 8 total hits to deshield if you can catch the target from the fatter side. If the deshield is successful you still have to hit a moving target, most likely turboing away while swarming, and you can land maybe two or three shots if you constantly adjust nose angle of the ship at less than 2k while taking tons of damage. Outside of 2k it is a real crap shoot at landing rails due to the rear profile size of both a dent and a goli.

There is no auto aim, there is no auto targeting there is simply having to make constant micro adjustments while losing distance and a shit ton of practice vs guaranteed hits and damage from guided missiles.

As I know of only one other person that has attempted to use this loadout, and if there are others they never tried it against another moving swarming target, this change to rail cannon turrets screams of being targeted due to uneducated complaints rather than any factual data.

I challenge any capship owner to try it. My bet is they will give up and go back to easy fire swarms after only a couple of attempts.

Capship battles were at an acceptable balance while waiting on the back end improvements to make it even better, this change has undone that balance.

If anything capswarms need more damage imo. Firing them from a stand still alcan only deshield a goli and thats if the goli doesn't turbo away.

Thank you Guild Software.

Stuff getting fixed! Yay!

Capship to capship battles were almost balanced with 180 rail cannons.

No. They weren't. "Balance" means there's some mitigating factor that exists to give a trade-off to the advantage of being able to deal a really large amount of damage, at significant distance, with near-instant impact. For instance, a big dramatic "targeting laser" that you paint the target with, that then requires a 30 second charge-up time and gives the enemy an audible "warning" that they've been targeted, and the process of charging up the weapon also depletes the shields of the attacking ship for a period of time after the firing process.

Something "being hard to use" is not the same as "being balanced", especially when there's practically no defense or warning against a given attack. Because: people get better. Techniques improve. Strategies are devised.

Guided missiles, for all their fire-and-forget nature, have a prominent and loud warning, and have no guarantee that they will all reach the same place at the same time. And I'm not even contending that their damage doesn't need to be reduced, that's fine, but they just weren't slotted for change back in September, because I was specifically concerned about the near-instant damage of rails (a weapon that was originally intended to be front-mounted on a capship).

As I know of only one other person that has attempted to use this loadout, and if there are others they never tried it against another moving swarming target, this change to rail cannon turrets screams of being targeted due to uneducated complaints rather than any factual data.

Jesus. So, now you're either choosing to not read the things I write, or you're claiming I'm a liar. Which is it?

The fact is, I saw this coming way in advance. In my original email to Ray, I wrote:

How hard would it be to let me define the firing fov arc of capship turrets on a per-weapon basis, in the objtable?

Part of the challenge is that, with the ability to face all turrets forward now (shooting at 180deg) it makes some weapon combos overpowered for assault usage, where they might be fine for defense. Being able to set a narrower firing arc, on specific weapons, might help with that.

This was from my own simple testing and calculations, it wasn't brain surgery.

I was also looking not just at current-weapons, but at the ability to add new weapons. People are always asking for new capship content, but the ability to group them into forward combo-fire created a whole new rats-nest of problems. Basically like the Hornet issue, but on a capship level, and I wanted some way to be able to create powerful defensive weapons, without necessarily having to be concerned they would be used as assault weapons (or very easily: there's still the "broadside option", which is fine; the quantity, location and angle of the turrets is a somewhat predictable factor there).

Capship battles were at an acceptable balance while waiting on the back end improvements to make it even better, this change has undone that balance.

Capship-vs-Capship assault hasn't been implemented yet. If I let you guys play around with some turret BS in the meantime, don't get salty if/when it gets adjusted. The only certainty about VO is change, especially for bleeding edge experimental content.

Currently there are exactly two weapons that were originally designed for usage against capital ships:

1) The Avalon Torpedo, which had to be nerfed in a lot of ways, because it couldn't be defensively destroyed while "incoming", due to technical engine limitations at the time. This eliminated the "tradeoff" that would have made the weapon worthwhile.

2) The Teradon's forward-facing goliath cannon derivative, aka the "giant golden ball thingies". This is a good example of a weapon that is actually conceptually balanced for a multi-player game: it does tremendous damage, but it moves really slowly, making it possible for people to get out of the way.

#1 has languished in development hell for many reasons, and #2 is too overpowered to currently give to players, because of the unacceptable impact on PvE and NPC goals, among other things.

So, really, cap-vs-capship content doesn't meaningfully exist yet. I'm interested in emergent gameplay, but generally not if it conflicts strongly with another major agenda and development goal.

To be clear, I never considered Wash's turret-control thing to be particularly "exploitative": we knew how it worked, it was about as complex and "exploitative" as a chainfire bind; and despite a lot of dramatic hand-waving from people about "Lua!" and "Automation!" it really wasn't automated at all, which I could clearly see every time he used it (for the "multi account" thing: remember that almost every Trident owner, starting with Conflict Diamond, had multiple accounts just to be able to use their Trident, for years). It could have been easily replicated by other players.

I mitigated the CapRails because of an obvious negative impact on the predictable player difficulty of PvE goals, like Deneb, Leviathans or future Hive content I'm currently working on (which then impacts drops, which then impacts the economy and item rarity, which then cascades through everything else I'm doing).

Also, as I mentioned in the OP: If we release some form of inherent turret automation, whatever we would implement would only make this issue more dramatic; and the response would likely be far more "vocal", if I nerfed at the time of that release, as opposed to now.

The real irony here, is if the turret-FoV thing hadn't been so hardcoded, and if I had been able to dynamically adjust it months ago, back when I originally wanted-to, NONE OF THIS DRAMA WOULD EXIST NOW. But, because of timing, coincidence, and increased player sensitivities to emerging issues, it apparently looks like something else.

Wash, if I had realized you were going to take this so personally, I would have talked to you about it in advance. But, this was in the pipe for a long time. I did tell you that I had changes coming that would hopefully quiet down the whole "Blah Blah Wash Exploit!@#" thing, which was also getting way out of hand. But, I didn't say how.

When capship-vs-capship assault content is meaningfully released, you'll know. It won't require any weird binds or other crap, and it will have balance factors that make offense and defense both realistic possibilities, with hard trade-offs.

Anyone who says 4 forward facing rail cannon turrets was op clearly has never tried to use it.

I tried it before, it was overpowered. However, it was very boring.

A large part of the reason not very many people tried it out is because Capital Rails have a nice badge and Conq Station requirement behind it.

Blazzzy and Nys are good examples of people who were using them effectively against pilots(me) with CCST x4 (Capital Chaos Swarm Turrets)

@incarnate

I mitigated the CapRails because of an obvious negative impact on the predictable player difficulty of PvE goals, like Deneb, Leviathans or future Hive content I'm currently working on (which then impacts drops, which then impacts the economy and item rarity, which then cascades through everything else I'm doing).

5-client trident users don't kill levis with caprails, they use neutron turrets. So, unless you are also going to nerf the arc of those, your purpose for nerfing the caprails (as stated above) is easily circumvented.

A large part of the reason not very many people tried it out is because Capital Rails have a nice badge and Conq Station requirement behind it. (-blaqk)

^I disagree. The main reason not many other people tried it is because running 5 clients is not within everyone's capability.